Sunday 15 January 2012

The Experience Machine

Robert Nozick was a philosopher who came up with a thought experiment where the concept was about the idea of happiness. Nozick asks us to imagine a machine, that if we entered it, we would enter a dream world, in which we could program what happened. Once you entered the machine you wouldn't remember programming it, you would wake up, with whatever new things you want (e.g 3 feet taller, living in Hawaii) and you wouldn't find anything strange. Nozick claims that if this machine did exist, and anybody could just live in this dream world with a fantastic life, nobody would ever enter it. He claims that you need a little bit of bad in life, so that the good can really be good. Perfection is boring, and knowing the future is even worse.

I personally wouldn't enter the machine, because, well basically because of Nozick's reasons, I want to do things for real, not just experience fake versions of them. One interesting thought people have come up with, and I contemplate from now and again is the idea that the life we live now could intact just be a dream. There literally are no clues to the true knowledge of our existence. I do love the quote by René Descartes, "I think, therefore I am", but what if the dream is telling us to "think", and to "be".

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