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Analysis of the Pursuit of Happyness
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In The Experience Machine by Robert Nozick brings up the idea of having a machine which you are hooked up to that will make you feel like you are experiencing certain desires. Someone who is a hedonistic that tries to maximize pleasure on how you feel on the inside, while reducing pain will think this is would be a great idea. What more could you want? Having the feeling of accomplishing all of your dreams while doing virtually nothing. Nevertheless, I believe there is more to life than just the feeling of pleasure. During those years that you are plugged in may seem appealing and pleasurable, but spending the rest of your life plugged into a machine while everyone else around you is living their life in the moment and accomplishing their dreams Such as a first kiss, or the feeling of accomplishing a life-long goal. Those experiences in the machine may feel great and of bring pleasure at the time, but in reality they would feel a lot more pleasurable and be a lot more valuable. Also, not all experiences may be pleasurable for my fulfillment. Once you are un-plugged from the machine you may become depressed that your real life is completely different than the one that you have experience in the machine. This is giving you blurred, disappointment and false image of what your real world is actually like. Therefore, I personally believe that a life spent in the experience machine would not be beneficial or worthwhile for myself. I believe that certain desire will be more pleasurable and are much more valuable in real life. Such as a first kiss, though in machine you may actually think that the first kiss what is really happening and you’re content of the outcome. However, in reality this experience is much more exhilarating and exciting furthermore just the memory of it is much more valuable than the feeling and emotions that were happening in the present
The Argument from False Happiness gives good reason to accept that the idea of pleasure being the only thing that is intrinsically valuable in life is ultimately not practical and that what makes a life good is what causes the pleasure in the first place. Hedonists will argue that the cause of happiness does not matter, only that we end up being happy. This seems like a logical point of view, as no one actively wants to be unhappy. However, the hedonist’s view is flawed because it counts on a very delicate circumstance: if a person’s happiness stems from false beliefs, then they must not find out that their belief is false because that will lead to disappointment and pain, thus making their life
One of the key questions raised by Rupert Sheldrake in the Seven Experiments That Could Change the World, is are we more than the ghost in the machine? It is perfectly acceptable to Sheldrake that humans are more than their brain, and because of this, and in actual reality “the mind is indeed extended beyond the brain, as most people throughout most of human history have believed.” (Sheldrake, Seven Experiments 104)
As humans we are constantly in search of understanding the balance between what feels good and what is right. Humans try to take full advantage of experiencing pleasure to its fullest potential. Hedonism claims that pleasure is the highest and only source of essential significance. If the notion of hedonism is truthful, happiness is directly correlated with pleasure. Robert Nozick presented the philosophical world with his though experiment, “The Experience Machine” in order to dispute the existence and validity of hedonism. Nozick’s thought experiment poses the question of whether or not humans would plug into a machine which produces any desired experience. Nozick weakens the notion of hedonism through his thought experiment, claiming humans need more than just pleasure in their lives. Nozick discovers that humans would not hook up to this machine because they would not fully develop as a person and consider it a form of suicide.
Authentic and intimate relationships are very important in our life. Turkle has defined the word authenticity in her article. She says that “Authenticity, for me, follows from the ability to put oneself to the place of another, to relate to the other because of shared store of human experiences: we are born, have families, and know loss and the reality of death. A robot, however sophisticated, is patently out of this loop” (268). By stating this she wants point out that when mankind shares experiences with others, they get attached emotionally and establish authentic relationships. However, sharing experiences with robots does not involve emotions, because robots are not humans. They are just human made creatures which seem alive, but cannot have any feelings. People use robots to make love out of it and to share their feelings. “Love and sex seems to celebrate an emotional dumbing down, a willful turning away from the complexities of human partnership- the inauthentic as a new aesthetic” (268). Here aesthetic means appreciating the beauty of robots. When people start loving robots, they appreciate the beauty of unreal relationships with robots rather than having real and intimate relationships. Having love and sex with robots has no emotions involved. As a technological creature, robot can only give pleasure and satisfaction to the user without any feelings of love and care. There are many medical technologies which are developed to make produce love in inauthentic way. Slater talks about the medical technology like neural implantation. She talks about Mario who had OCD and got neural implantation to love his daughter and his family. Slater says that, “He wanted a shot at the ordinary, a lawn he might mow just once a week. The ability to endure the mess and touch of children. He decided the
Why is technology a source of erotic thrill? A central motivation is the relationship with power. Technology provides control over power, and, by extension, power over the "Other". After the beginning of the nineteenth century, machines came to be perceived as threatening and uncontrollable entities, and thus made the object of displacement and projection of patriarchal fears towards female sexuality. The physical manifestations of industrial machines, such as size, shape and motions (thrust/pause/press), provided straightforward metaphors for human sexual responses, and the increasingly widespread use of cars made it possible to the large mass of consumers to experience the extension and transformation of the human body through exhilarating blasts of speed and power. The drastic changes in technology have brought a new kind of awareness. As an object of erotic attraction, electronic technology is of a different order from the industrial one exemplified by the car. The masculine power of size and motion has been replaced by the feminized and miniaturized intricacy of electronic circuitry. Re-production has supplanted production and space has become an abstract entity hidden behind the opaque screen of computers and electronic equipments. The more overt sexual connotations of power and strength of industrial machinery has given way to an ambiguous relationship with gender roles and sexual identity. Small size, fluid and quiet functioning computers, which provide the practical possibility to assume on-line personae, invert or blend gender roles. The erotic and exciting feeling experienced with electronic circuitry transgresses the notion of solely body control, in that cybernetics enables control over the information and, for those who own the technology, control over the consumer classes. Donna Haraway's call for a feminist embrace of technology is grounded on the recognition that the technological evocation of feminine metaphors in terms of appearance and functioning does not acknowledge the dangers hidden behind the process of miniaturization: "small is not so much beautiful as pre-eminently dangerous as in cruise missiles" (153).
