The experience machine
Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), the section “The Experience Machine.”
Nozick asks you to imagine a machine that stimulates the brain so that you think and feel you are writing, or meeting a friend, or reading, while you float in a tank. He uses the case against the idea that only the felt quality of experience matters for how well a life goes. He suggests that we also care about doing things, about being a certain sort of person, and about contact with a reality deeper than a constructed sequence of feelings.
The case is not a proof. A reader can enter the machine and then say what they think Nozick has missed. NOEMA’s question uses an original wording and does not tell you his conclusion before you answer. Refusing the machine is not, on this site, a better personality.