GMU Life Guarantees Each Individual Both Bad and Good Experiences Analysis

Your first writing assignment is to write a short paper critiquing an argument considered by Robert Nozick in his influential book Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Consider the following thought experiment:

“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 you are worried about missing out on desirable experiences, we can suppose that business enterprises have researched thoroughly the lives of many others. You can pick and choose from their large library or smörgåsbord of such experiences, selecting your life’s experiences for, say, the next two years. After two years have passed, you will have ten minutes or ten hours out of the tank, to select the experiences of your next two years. Of course, while in the tank you won’t know that you’re there; you’ll think it’s all actually happening. Others can also plug in to have the experiences they want, so there’s no need to stay unplugged to serve them. (Ignore problems such as who will service the machines if everyone plugs in.) Would you plug in? What else can matter to us, other than how our lives feel from the inside?” (Nozick 1974:42)

Now consider the following argument, based on this thought experiment:

P1. If we would want to plug into the experience machine, then pleasure is all that matters to us.

P2. We would want to plug into the experience machine.

C. So, pleasure is all that matters to us.

Your task in this paper is to develop objections to one or both of the premises of this argument (P1 and P2). You should offer at least one objection to one of the premises, either P1 or P2. It is up to you whether to spend the entire paper developing this objection, or instead to divide the space available between two different objections. For instance, you might spend your entire paper developing an argument that the second premise is false. You do not need to summarize the thought experiment or argument above; launch right into your critique.
You are not permitted to consult external sources in writing your paper.

This includes the other material in the book itself (Anarchy, State, and Utopia). The ideas you express in the paper should be your own: this is not a research paper.

Outlining requirement

You are required to include an outline of your paper along with your first draft that reflects its content at the time of submission.