Nozick was a philosopher who proposed a thought experiment about an ‘experience machine’.

Suppose there were an experience machine that would give you any experience you desired. […] All the time you would be floating in a tank, with electrodes attached to your brain. Should you plug into this machine for life, preprogramming your life’s experiences?

– Robert Nozick

What would you do? Would you plug in?

I would write an essay about it for my philosophy degree.

I started my essay a week ago and it was the most difficult essay I ever wrote. I didn’t just have to write about Nozick, his tank and his electrodes. I had to write about a whole bunch of other philosophers who had opinions and none of them agreed with each other and none of them agreed with Nozick. It took me a week and I was just doing my final read-through before I submitted it.

I was finally happy with it (well, as happy as I could be) when I saw a sentence that was wrong.

According to Nozick, hedonists value only the experiencing and not the doing…

Nozick didn’t say that about hedonists!

I started to fix it.

I re-read the sentence but I only got two-thirds of the way through before I forgot the first bit. I tried again but this time the first couple of words made no sense. I tried going back to the start of the paragraph but it didn’t even seem like proper English now. I had totally screwed up my essay!

I realised something was not quite right but I couldn’t put my finger on it. I read the paragraph again, but this time I could only see the left half of the page. The other half was all vertical black-and-white lines. I read that sentence again and again and again for about half an hour.

‘That’s weird’, I thought.

Then I felt a kind of rushing in my head — the kind you might feel after way too much rum. I finally realised what was happening and headed upstairs to get help from Mrs Clown. But I only made it about halfway when it all went fuzzy.

When I came round, I was waking from a dream on the stairs and I had no idea how I got there or how long I’d been there. Dedicated student that I am, instead of going to tell Mrs Clown what had happened, I went back, fixed my essay and submitted it.

I hope I get a good grade.