Scientists offer you a machine that will simulate your ideal life with unending joy, then erase your memory so it feels completely real. Do you take the deal? This deep dive explores Robert Nozick's 1974 experience machine from Anarchy, State, and Utopia, a thought experiment built as a trap for ethical hedonism, the utilitarian thesis associated with Jeremy Bentham that pleasure is the only intrinsic good. We walk through Nozick's logical premises and his three reasons for refusing: we want to actually do things rather than merely experience them, we want to be a certain kind of person rather than an indeterminate blob, and we crave a deeper reality not constructed by programmers.

Then we turn to the psychologists who pushed back. Joshua Greene's reversed scenario, in which you learn your current life is a simulation chosen forty years ago ...