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 is 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 Nozik 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,

something that we actually ought to be happy about, rather than just a fiction.

If your friend has betrayed you, wouldn't you want to know? Wouldn't you prefer to be a basketball star in real life instead of just in virtual reality? Even if you couldn't tell the

difference? We care about not being deceived about the reality of the world. 50 years later,

the intuition that reality matters isn't so intuitive for everybody.

Megan says that usually more than half the class will say,

...