What does the experience machine test?

Whether pleasant experience is the only thing people finally care about. (The passage says the common refusal is awkward for any theory that treats pleasant experience as the only thing that matters.)

According to the passage, what is true of experiences inside the machine?

They feel exactly as vivid as real ones and cannot be noticed from the inside. (The first paragraph says each sensation is exactly as vivid as the real thing and none of it is detectable from the inside.)

Why is the common refusal awkward for a theory that counts only pleasant experience?

Because the machine supplies more pleasure than real life, so refusing would count as an error. (The second paragraph states this: if experience were the whole of the good, refusing would be an error rather than a preference.)

In this passage, detectable means

able to be noticed. (Nothing inside the machine can be told apart from real experience, so nothing about it can be noticed from the inside.)

The Machine That Feels Like Life: Level 5 Reading Comprehension Questions

In 1974 the philosopher Robert Nozick described a machine that could give you any experience you wanted. You would float in a tank with your brain wired to it, and you would feel yourself writing a novel, earning a friend's trust, climbing a mountain, each sensation exactly as vivid as the real thing and none of it detectable from the inside. You could program a lifetime in advance. Nozick then asked a question that sounds simple and is not: would you plug in?

Most people say no. That answer is awkward for any theory that treats pleasant experience as the only thing that finally matters, because the machine supplies more of it, more reliably, than any life outside could. If experience were the whole of the good, refusing would be an error rather than a preference.

Nozick reads the refusal this way: we want to do certain things, not merely to have the experience of doing them, and we want to be a certain kind of person, while a body floating in a tank is not any kind of person. The thought experiment does not prove this. What it does is bring into the open a commitment we rarely notice, that contact with reality is part of what we are after, and not only a means to feeling good.

Comprehension questions