Robert Nozick Experience Machine: Is Hedonism False?

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

is because of our day to day experience with the hedonism paradox. I will say that this is in fact not the case, because of the terms of Nozick’s experience machine thought experiment.
The experience machine:
“Suppose there were an experience machine that would give you any experience you desired. Superduper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book. Should you plug into this machine for life, pre-programming your life’s experiences? … What else can matter to us, other than how our lives feel from the outside? ... We can learn that something matter by imagining an experience machine and then realizing that we would not use it.” [1]
Hedonism:
Ethical or evaluative hedonism claims that only pleasure has worth or value and only pain or displeasure has disvalue or the opposite of worth. [2]
By saying that something matters apart from pleasure, Nozick is attempting to refute hedonism.

Pleasure can’t be the only consideration we make when we evaluate what has value.
If pleasure was the only consideration we made, then we would have no trouble jumping into a simulation in the experience machine that was only slightly more pleasurable than our own life.

“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

experiment.
One objection to Nozick is the following survey by Felipe de Brigard in which the Experience Machine thought experiment is reversed (I am only going to focus on his second neutral scenario). Imagine one day if someone were to knock on your door and tell you that you had been put into the experience machine for your whole life, which is a series of experiences that were designed to give you an the most pleasurable outcome. The person then says you now either have the opportunity to leave the machine, or your memory of this encounter could be wiped and you would stay in the machine. You are then told that your real life is very different to your life in the machine. In this thought experiment you have effectively just been told that your parents aren’t real, and that anyone who ever liked you was a fiction. The survey found that most people would rather wipe their memory (59%).
De Brigard claims that it’s possible that the reason people would want to stay in their original life is because of something known as the Status Quo Bias.

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

flawed.
I don’t think this is sufficient to explain our initial aversion to plugging in. The differences between the two thought experiments are quite large, and affect the nature of the answer. Nozick is just showing how value is not simply pleasure minus pain. This is not the same as De Brigard showing that a net positive result for pleasure minus pain is preferable to some over an uncertain but real result.
Nozick doesn’t have any uncertainty in his original experience machine, you know your two possible futures will be and are asked whether hedonism tells you to choose the future you intuitively think you should choose. De Brigard is asking you to decide between certainty about the present and uncertainty about the present, which is why I think it’s a different question.
Nozick doesn’t need to show that being in contact with reality is always preferable to a pleasurable but fictitious one to disprove Hedonism, he just needs to show that we consider things other than pleasure minus pain. De Brigard even shows this with his study, as 41% of the participants in the above scenario would rather have a real but uncertain existence than a fictitious but pleasurable one. I think this could even be a case of people valuing contact with reality despite the Status Quo Bias.
I think that beacause of all this De Brigard’s experiment does not give Nozick any cause for worry, and in fact even reinforces his point, namely that pleasure isn’t the only thing we value.

Another common objection to Nozick, used by Roger Crisp, is the idea that the reason we don’t plug in is because we are only subconsciously hedonist, and that this manifests in the conscious as goal seeking behaviour. Crisp asks us to consider the tennis player, who forgets about trying to enjoy himself and focuses on winning. This tennis player then proceeds to get more enjoyment from the game than they would have done if they had focused on enjoying themselves and hadn’t won. The tennis player that really cares about winning will, according to Crisp, enjoy themselves more if they forget about enjoyment and focus on winning. This is the paradox of hedonism, that sometimes by ignoring pleasure we can obtain more.
Crisp then uses this to say that our intuitions are unreliable, because they are only apparently non-hedonistic, and that by forgetting the desire for pleasure and by focusing on winning, the tennis player is actually still searching for pleasure. The implication from this, stated explicitly by Matthew Silverstein, is that the reason we don’t plug in is because we like reality and it makes us happy to be in contact with reality because it has had such a huge effect on us.
I would disagree with this argument. For this argument to be true, all our instincts would have to be misleading. This would however mean that our instincts are not a good tool to use in constructing a system of ethics. However hedonism itself is based on the idea that pleasure has value because we instinctively like it. Mill even made the implicit assumption that what we judge to be good is good. This argument by Crisp does not promote hedonism in any way, and if it refutes the experience machine, then it also refutes hedonism on the same grounds.

To conclude, I would say that Nozick’s experience machine does show that hedonism is false. Firstly because all it takes is for one person to not plug in because they value something else, Nozick himself presumably wouldn’t plug in. Secondly because I don’t think De Brigard actually refutes Nozick, in fact I think he strengthens his case. De Brigard showed how despite the status quo bias and his added uncertainty, 41% of the participants in his second neutral scenario still would unplug themselves. Finally I think that whilst the idea that our intuitions are wrong might make our desire to not enter the experience machine an incorrect one, it also refutes hedonism. Hedonism fails either way, which is the beauty of Nozick’s argument.

References

[1] Nozick, R. (2003). Anarchy, state, and Utopia. Oxford: Blackwell.
[2] Moore, A. (2004). Hedonism. [online] Plato.stanford.edu. Available at: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hedonism/ [Accessed 2 Dec. 2015].
[3] Surgener, K. (2015). Nozick’s Experience Machine. Conversation with u1403196, in the philosophy undergraduate common room, Warwick University, 26th November.
Bibliography

De Brigard, F. (2010). If you like it, does it matter if it's real?. Philosophical Psychology, 23(1), pp.43-57.
Crisp, R. (2006). Hedonism Reconsidered. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 73(3), pp.619-645.
Lin, E. (2015). How to Use the Experience Machine. Utilitas, pp.1-19.
Silverstein, M. (2000). In Defense of Happiness. Social Theory and Practice, 26(2), pp.279-300.