It's hard to make decisions that will change your life. It's even harder to make a decision if you know that the outcome could change who you are. Our preferences are determined by who we are, and they might be quite different after a decision is made -- and there's no rational way of taking that into account. Philosopher L.A. Paul has been investigating these transformative experiences -- from getting married, to having a child, to going to graduate school -- with an eye to deciding how to live in the face of such choices. Of course we can ask people who have made such a choice what they think, but that doesn't tell us whether the choice is a good one from the standpoint of our current selves, those who haven't taken the plunge. We talk about what this philosophical conundrum means for real-world decisions, attitudes towards religious faith, and the tricky issue of what it means to be authentic to yourself when your "self" keeps changing over time.
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L.A. (Laurie) Paul received her Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton University. She is currently professor of philosophy and cognitive science at Yale University. She has worked extensively on causation, the philosophy of time, mereology, and transformative experience. She has won fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Humanities Center, and the Australian National University. Among her books are the monograph Transformative Experience; she is currently working on a popular-level book on this theme.
Click to Show Episode Transcript
0:00:00 Sean Carroll: Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. All of us are faced with difficult decisions in our lives, big decisions. We don't know whether to do something or not, because the ramifications of doing it or not might just be enormous. Right? Getting married, going to graduate school, getting a new job, moving across the country, other sort of life-changing decisions. But we generally think that even though it might be difficult to make these decisions, the underlying strategy of being rational is not that hard to understand. We have preferences. Right? We might like learning new things, but we might not like working really hard. So there's something in favor of going to graduate school and something against going to graduate school.
0:00:45 SC: So here's the problem: Imagine that you are considering a kind of life choice that will literally change who you are. The kind of choice that is so big, that the person after the choice is made, is a different person than you are now, before the choice is made. These are called transformative experiences and today's guest, Laurie Paul, is the world's expert. She's a philosopher at Yale University who's written about transformative experiences and she has raised the following issue. You might just say, "Well, okay, I'm gonna make some big change, I'll become a different person, but I can just look at other people who've done that. Other people who've gone to grad school, or have gotten married, or whatever, I will ask them how they feel about it." The problem is that how your response is after you've made the change, might not be relevant to your preferences now, because you are a different person and you might not know after you've made the change, you might not be able to remember what it was like to be you.
0:01:44 SC: The fanciful example that she uses is becoming a vampire. Right? I mean, you can ask vampires how do they like it and they'll say, "Sure, we love being vampires." But the things that they like about it might not be things that are relevant to your preferences right now. So how do we adapt rationality to the case of transformative experiences when ourselves change over time? And of course, once you open up this Pandora's box you have very interesting things to ask about what it means to change over time, what it means to have a personal identity even though you as a person are not the same person now, that you were five years ago or will be five years from now. So I don't think we find the once-and-for-all answers here, but it's a really fascinating conversation about a set of issues that we all face without kind of even knowing it.
0:02:32 SC: So thanks for supporting the Mindscape podcast. Remember, we have a webpage at preposterousuniverse.com/podcast, and something I always mean to remind people of but always forget, is there's a mailing list. So probably the podcast just pops up into your podcast listener device, whatever that might be, but if you want, you can get an email every time a new episode comes out. It's a MailChimp mailing service, but go to the website, you can click on "Join the mailing list." There's both a regular mailing list for episodes, and in principle, there's another mailing list for announcements. There's never been an announcement, but you never know. It could happen. Thanks for being part of the Mindscape community and with that, let's go.
[music]
0:03:29 SC: Laurie Paul, welcome to the Mindscape podcast.
0:03:31 Laurie Paul: Hi Sean, it's nice to be here.
0:03:32 SC: So we're gonna be talking about transformative experiences. I think this is a unusual/challenging topic a little bit, because unlike quantum mechanics where no one thinks they know what's going on, this is something where there are some challenging ideas that people should think about, but they probably all think they know what the right answer is right away. Right? Have you encountered that in talking about this?
