It has been agreed upon throughout time that the meaning of life is to be happy. Life, by nature, is full of not only happy experiences, but it is also full of extremely sad ones. So when one is offered to take part in the Nozick’s Experience Machine- a machine that allows the user to live in a self-designed, happiness guaranteed computer program composed of illusions of happy moments- the idea of giving the offer up sounds crazy. Who wouldn’t want to be happy all the time? I know it sounds kind of absurd, but I would not partake in the experience. I would rather live a life that is spattered with sadness, but real, than live one that is blissful, yet fake.
Happiness is something relative. You know that you are happy, because you feel better than you do when you are sad. Therefore, if you are hooked into the Nozick Experience Machine, going through only happy experiences, you can never tell when you are actually happy. When hooked into the machine, your emotions will never change; they will continuously remain at the same happy state for ever. I would not like that, because living a consistent life is boring. With no diversity in ones’ life, comes no character change. If you are never changing your emotions, then you will never change as a person, and growing emotionally is a major aspect of life. In the machine, you will never have that ability to grow and change on an emotional level, leaving out a crucial aspect of life, which isn’t worth giving up.
The idea of the machine also freaks me out a bit. Life is supposed to be messy, and you are supposed to experience sad situations, so you can learn from them and grow. Granted, reality is not perfect, and neither is life. So if you are hooked onto the machine all the time, going through fake experiences, you are, in essence, living a reality that isn’t real. And if you aren’t living a real life, then what’s the point of living in the first place?
I would also have to question the emotional deepness that one can experience while hooked into the machine. Building relationships with friends and family takes a lifetime to do, something that clearly cannot be completed during the course of flashes of one memory or one experience. And for this reason, the time allowed to “live” through each moment and each experience with your loved ones, isn’t enough time for you to actually create and build a real relationship. Once you start to level off in emotions, the machine automatically changes it to another moment, leaving your loved one behind in a previous memory. If you keep going through this cycle of connection-disconnection and rapid change to ensure that you will always remain at an all time high in regards to happiness, you will never truly love anyone. Love is a major aspect of happiness, and without ever reaching true love, life is incomplete. Therefore, if you never have the chance to make that legitimate connection and actually fall in love in the machine like you would in the real world, than that machine never accomplishes its goal of finding happiness.
From the saddest of moments, one finds the most important messages. And if you go through life never being sad or mad or anxious, and only being happy, you aren’t really living. Although the machine is a good idea, and has a nice message of trying to accomplish the meaning of life, it is not completely desirable. The reason for life is to live, and if you are hooked onto a machine which does the feeling and experiencing for you, only feeding you allusions created out of the things that make you happy, you aren’t actually happy or living. Thus, if given the opportunity to hook onto the machine, I would have to decline, and instead live my real life, emotions and all.
Grade; A+) An interesting response- you identified many important elements of a happy life. "Real" is a theme that resonates throughout your response. Robert Nozick who first proposed the proposition of the “Experience Machine” in 1974 to test whether there was more to life, than feeling happy. Nozick’s answer about plugging into the machine for life is a resounding “NO!” Far more matters to us as human beings, he argues than what we experience, no matter how pleasant. First of all, we want to DO certain things, not just believe we are doing them. Second, “we want to BE a certain way, to be a certain sort of person. Someone floating in a tank is an indeterminate blob. “One of the distressing things about the experience machine, as described,” Nozick ads, “is that you are alone in your particular illusion.” What use is it to feel happy about oneself, one’s artistic genius, ones love life or one’s service to humanity if its all imaginary? “What we want, in short,” Nozick says, “is a self that happiness is a fitting response to-and then to give it that response.”
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