Lesson · 4 min Gentle
The Experience Machine
In one line We want to do things, not only to feel as though we did.
Robert Nozick asks you to picture a machine that can give you any experience you choose, and make you believe it is real. Inside it you do not do the work, meet the people, or live the days. You only have the feeling of having done them.
He thinks a person can refuse to stay plugged in. Wanting to do things, and wanting to be the person who does them, is not the same as wanting the feeling of having done them. A life swapped for a sensation has left the doing out.
This lesson adds a point of its own: refusing the machine is not refusing rest, a film, or relief from pain, which still happen in a life you are living. The machine is the offer to replace the life, for good, with the picture of one.
The perfect week
A device offers a week that will feel exactly like the week you wanted: the work finished, the friend met, the walk taken. You will not have done any of it. You will only be sure that you did.
Nozick would let you decline. The feeling of the week is not the week. Rest, a story, and a painkiller can still be part of a day you actually live.
Try this today Choose one thing you would rather really do than merely imagine, and do a small piece of it.
Cite or share this lesson
A plain reference you can paste into notes or an essay:
Quest2Reason. “The Experience Machine.” https://quest2reason.com/learn/lesson/experience-machine. Accessed 13 November 2026.
Sources
- Wikipedia, “Experience machine” — Nozick’s thought experiment.
- Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) — The experience machine: a life of chosen feelings, believed to be real, with the doing left out. The book is copyrighted. This lesson paraphrases the question.
- Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974) — Wanting to do and to be is not the same as wanting the sensation of having done.