a life where you have pleasurable experience with genuine friends and and pleasurable experiences with friends whom you believed to be genuine but turned out to be deceitful. An experientialist would say that there is no difference because in either case, you are having pleasurable experience and the truth about your "friends" intentions, as long as they are kept from you, does not matter. Nozick's experience machine argument furthers this idea of discrepancy between perception and reality by questioning whether a life hooked up to a machine which plays experiences and a life in which the actor is actually having those experiences can be considered equally happy, as experientialism would provide. Mill's theory of well-being would conflict woth experientialism on this basis. No matter how pleasurable a higher pleasure is, part of the pleasure is having the actual feeling of appreciating poetry, art or music. An actual feeling of friendship is important for the friendship to be pleasurable, regardless of how great the experiences are. True Happiness cannot be achieved without a feeling that feeling pleasure is actually happening and not some sensation. If having higher pleasures is just some sensation, happening only within one's mental state, then it could be argued that it is in fact a lower pleasure. Experientialism shares in common with Mill's account a hierarchy of pleasures, where pleasures are distinguished by their indirectness in achievement. However, Mill's account cannot be seen as fitting experientialism because of the reality requirement; higher pleasures in Mill's account become almost sensual pleasures if one is to accept experientialism and from there can be reduced to lower pleasures, where contentment is the only option and Happiness can never really be achieved.The Desire Theory stipulates that a life is going well to the extent that one's desires are fulfilled, regardless of the content of those desires. The Theory ha...