0:03:53 LP: Right. Yeah. And one place, because the phrase "Transformative experience" has a sort of ordinary interpretation, and what I wanna talk about isn't completely different from that, it's deeply related to that, but has some important nuances, yeah, often there I have to have a discussion back and forth where people think they might know about it. And I think they do kind of know about it, but maybe there's a little more to it.
0:04:15 SC: There are some details that we're gonna get into. Right? That's what philosophers do. Right? So maybe to ease the path there, Why don't you just give us the punchline? Why don't you just give us the elevator pitch for what we're talking about and then we can back up and get there in a more detailed way.
0:04:29 LP: Okay. So the way that I wanna think about transformative experiences are as life-changing experiences, which is the sort of more ordinary way of thinking about them, but I think they're... We have to be more specific than that, because there are lots of life-changing experiences we have that kind of don't surprise us in certain ways, or don't necessarily teach us new things in the ways that I'm interested in. The concept of transformative experience that I'm especially interested in applies to a set of very specific, big life changes and often they are changes that we face when we're at life's crossroads. And one way I like to think about it is in terms of decision-making. So I'll frame it in terms of decision-making here, but it's not just about making decisions. So if you had the chance, like a one-time-only chance, let's say, to become a parent or my favorite example is to become a vampire.
0:05:20 SC: Yeah, we're definitely gonna talk about the vampire thing, yeah. [chuckle]
0:05:21 LP: Okay. Alright, alright. So how about I tell you about vampires? 'Cause that's my favorite case.
0:05:24 SC: Sure.
0:05:25 LP: Okay. So Dracula comes to you, you're touring a castle somewhere in Europe and he says, "Look, I like the way you carry yourself. I wanna make you one of mine." And you find this kind of stunning, and exciting, and a little frightening, and so he says a little bit more. He says, "Well, look, you'll be able to have amazing new powers, and you'll look amazing in black, and you'll be in one of my legions, and you'll never... You'll be, for all important ways, you'll be relatively immortal." I mean, okay, barring stakes through the heart and such.
[chuckle]
0:06:00 SC: Stay away from the Van Helsings.
[chuckle]
0:06:02 LP: Yeah. Sunlight. And so, this is incredibly exciting. So okay, so here's an amazing opportunity. You rush back to your Airbnb, and you call your mom, and your mom says, "Oh, that's interesting. Well, I'm already a vampire." And you say, "Mom! This is... Why didn't you tell me?" So okay, so after things calm down, you start asking her questions about what it's like and what she thinks you should do, because you're worried, because you know that vampires can't go out in the sun.
0:06:30 SC: Some downsides, yeah.
0:06:32 LP: Yeah. And they drink blood and that's kinda gross, and they have no soul or whatever. Right? And she tries to tell you about it, and she says, "Well, you know... " And she tries to tell you why she thinks it would be a great thing for you to do. You can't really kinda get the detail you need. She just says, "Well, it's really amazing, it's really incredible." And then, she finally says after you've talked for a bit, "Well, look, it's just something that you as a human can't possibly understand. You have to have the experience yourself, to find out. Humans can't really understand what it's like to be a vampire. It's a vampire thing." Okay, and actually... So okay, you trust your mom, and you check around, and you text some friends, and you find out in fact that, actually, everybody you know has become a vampire and pretty much...
[chuckle]
0:07:19 LP: You have the same conversation with everyone else about, "Well, should I do it? What are the pros and cons?" And they say there are some pros and there are some cons, but you don't really care about the cons, and it's fabulous and you should do it. Okay, so here's this one-time-only chance to have this amazing experience that you can't, in some ways, know and in very important ways know what it's like, unless you undergo it. Now, that's the transformative experience. It's a kind of experience that you can't know about until you actually undergo it. And clearly, becoming a vampire is life changing, and so it's a life-changing experience, it changes in a very deep and fundamental sense who you are. Now, I framed it in terms of having an opportunity to do this, so there was a decision. And I find that very helpful because there's the idea of a transformative experience, some of them kind of come to us unbidden.
