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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   33868 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 19, 2026

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If people need to be convinced that the experience machine is high status in order to enter it, does that not prove that people value status over pleasure? It seems to me you are in agreement with Nozick, only you expand on his idea by suggesting a candidate for the thing which people value over hedonism.

I see your point, but I think that this is kind of a semantic issue. Would a hedonist seek out the experience of feeling that he is important; of feeling that he is superior; of feeling that he is "cool"? It really depends on the definition of hedonism. Normally when one thinks of hedonism, one thinks of experiencing pleasures such as those provided by sexual stimulation; opiates; tasty food; and so on. But I think it makes sense to think about hedonism in a broader way. When some political activist pursues activities that are very unlikely to accomplish anything except to make the activist feel good about himself (and we've all seen examples of this), how is this not fundamentally a case of hedonism?

Interesting point. I've thought about it a little and two ideas come to mind.

First, I think the broader definition of hedonism might end up being unfalsifiable. Let's say that people value status as some sort of more sophisticated form of hedonic pleasure over things like sex and drugs, which I think is a reasonable idea. How in this scenario does anybody value anything over hedonism? Presumably whatever one values, if you achieve it, it will bring you pleasure. If every possible good one can value is accompanied by a pleasurable experience and we suggest that what people really want is the pleasurable experience rather than the good itself, how can there ever be a situation where somebody can't be assumed to be a hedonist? Given these assumptions, hedonism seems almost definitionally true.

Second, on further thought I think the experience machine thought experiment actually does manage to solve the problem of my first point. If one is motivated primarily by the experience of status, presumably the experience machine will bring about that experience as well. So if the in the thought experiment we know we would have a perfect experience of being high status without knowing that it is false, but nevertheless we reject that experience because we think it is low status, I think it still amounts to choosing actual high status over an experience of high status, thus rendering the person who makes that choice not a hedonist. If the person in question truly values the hedonic pleaure of being high status above all, why not get into the experience machine to perfectly experience the hedonic pleasure of being high status?

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