The Demandingness Objection and the Experience Machine

Robert Nozick's experience machine, introduced in Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), is a thought experiment designed to test hedonism, the view, shared by Bentham and much of classical utilitarianism, that only pleasurable subjective experience possesses intrinsic value. Nozick asks readers to imagine a machine, operated by neuropsychologists, capable of producing any experience one might desire while the subject floats in a tank with electrodes attached to the brain, unaware that the experiences are simulated rather than real. Nozick argues that most people, on reflection, would refuse to plug into such a machine for life, even knowing the simulated experiences would feel indistinguishable from, or even more pleasurable than, ordinary reality, because people care not merely about having the subjective experience of, say, writing a great novel or being a loving parent, but about actually doing these things, actually being a certain kind of person, and remaining in genuine contact with reality rather than a simulation of it.