Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit Subscriptions.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

Articles

Robert Nozick’s Metaverse Machine

Lorenzo Buscicchi asks, would you plug into Mark Zuckerberg’s virtual world? He finds that the question has been considered by philosophers for decades.

At the end of October 2021, Facebook announced its ‘Metaverse’ project, an entire virtual reality world that will be up and running ‘in the near future’. Laymen tend to have a stereotype of philosophers as being techno-sceptic. However, philosophers have been discussing virtual reality since before Mark Zuckerberg was born.

A comparatively recent contribution to the debate was the ‘experience machine’ thought experiment advanced by Robert Nozick in 1974 in his book Anarchy, State and Utopia (though it’s probably based on a short story called ‘The Happiness Machine’ published by Ray Bradbury in 1957). In this thought experiment, Nozick asks you to imagine a machine that can simulate every experience you would like to have until the end of your life.

…