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.
Join the conversation