Robert Nozick Experience Machine: Is Hedonism False?

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In this essay I am going to argue that Robert Nozick’s experience machine does show that hedonism is false. Firstly I am going to define what the experience machine thought experiment is, then I am going to define hedonism. Then I am going to show how Nozick’s argument does in fact show that hedonism is false, and that we consider things other than pleasure and pain when considering value. After that I am going to respond to some objections. Firstly the objection raised by Felipe de Brigard, who says that our initial reaction to the experience machine might just be cognitive bias. I will say that De Brigard actually adds weight to Nozick’s argument. Secondly I will respond to the objection that the reason people dislike the experience machine …show more content…

“In fact all the experience machine would need to offer us would be our life, but with say an extra cool drink thrown in somewhere. Hedonism would tell us to in this case, choose the experience machine.” [3] If we experience discomfort at the idea of entering the experience machine, then some things in life must have value other than pleasure, and some things in life must have disvalue, other than pain. Clearly not being in contact with reality in some way detracts from the value of our experiences. In fact, it only takes one person to not want to plug in and to value something else under these circumstances for Nozick to have proved hedonism false. Clearly Nozick himself does not want to plug in, and so that is enough. I think that this shows that pleasure isn’t the only thing in life that has value, and if that is the case, then Nozick has proved hedonism wrong. I also think that one of the most commonly used objections to Nozick, De Brigard’s experiment, doesn’t actually refute his thought …show more content…

This is a phenomenon known to Economists and is part of a series of a family of cognitive biases known as Loss Aversion. This basically causes an increase in gains in quality of a change in life to have a diminishing return on the increase in value of the change. This is the reason why we tend to value our houses at much more than what the real estate agent tells us they’re worth. De Brigard claims that this could be why we would not plug in at the beginning, and that actually our aversion could be just a dislike of change, and not because Hedonism is

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