Experience Machine

     Nozick’s experience machine personally gave me the help that could be determined through reality and a virtual life. With his multiple reasons for all the machines he presents throughout the passage makes it easier for the choices I have to make if I were put in the situation to plug myself up to one of his machines that are mentioned. After reading the passage I would not plug myself up to any of the three machines because Nozick’s reasons make it easier to see that we are capable of doing what we can if we stick to it. I am also capable of doing so much more than a selected few, while some are unable to have full capable abilities and the experience machine might help them see what it would be like to be more fulfilling in this large world, but not to set the rest of their lives.

     The experience machine was well explained by Nozick, as it will let you choose the next two years of your life. “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”(Nozick 121). This machine would let you live however you want with one simple act of plugging into the machine, but while all of this seems true in your mind in reality you are just floating in a tank cut off from the real world and you are getting nothing in your true life done. Nozick considers plugging into the machine is suicide and gives reasons on why you shouldn’t plug up to the machine. The three reasons that Nozick gives to not plug into the experience machine are: “First, we want to do certain things, and not just have the experience of doing them.” “A second reason for not plugging in is that we want to be a certain way, to be a certain sort of person.” “Thirdly… limits us to a man-made reality, to a world no deeper or more important than that which people can construct” (Nozick 122). This gives some insight that Nozick believes that we should live our lives because we won’t accomplish the real problems in the world as we try to escape from it and that we need not to imagine the things we want to accomplish instead actually step forward and try to achieve your goals because it might not only help you but it might help many more in the future. Also, the second rule is helping the understanding that we will never truly know someone’s true identity if they are plugged in because they are useless to others and you cannot just judge one off their floating body in a tank. You have to interact with others to realize their true potential in the world. The third reason helps us because God all gave us life on this world to accomplish something that no one else can but you and limiting that time for one to reach the knowing of their purpose on this world that could potentially spread around the world that would better improve many varieties that could be and make it easier for the world to accomplish instead of needing a machine to do it for us.  Nozick even states that eventually that the experience machine will not meet our needs or finally realize that we don’t need it. Then, other machines are built in trying to replace and be more advanced than the experience machine, hopefully to more improve one’s self and satisfy the people’s needs. These machines were similar to the experience machine but instead called the transformation machine and the result machine.

      The transformation machine will transform you into the person you always thought you could be, but eventually after plugging in you would realize that it wasn’t all made out to be because even though you would be a new person you would still have obstacles in your way or new ones that appear, and even your standards will be raised because what kind of people see you now. Nozick thinks that the transformation machine will somehow revert you back to the experience machine, as the new you will have new things you want to experience but don’t want to strive for them.  Next machine is the result machine that would be created after the transformation machine. In the passage the result machine will be, “which produces in the world any result you would produce and inject your vector input into any joint activity” (Nozick 122).  On the other hand the result machine would make it possible for any thoughts of any result be possible for any situation you want to be determined. I would not think a result machine would even be a great idea for anything because jumping straight to the results of something and finding out the results you could either be satisfied or unpleased with the results or try to change something that will cause a chain reaction and mess a lot of purpose actions up. If you see the functions of each machine they will somehow result all back to each other and will leave a huge impact on the world and even the people that decide not to hook up the machine.