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Notes -
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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