Woody Allen’s zany 1973 comedy film Sleeper, about a health-food shopkeeper who emerges in the 22nd century having been cryogenically frozen, features an “Orgasmatron”. Even if you haven’t seen the film, you can guess the gadget’s function.
At roughly the same time Sleeper was released, Robert Nozick – who was born, like Allen, in the 1930s to a Jewish family in New York – was sending his publishers the manuscript of his somewhat rambling masterpiece, Anarchy, State, and Utopia. It appeared in print in 1974, and the distinctive bands of colour on its cover are instantly recognisable on any bookshelf.
Anarchy, State, and Utopia was conceived as a response to John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice, which justified the redistribution of resources from rich to poor. Nozick, conversely, argued that the government had no right to tax what had been legitimately earned. He is a (if not the) godfather of libertarianism.
The book meandered down various intellectual pathways, including one that led to a now-famous thought experiment involving a version of the Orgasmatron – although this being philosophy, Nozick’s version has less sex. He called it the “Experience Machine”.
What do you desire in your life? A happy marriage? Close friendships? A rewarding career? Money? Plug in to the Experience Machine and it will furnish you with everything you want, for the rest of your life. Inside the machine, people are captivated by your anecdotes and guffaw at all your jokes. You can be the prime minister, win a Nobel Prize in Literature, and become a Wimbledon tennis champion.
Hedonism is the theory that what you should aim for in life is the minimisation of pain and the maximisation of your pleasure. It has a very long pedigree as a basis for ideas about ethics and the good life, with its best-known exponent being Jeremy Bentham. “Then along comes Nozick,” says the Oxford philosophy professor Roger Crisp, “and apparently shows that hedonism is rubbish.”
The reason for this is that if pleasure was really all that mattered, we would willingly wire ourselves up to the Experience Machine. And yet, claimed Nozick, few of us would want to do this. We would rather have a real marriage, with all its bumpy ups and downs, than a perfect one that is tainted only by the fact that it’s entirely illusory. Woody Allen captures something of this intuition in his film The Purple Rose of Cairo, when the heroine falls in love with the handsome lead character in a movie. “I just met a wonderful new man. He’s fictional but you can’t have everything.”
“Nozick’s view of the good life,” says Crisp, “is that you have to be in contact with reality.” We value doing certain things – say writing a novel – not just the belief that we have done them. We value being kind or generous – not just the experience of being this sort of person. For Robert Nozick, “plugging in to the machine is a kind of suicide”.
Simulated experience has long been a staple of dystopian novels such as William Gibson’s Neuromancer and sci-fi movies such as The Matrix, but yesterday’s future is today. The term “virtual reality” was coined a decade after the Orgasmatron and the Experience Machine, and immersive experiences generated by computer, though still relatively primitive, are becoming ever more sophisticated and realistic. It is no longer fanciful to imagine being lost in such a world, surrounded by familiar sights, smells and tastes.
Perhaps our reluctance to disappear into such a world is merely a form of status-quo bias. Most of us are more or less comfortable with our lives, and don’t fancy opting out of them. But who knows – you might currently be in an Experience Machine. You think you’re sitting at home, or on the train to work, contentedly reading this edition of the New Statesman, whereas in fact you’re wired up to a contraption.
Suppose you’re suddenly jolted out of this fantasy – perhaps the Experience Machine is owned by Elon Musk, who has inserted commercial breaks. After the ad, you’re given a choice. You can re-enter the machine – and the memory of the irritating interruption will be wiped from your mind – or you can stay out, in what you are assured will be a less happy existence.
Is it really so obvious what you would do?
[See also: The prophet of the new right]
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This article appears in the 05 Mar 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Fall Out