On a sunny Saturday morning with beautiful blue skies, and birds chirping, James Hamblin was in his balcony with a cup of coffee on his desk eager to write his short argumentative essay titled “Buy Experiences, Not Things”. In this short essay, Hamblin wanted to depict the fact that happiness in individuals, is mainly due to experiential purchases than to material purchases. One of the things he said to prove that point was “waiting for an experience elicits more happiness and excitement than waiting for a material good’ (Hamblin, 2014). He also stated that “a mind should remain in one place, and a mind that wanders too much is a sign of lack of happiness” (Hamblin, 2014). Instead of buying the latest iPhone, or Samsung galaxy, we should spend
Most people think that the highest end is a life of pleasure. Hedonists have defined happiness as " an equivalent to the totality of pleasurable or agreeable feeling.';(Fox, 3) Some pleasures are good and contribute to happiness. Not all ends are ultimate ends but the highest end would have to be something ultimate; the only conceivable ultimate end is happiness.
Some people think faster than they can write or type but if you are a fast typer, you could be faster on a computer and keep up with your thoughts and it will still always be legible as opposed to paper where you most likely will have made some chicken scratch trying to keep up with your thoughts. We live in a world where simulation can be used for pretty much everything which can sometimes be considered a bad thing, but honestly it is a necessity for a lot of things because it is helpful. Computer simulations can help doctors train and learn to diagnose patients. Simulations are or can be used in so many things like education, science, entertainment, etc. and they are usually beneficial to us because they make us capable of doing more things that we could have possible never been able to without technology.
The machine is a Rube Goldberg machine that turns on a light. It has no practical purpose, and exists solely as art. It is exciting and beautiful to watch, but a machine that takes three times as long to do a task that requires very little effort without a machine has no inherent value. It is simply there as art, as something for people to look at and to enjoy.
We already have automated machines designed to make life easier for us: vacuum cleaners, car washes, dishwashers, laundry machines, litter-box scoopers, etc. We have many automated technologies that we can set to our personal preference, such as Tv and radio stations, thermostats, lighting, etc. Bill Gates even has a feature in his house that will switch out different paintings depending on who is standing in the room. We humans like shortcuts and simple luxuries, but with technology taking away so much of our workload we are enabling ourselves to be lazy. We are already dependent on technology. In the least, we are already severely addicted to it. How many hours are spent wasted glued to our cell phones, watching Tv or surfing the web? How would you communicate with your friends and family without telephones or email? How would we cook without our gas/electric stoves and microwaves? How would we store our food without refrigeration? How would we see at night? How would we get around? Obviously, we are already in over our heads with our relationship to
...r us, and we will become lazy. What are we going to do all day if we have machines to make meals for us, to do our laundry, and to clean our houses? We would do nothing. We would become like Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot-we would be doing nothing more than existing, which we have seen does not bring much happiness.
Rather, it seems consistent, in terms of evolutionary psychology and the anthropological etiology of human motivations, that declining individuals are likely convinced that time spent in the NEM might cause them to miss arguably better experiences achievable only through the complexities of life in the external world. Voluntary users of the NEM are actively and consciously seeking pleasure, a fact made obvious by the NEM concept and their explicit use of the machine. In both cases, the individuals in question are actively seeking the optimal set of experiences, and the chief difference is found in their preferences for pleasure-experience delivery. In this way, the telos of human motivations may not be pleasure per se, but the delivery vehicle is arguably the pleasurable
Suppose one was to record their pleasures down on paper using a graph. At first, one might be confused as to how to go about quantifying their happiness. After consideration of the quality of ones varying pleasures though, one is more able to deduce whether it is a higher or a lower pleasure and graph them. This enables one to distinguish which things promote the greatest pleasure, which translates itself to strive for happiness. For example, consider the attainment of food or sex in contrast to mental and spiritual growth. When one is only interested in satiating their appetite for food or sex, the pleasure acquired is minuscule when compared to the acquisition of mental and spiritual growth. Thus, attaining mental and spiritual growth will bring o...
Our minds have created many remarkable things, however the best invention we ever created is the computer. The computer has helped us in many ways by saving time, giving accurate and precise results, also in many other things. but that does not mean that we should rely on the computer to do everything we can work with the computer to help us improve and at the same time improve the computer too. A lot of people believe that robots will behave like humans someday and will be walking on the earth just like us. There should be a limit for everything so that our world would remain peaceful and stable. At the end, we control the computers and they should not control us.
...end on us. There are three ways that a person can overuse a computer. They are physical/behavioral sicknesses, harming family connections and diminishing scholarly study. Once more, yes we are too dependent on computers in light of the fact that the human cerebrum, which computes this magnificent world unconsciously in the almost in an insensible way, lets us enjoy, live and create.