Scientists offer you a machine that will simulate your ideal life with unending joy, then erase your memory so it feels completely real. Do you take the deal? This deep dive explores Robert Nozick’s 1974 experience machine from Anarchy, State, and Utopia, a thought experiment built as a trap for ethical hedonism, the utilitarian thesis associated with Jeremy Bentham that pleasure is the only intrinsic good. We walk through Nozick’s logical premises and his three reasons for refusing: we want to actually do things rather than merely experience them, we want to be a certain kind of person rather than an indeterminate blob, and we crave a deeper reality not constructed by programmers.

Then we turn to the psychologists who pushed back. Joshua Greene’s reversed scenario, in which you learn your current life is a simulation chosen forty years ago, suggests our hesitation is driven by status quo bias rather than a love of truth. Felipe De Brigard’s study of 72 students found that only 13 percent would unplug to return to a maximum security prison, while just 50 percent would unplug to become a millionaire artist in Monaco, the same as those told nothing. Duvin and Hendricks swapped the creepy machine for pills and found 29 percent would plug into the machine, 53 percent would take an experience pill, and 89 percent would take a functioning pill that enhances real-world ability. We close with The Matrix, Cypher’s steak, Infinite Jest, Inception, Simak’s City, and a question about whether the algorithm in your pocket is already the machine.

• How Nozick’s premises turn hedonism’s own math against it
• Why plugging in has been called a suicide of the self and an act of abandoning real relationships
• Greene’s reversal and De Brigard’s data on status quo bias
• Experience pill versus functioning pill: why 89 percent want to earn their pleasure
• Kelly Inglis’s universal pure pleasure machine and why only 5.3 percent want it