Robert Nozick argued desirable experiences weren't sufficient for living a good life. But are they even necessary? If you could give up your conscious life to better achieve your dreams and ambitions, wouldn't you still be living a good life? An artificial or even an unnatural life can be one that is worth living, write Chris Ranalli.
Do you need conscious experience to live a good life? On its face, this sounds like an absurd question. For experience, you might think, is what makes us who we are. Wouldn’t a life without experience be too artificial? What I want to do here is explore just how far we can push our thinking about experience and living a good life in order to see whether conscious experience really is as important to our humanity as we ordinarily like to think.
Let’s start with Robert Nozick’s experience machine thought experiment (Nozick 1974). The experience machine is a simulation machine in which you are given the opportunity to have any experience. Anything you might ever want to do in your life you get to experience in the experience machine. Now imagine that you could spend your entire life in the experience machine, having only the experiences you want to have. Why not plug in? Nozick argued that, everything else being equal, permanently plugging into the experience machine would deprive you of a good life because living a good life includes more than simply having certain experiences. The person who hopes to climb Mt. Everest actually wants to climb the mountain—with all its risks and rewards—and not simply to simulate it. The lover wants to be with their partner rather than merely simulating partnership. The entrepreneur wants to develop something groundbreaking and not only to feel as if they are doing so. In each case there is an emphasis on the reality of doing something rather than merely having the experience as of doing it. A life in the experience machine is an artificial life; a life that happens to you rather than a life that you live. What makes a person’s life a good one has to go beyond simply having certain experiences.
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