0:08:07 SC: Sure.
0:08:07 LP: And we can talk about that. But sometimes we have a choice about whether to undergo one.
0:08:12 SC: The vampire thing is clearly a very thinly veiled metaphor for having kids. [chuckle]
0:08:16 LP: Yes, exactly, maybe even... Yes, exactly, because, well, you're up all night and [chuckle] drained of...
[laughter]
0:08:21 SC: Drink the blood of the innocent. I don't know.
0:08:25 LP: Exactly, exactly. That's exactly right. So I use it in other discussions as a kind of thought experiment, to outline the conceptual structure of a real-life kind of case where you had this one-time-only... Maybe not a one-time-only chance to become a parent, because maybe you could become a parent more than once. But it's your first time, let's say. And so, you are facing this new kind of experience that you have to actually undergo. You have to actually have a child and form that life-changing kind of parental, loving attachment bond with the particular child that you produced, to really know what it's gonna be like to live your life with that child, as the parent of that child.
0:09:03 SC: Yeah.
0:09:04 LP: And it's of course, I think, life changing when you do form that bond. So there's the structure, and then, when we think about it in terms of decisions, there's actually a special problem that arises. So I'm super interested in transformative experience straightforwardly. I think they punctuate our lives in various kinds of ways, and so I think of it as like if you were just watching... Like if you drew a line there would be these large jumps whenever you had a transformative experience. Like think if it's your world line, that's where you're gonna see lots of variation, in general. And that's already interesting, but if we think about decision-making, where we have a picture of rational decision-making, involving being able to kind of know ahead of time what sort of act you're performing, and what sorts of outcomes you're deciding between, and in particular, knowing enough about those outcomes to sort of mentally simulate the possibilities and assign them values, and on that basis choose the most preferred option, then the cases that I just described create serious problems for us, as individuals making those choices, because we can't evaluate all the options that we need to. In fact, some of the most important options, we can't evaluate them in the way that we want to.
0:10:21 SC: Right.
0:10:21 LP: Which means we can't assess the trade-off.
0:10:22 SC: We don't know who we're gonna be. We're not... Something like that.
0:10:25 LP: Yeah, two things. One is we don't know the nature of the outcome, and so that means there's this way in which you can't reason through it involving a kind of first-personal modeling. Molly Crockett, she's a psychologist at Yale, has done really important work on model-based reasoning and model-free reasoning, and a lot of times when we reason, for new things we use model-based reasoning. And I think of that, in this case, as like imagining myself, say, being a parent, or being a vampire, or just enjoying the new wing of a house I'm considering renovating. Right? These are just things that we do.
0:10:56 SC: Are there degrees of these transformative experiences?
0:10:58 LP: Yeah. I pick easy cases for myself, like really radical transformations, where there's this kind of epistemic shift in virtue of having the new experience, that's so profound that it scales up on to a personal thing.
0:11:08 SC: Vampires want different things than non-vampires.
0:11:11 LP: Yeah, yeah. They think that blood is incredibly tasty and has different flavors, presumably. And I mean, one can elide the moral question by having it be artificial or something like that, but it's still pretty gross.
0:11:25 SC: Right. Okay, so that's where we're gonna go, we're gonna try to figure out what it means to make choices, to rationally deliberate in the presence of these transformative experiences. So let's put something on the table that everyone can just agree with. Like what is the ordinary way of thinking about making rational decisions? Right? The decision theory or whatever the calculus is. Let's be a philosopher. Let's explain to the folks out there how to make rational decisions.
