"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. All the time you would be floating in a tank, with electrodes attached to your brain. Should you plug into this machine for life, preprogramming your life's experiences?"
If a machine could give you the exact feeling of 'I pulled it off' without doing any of the work, would you plug in? What would feel missing?
If Fake Happiness Felt Exactly Real, What Would Be Wrong?
Robert Nozick was a Harvard philosopher whose Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) set out a libertarianism that put individual rights first, sparking one of political philosophy's great debates alongside his colleague John Rawls's A Theory of Justice. He posed the question 'Is a good life just the sum of pleasant feelings?' as a thought experiment.
Nozick is known to have preferred opening courses on new topics rather than repeating the same lectures. He did not treat even his signature theory as a fixed answer: in The Examined Life (1989) he wrote that the libertarian position he once propounded now seemed to him 'seriously inadequate'.