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Nozick's Experience Machine Is Dead, Long Live The Experience Machine!

This document summarizes an article that evaluates people's responses to Robert Nozick's famous "experience machine" thought experiment. The author conducts several experiments to create a new experience machine scenario that is relatively free of biases like status quo bias. The study finds that unlike existing scenarios, the new unbiased scenario does not provide strong evidence for or against internalist mental state theories of well-being when used to assess those theories. The author argues this new unbiased scenario should be used over existing scenarios if the experience machine thought experiment is going to be used to evaluate internalist theories of well-being.

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Anders Næss
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58 views

Nozick's Experience Machine Is Dead, Long Live The Experience Machine!

This document summarizes an article that evaluates people's responses to Robert Nozick's famous "experience machine" thought experiment. The author conducts several experiments to create a new experience machine scenario that is relatively free of biases like status quo bias. The study finds that unlike existing scenarios, the new unbiased scenario does not provide strong evidence for or against internalist mental state theories of well-being when used to assess those theories. The author argues this new unbiased scenario should be used over existing scenarios if the experience machine thought experiment is going to be used to evaluate internalist theories of well-being.

Uploaded by

Anders Næss
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Philosophical Psychology, 2014

Vol. 27, No. 4, 513–535, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09515089.2012.757889

Nozick’s experience machine is dead,


long live the experience machine!
Downloaded by [University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign] at 00:47 03 October 2014

Dan Weijers

Robert Nozick’s experience machine thought experiment (Nozick’s scenario) is widely used
as the basis for a “knockdown” argument against all internalist mental state theories of
well-being. Recently, however, it has been convincingly argued that Nozick’s scenario
should not be used in this way because it elicits judgments marred by status quo bias and
other irrelevant factors. These arguments all include alternate experience machine
thought experiments, but these scenarios also elicit judgments marred by status quo bias
and other irrelevant factors. In this paper, several experiments are conducted in order to
create and test a relatively bias-free experience machine scenario. It is argued that if an
experience machine thought experiment is used to evaluate internalist mental state
theories of well-being, then this relatively bias-free scenario should be used over any of the
existing scenarios. Unlike the existing experience machine scenarios, when this new
scenario is used to assess internalist mental state theories of well-being, it does not provide
strong evidence to refute or endorse them.
Keywords: Experience Machine; Experimental Philosophy; Hedonism; Status Quo Bias;
Well-Being

1. Introduction
This paper continues an emerging experimental tradition in philosophy: evaluating
the responses elicited by thought experiments using both empirical studies and
philosophical reflection. The responses evaluated here include those elicited by Robert
Nozick’s experience machine thought experiment (henceforth Nozick’s scenario).
Nozick’s scenario (1974, pp. 42– 45) is widely used as the basis for a “knockdown”
argument against all internalist mental state theories of well-being.1 Indeed, most
undergraduate philosophy students are introduced to Nozick’s experience machine
purely for the reason of discrediting these theories.
Perhaps most importantly, Nozick’s fantastic scenario has been used extensively to
show that the majority of hedonistic theories of well-being must be wrong.2 It has been

Dan Weijers is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Victoria University of Wellington.


Correspondence to: Dan Weijers, Philosophy Department, Victoria University of Wellington, PO Box 600,
Wellington 6140, New Zealand. Email: [email protected]

q 2013 Taylor & Francis

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