scholarly journals Negotiating Fitness, From Consumption to Virtuous Production

2015 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 284-311 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ross D. Neville ◽  
Catherine Gorman ◽  
Sheila Flanagan ◽  
Frédéric Dimanche
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Thought Experiment ◽  
Frame Of Reference ◽  
Robert Nozick ◽  
Experience Machine ◽  
Nous Examinons ◽  
Consumption Activity

By shifting our attention toward everyday life, its manifold commitments and responsibilities, this paper examines the potential for “fitness” to take on an extended meaning beyond consumption activity. In the opening sections, Robert Nozick’s (1974) “Experience Machine” thought experiment is presented as an alternative analytic frame for interpreting the problem of fitness in terms of a tension between mere activity and experience. In relation to this tension, the paper presents findings from a study of experienced participants and emphasizes the possibilities of a virtuous production through fitness. In particular, we emphasize that there is much work to be done in sedimenting (and maintaining) an appropriate frame of reference for “doing fitness” and that “being someone through fitness” might operate as an indexical marker of virtue.En dirigeant notre attention vers la vie de tous les jours et ses multiples engagements et responsabilités, nous examinons dans cet article le potentiel du « fitness » d’avoir une signification étendue au-delà de l’activité de consommation. Dans les premières sections, l’expérience de pensée de la « machine à expérience » de Robert Nozick (1974) est présentée comme un cadre analytique alternatif pour l’interprétation du problème de la condition physique en termes de tension entre simple activité et expérience. En lien avec cette tension, cet article présente les résultats d’une étude de participants expérimentés et met l’accent sur les possibilités d’une production vertueuse par l’intermédiaire de la condition physique. En particulier, nous soulignons qu’il y a beaucoup de travail à faire dans la sédimentation (et le maintien) d’un cadre de référence approprié pour « faire de l’activité physique » et qu’« être quelqu’un par l’intermédiaire de la condition physique » peut agir comme indicateur de vertu.

scholarly journals The Experience Machine: Existential Reflections on Virtual Worlds

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefano Gualeni
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Virtual Worlds ◽  
Philosophy Of Technology ◽  
Thought Experiment ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Robert Nozick ◽  
Experience Machine ◽  
Technical Reproducibility ◽  
Self Discovery ◽  
Digital Simulations

Problems and questions originally raised by Robert Nozick in his famous thought experiment ‘The Experience Machine’ are frequently invoked in the current discourse concerning virtual worlds. Having conceptualized his Gedankenexperiment in the early seventies, Nozick could not fully anticipate the numerous and profound ways in which the diffusion of computer simulations and video games came to affect the Western world.This article does not articulate whether or not the virtual worlds of video games, digital simulations, and virtual technologies currently actualize (or will actualize) Nozick’s thought experiment. Instead, it proposes a philosophical reflection that focuses on human experiences in the upcoming age of their ‘technical reproducibility’.In pursuing that objective, this article integrates and supplements some of the interrogatives proposed in Robert Nozick’s thought experiment. More specifically, through the lenses of existentialism and philosophy of technology, this article tackles the technical and cultural heritage of virtual reality, and unpacks its potential to function as a tool for self-discovery and self-construction. Ultimately, it provides an interpretation of virtual technologies as novel existential domains. Virtual worlds will not be understood as the contexts where human beings can find completion and satisfaction, but rather as instruments that enable us to embrace ourselves and negotiate with various aspects of our (individual as well as collective) existence in previously-unexperienced guises.

The Quality of Life

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Kraut
Keyword(s):  
Quality Of Life ◽  
No Value ◽  
Thought Experiment ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Robert Nozick ◽  
Experience Machine ◽  
The World ◽  
Better Than

The Quality of Life: Aristotle Revised presents a philosophical theory about the constituents of human well-being. It begins with Aristotle’s thoughts about this topic, but often modifies and sometimes rejects them. The principal idea is that what Aristotle calls “external goods” (wealth, reputation, power) have at most an indirect bearing on the quality of our lives. A good internal life—the way in which we experience the world—is what well-being consists in. Pleasure is one aspect of this experience, but only a small part of it. Far more valuable is the quality of our emotional, intellectual, social, and perceptual experiences. These aspects of our existence make it potentially richer and deeper than the quality of life available to many other animals. A good human life is immeasurably better than that of a simple creature that feels only the pleasures of nourishment. Even if it felt pleasure for millions of years, human life would be superior. Contemporary discussions of well-being often appeal to a thought experiment devised by Robert Nozick, which holds that we should not attach ourselves to an “experience machine”—a device that manipulates our brains and gives us any illusory experiences of our choosing. This is thought to show that one’s interior life has little or no value on its own; that we must live in “the real world” to live well. In fact, however, this thought experiment supports the opposite conclusion: the quality of our lives consists in the quality of our experiences.

scholarly journals The Right to an Artificial Reality? Freedom of Thought and the Fiction of Philip K. Dick

2021 ◽  
pp. 377
Author(s):  
Marc Blitz
Keyword(s):  
Virtual Reality ◽  
Thought Experiment ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Robert Nozick ◽  
Philosophical Thought ◽  
Physical Universe ◽  
Experience Machine ◽  
Real People ◽  
Freedom Of Thought ◽  
The Right

n Anarchy, State, and Utopia, the philosopher Robert Nozick describes what he calls an “Experience Machine.” In essence, it produces a form of virtual reality (VR). People can use it to immerse themselves in a custom-designed dream: They have the experience of climbing a mountain, reading a book, or conversing with a friend when they are actually lying isolated in a tank with electrodes feeding perceptions into their brain. Nozick describes the Experience Machine as part of a philosophical thought experiment—one designed to show that a valuable life consists of more than mental states, like those we receive in this machine. As Nozick says, “we want to do certain things, and not just have the experience of doing them.” An 80-year sequence of experiences generated by the machine would not be of equivalent value to the lifetime of the identical set of experiences we derive from interactions with real people (who are not illusions, but have minds of their own), and with a physical universe that lies outside of us. On the contrary, says Nozick, a solipsistic life in the Experience Machine is a deeply impoverished one.

Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Schmidtz
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Robert Nozick ◽  
Theory Of Justice ◽  
Cooperative Society ◽  
Experience Machine ◽  
Mutual Advantage

Anarchy, State, and Utopia is arguably the twentieth century’s most influential work of political philosophy after Rawls’s Theory of Justice. It substantially responds to Rawls, despite ranging over many topics. The Experience Machine, discussed in Part I, engagingly articulates Nozick’s discomfort with utilitarianism, and with Rawls’s way of modeling separate personhood. That is, Rawls depicts bargainers as separate consumers, entitled to separate shares, while dismissing the separateness of what they do as arbitrary. Part II continues to pound on the incongruousness of respecting our separateness as consumers (see his discussions of distributing grades and mates) while implicitly denigrating and even denying our separateness as producers. Part III argues that true utopia would not impose a favored vision of utopia while silencing incompatible rivals. It would instead be a cooperative society for mutual advantage, premised on everyone coming to the table with a robust right to say no to unattractive offers.

Faiths and Films: Countering the Crisis of Thai Buddhism from Below

2006 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 264-290 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pattana Kitiarsa
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Economic Crisis ◽  
Full Moon ◽  
Frame Of Reference ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Popular Films ◽  
Multiple Issues ◽  
Thai People ◽  
Moral Crisis

AbstractThis article addresses multiple issues of how the ongoing debates of 'Thai Buddhism in crisis' (wikrit phutthasatsana) are perceived and discussed in popular films. Purposefully selecting three film stories, namely, Fun, Bar, Karaoke (1997), Mekhong Full Moon Party (2002), and Ong Bak: Muay Thai Warrior (2003), as case studies, the author argues that the contemporary state of Thai Buddhism is narrated and interpreted in remarkably different tones. There is virtually no moral crisis concerning Thai Buddhism reflected in the films, but a firm faith in Buddhist teachings and principles is presented, with some critical concerns of its religious agencies and performances in Thailand's post-1997 economic crisis context. In the turbulent decade of the 1990s and the new millennium, the Thai people have strongly expressed a desire for religious sanctuary. Faith in Buddhism is still strong and powerful, but its form and content are always plural and multi-dimensional. Everyday life religion, not the official or canonical Buddhism, has continuously posted itself as a prominent frame of reference for ordinary people to re-assess and re-define the problems of modernity in the midst of emerging threats of global capitalist challenges.

The Experience Machine

Think ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 3 (8) ◽  
pp. 35-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Hauskeller
Keyword(s):  
Thought Experiment ◽  
Experience Machine

Michael Hauskeller discusses a famous thought-experiment that appears to show that we actually want far more then merely to feel happy.

Experientialism and the Experience Machine

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Kraut
Keyword(s):  
Thought Experiment ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Minor Importance ◽  
Other Minds ◽  
Causal Interaction ◽  
Material World ◽  
Experience Machine

Nozick’s thought experiment makes many assumptions about the experience machine that require re-examination. It raises questions about whether illusion and self-deception are inherently bad; about what it is to be active rather than passive; about what it is to be free; about the value of physical embodiment and causal interaction with the material world; about the value of fiction and beauty; and about solipsism. Would one’s life be bad, if there are no other minds? Posthumous harms and benefits are also thought to pose a problem for an experientialist conception of well-being. Aristotle wrongly believes that there are such harms and benefits, but his error is negligible, because he assigns them minor importance.

The Power of the Jama‘A: The Role of Hasan Al-Banna in Constructing the Muslim Brotherhood’s Collective Identity

2013 ◽  
Vol 1 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 41-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Khalil al-Anani
Keyword(s):  
Collective Action ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Collective Identity ◽  
Social Activism ◽  
Field Research ◽  
Muslim Brotherhood ◽  
Frame Of Reference ◽  
Identity Based ◽  
The Muslim Brotherhood

This article explores the role of Hasan al-Banna (1906-1949) in creating the collective identity of the Muslim Brotherhood. It examines the enduring impact of al-Banna’s thoughts and legacy on the Muslim Brotherhood (MB). The article argues that al-Banna interweaved a distinctive frame of identity for the MB which is still vibrant and operative. It also contends that the MB’s identity plays a pivotal role in preserving the movement’s coherence and sustaining its political and social activism. Al-Banna, the founder and the chief ideologue of the MB, had crafted what this article calls the ‘Jama‘a’ paradigm. It refers to the cognitive system of aims and objectives, duties and means, phases and norms, symbols and meanings that encompasses and guides the MB’s members in everyday life. The Jama‘a paradigm operates as a frame of reference to the MB’s collective action. While other studies focused on the historical and chronological journey of al-Banna, this study unpacks al-Banna’s legacy and investigates its effects on the MB’s identity. Based on a field research, the article provides a fresh and nuanced account for al-Banna enduring impact on the MB.

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