experience machine: a standalone construct

Robert Nozick introduced the experience machine in Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) as a thought experiment against hedonism, the view that pleasurable experience is the only thing that is good for a person. He asks the reader to imagine a machine that could give any experiences one desires, feeling entirely real from the inside, for the rest of one's life, and he observes that most people would decline to plug in permanently. Nozick reads that reluctance as evidence that people value more than how their lives feel: they want to actually do certain things, to be a certain kind of person, and to stay in contact with a reality beyond their own sensations, none of which a lifetime inside the machine could supply. As a landmark in value theory, the case is the standard argument used to separate the value of an experience from the value of the state of affairs that produces it, and it has since been tested empirically, with studies probing whether the intuition survives once wording and framing are controlled.[1][2][3]

Unit

A philosophical thought experiment, a single imagined scenario used to test a theory of value

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Identified in the literature by its canonical setup (whether one would plug into a machine giving indistinguishable pleasurable experiences for life) and tested empirically through survey vignettes that vary framing and wording