"SOME THEORISTS HAVE CLAIMED that happiness is theonlyimportant thing about life; all that should matter to a personthey sayis being happy; thesole standard for assessing a life is the amount or quantity of happiness it contains.

[To test this hypothesis]imagine a machine that could give you any experience (or sequence of experiences) you might desire.When connected to this experience machine, you can have the experience of writing a great poem or bringing about world peace or loving someone and being loved in return. You canexperience the felt pleasures of these things, how they feel "from the inside." You canprogram your experiencesfor tomorrow, or this week, or this year, or even for the rest of your life. If your imagination is impoverished, you can use the library of suggestions extracted from biographies and enhanced by novelists and psychologists. You can live your fondest dreams "from the inside."Would you choose to do this for the rest of your life? If not, why not?(Other people also have the same option of using these machines which, let us suppose, are provided by friendly and trustworthy beings from another galaxy, so you need not refuse connecting in order to help others.)

The question is not whether to try the machine temporarily, but whetherto enter it for the rest of your life. Upon entering, you willnot rememberhaving done this; sono pleasures will get ruined by realizing they are machine-produced. Uncertainty too might be programmed by using the machine's optional random device (upon which various preselected alternatives can depend).The question of whether to plug in to this experience machine is a question of value.(Itdiffersfrom two related questions: anepistemological oneCan you know you are not already plugged in?and ametaphysicaloneDon't the machine experiences themselves constitute a real world?)

Would you plug in to the "experience machine"? Yes or No? Why or why not? What does your answer say about your conception of what a good life is? Is it enough to feel happy or have pleasant experiences to lead a good life? If not, what "more" is needed?