Imagine if you could plug your brain into a machine that would bring you ultimate pleasure

for the rest of your life.

This TED Talk educational video was talking about a kind of virtual reality.

No sadness, hardship or pain.

It would seem completely real.

You'd never know it was only an illusion.

The catch.

You had to stay there until you died.

No going back and forth.

If you were given the choice to sign up for that kind of existence, would you?

That's the question philosopher Robert Nozick posed through a thought experiment he called

the Experience Machine.

Megan Fritz often discusses Nozick's Experience Machine in class.

I'm a professor of philosophy at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.

Megan told me Nozick published the thought experiment in 1974.

By then, scientists had been experimenting with virtual reality headsets for a few years,

but they were very clunky.

He expects the kind of reaction to this offer to be an immediate, oh yeah, no, I'm not

going to take that offer.

What he wants to use this intuition to argue is that humans actually care about more than

pure experience, pure happiness.

We care about other things like whether that happiness is connected to something real,

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