Experience Machine And Hedonism

Experience machine and hedonism

[Name of the Writer]

[Name of the Institution]

Introduction

It has been witnessed that there are always two groups; one that opposes a concept of idea and other one that argues in the support of that idea. In philosophy, it has been seen that there are two groups; one who does not have pretty serious thoughts about life and believe that they must seek pleasure from every moment of life. On the other hand, some philosophers and philosophies claim, there are other things as well in this world other than the merrymaking.

Discussion

There could be found various ideologies and philosophies that support the vision that life is not just seeking pleasure. A conflict has been witnessed between Robert Nozick’s idea of the experience machine and hedonism (Caruana, et al, 2019). One of the most famous philosophers, Robert Nozick, who proposed a thought experiment in 1974 has his most celebrated book “Anarchy, State and Utopia”. Robert Nozick’s idea that man is an experience machine directly argues against hedonism and refutes the claim being presented by hedonism. Hedonism is the school of thought that claims that primary goal of life is intrinsic goods and seeking pleasure. Robert’s philosophy of experience machine negates the idea of hedonism that every person has the right to do anything that makes him happy.

In philosophy, there are philosophers like Bentham who claims “pleasure and only pleasure is good”. Critical evaluation of hedonism shows that this philosophy believes that the main purpose of the human birth is to seek happiness as it is the only thing that would eliminate the pain of the human miseries (Löhr, et al, 2019). Hedonism is completely negated by Robert Nozick as he gives the idea of experience machine (a supposed machine that would take the people to give an experience that they wanted to have and would fulfill their desires). Robert claims that this experience machine can give the man any experience i.e. writing of a novel, making a friend, reading a book, etc. This machine by the help of the electrodes would be attached to a person's brain so that one could experience what he/she desires of.

Pre-programming of the life experience would be done so that one could enjoy anything that one wished to have. A hedonist is a person who wanted to have sensual pleasure but life is much more than just considering things that would make one happy. Robert claims that sitting in an experience machine and just imaging the things is not enough as man does not want to just experience, rather he/she wants to do certain things (KARADJOV, et al, 2019). It could be said that according to Robert, merrymaking, and pleasure-seeking is not the only purpose of life as if it was the case, people would love to plug in the experience machine but in fact, they wanted to experience their life is a combination of ups and downs. Without pain, essence of life could not be felt.

Conclusion

Taking a look at the above discussion, it could be concluded that hedonism (pleasure-seeking all the time) has been refuted by Robert as he gave a conception of experience machine that not happiness and fulfillment of the desire is the sole purpose of life. If it were the fact that people loved to plug in experience machine for experience joy of every kind; in reality they just don’t want to a feeling of experienced joy rather, they actually want to do certain things that would give them the actual pleasure (Silcox, et al, 2019). It could be said that most of the time, philosophers who wanted to refute hedonism use Robert's experience machine as a tool for providing evidence. So, it could be promulgated that Nozick's thought experience present problem for hedonism as it claims and proves that pleasure-seeking is only the sole purpose that people want to achieve rather what they want is the actual doing of certain things that would satisfy them.

References:

Caruana, R., Glozer, S., & Eckhardt, G. M. (2019). ‘Alternative Hedonism’: Exploring the Role of Pleasure in Moral Markets. Journal of Business Ethics, 1-16.

KARADJOV, B. (2019). ECONOMIC FREEDOM, NEOLIBERALISM AND MORALITY: FROM JOHN LOCKE TO ROBERT NOZICK. Journal of Sustainable Development, 9(22), 115.

Löhr, G. (2019). The experience machine and the expertise defense. Philosophical Psychology, 32(2), 257-273.

Silcox, M. (2019). A Defense of Simulated Experience.