0:11:53 LP: Okay, right. So I'm gonna go with... I mean, there are lots of different models and so what I'm trying to do is pick, and in some sense, the most ordinary, generic way of thinking about this. So let's say we're trying to figure out which pair of socks to wear. One day, you get up, and you look, and you have three different pairs of socks. You like all of them. One pair is red, one pair is blue, and one pair has, I don't know, black and white polka dots. Right? You have interesting socks. And so, you set all three pairs of socks out on your dresser, and you observe them, and you have to think about, well, which pair of socks would you like to wear? And various kinds of properties are gonna matter. For example, What color is your outfit? Will anyone see your socks? I think that's always important.
[chuckle]
0:12:41 SC: You can get away with more, if no one is gonna see them.
0:12:43 LP: Yeah, exactly, exactly. You can know on the inside that you're wearing polka dots. But if you're going to the airport and you're gonna be taking off your shoes, maybe you might wanna... Well, it depends on... Maybe you want to just draw attention to yourself.
0:12:53 SC: Depends on who you are.
0:12:54 LP: Yeah, exactly, exactly. So you look at the three pairs of socks and you assign value to each like, "Well, maybe I'll wear the red ones, maybe I'll wear the blue ones, or maybe I'll wear the polka dot ones." And each act... And you can make a choice. You can choose the red ones, you can chose the blue ones, you can chose the polka dot ones, and each choice you make has a certain value. Right? And also, we're just assuming, I'm not adding in there can be like, how likely is it that you'll actually be able to wear those socks. Well, they're all in front of you, so you're okay, but...
0:13:23 SC: A hundred percent chance when you decide, yeah.
0:13:24 LP: Yeah, exactly. We're keeping it simple. You could feed in issues about, well, when you're thinking about being able to wear the red socks, like could an elf show up immediately and steal them. Right? Ready to try to take them. And how likely is that? And you'd pack that in there.
0:13:35 SC: Well, some things do have probabilities involved. Right? I mean, you play the lottery, but okay.
0:13:38 LP: Exactly. Exactly. But I'm simplifying it.
0:13:39 SC: We're gonna ignore that.
0:13:40 LP: We're gonna... Yeah, yeah. Because in this case, what's easy is that you know the value of each choice, of each outcome. And so, what you wanna do then is, in a very simple sense, you wanna choose the option that's going to give you the most value, that you want the most, that's gonna maximize your expected value. Very simply, that's the way. So the rational thing to do is to choose the pair of socks that you like most. It would seem weird if you really liked the red socks and you chose the polka dot socks instead, like you're making some kind of mistake there. [laughter]
0:14:10 SC: Right. That's right, yeah. So you're maximizing something that you've been calling it value. We could also call it utility, or something like that. Right?
0:14:17 LP: Yes.
0:14:17 SC: That's the general... So and you can generalize it to situations where there's a 50/50 chance of different things happening, and the expected value is there. Okay. So that's the ordinary, rational way of making decisions. Now, is this completely unproblematic, even before we get to transformative experiences? I think about... I mean, let me just ask you this way. Is every decision-making process model-able in terms of maximizing some value or utility?
0:14:42 LP: No. I mean, it's totally problematic in all kinds of ways. [chuckle]
[chuckle]
0:14:46 SC: Okay, good.
0:14:47 LP: So it's not like, "Oh, yeah." And there's a huge amount of debate about whether we can... Well, ordinary people don't act rationally in all kinds of context.
0:14:55 SC: That's also true.
0:14:57 LP: This model has all kinds of issues with it. I mean, we just... We're mentioning issues about the probability of various outcomes happening. There's all kinds of crazy things, like what about the radical possibility that a... I don't know, that a mysterious new pair of amazing sparkly socks could appear just as soon as I'm... There's all kinds of... Or whatever. So there are lots of complications with the model, but the work that I've been doing, connecting with decision theory is intended to bring, in a sense, a new kind of complication. And a complication that is a little less bizarre than some of the straightforward ones that are worried about, like sort of infinitely small probabilities of crazy things happening that can kinda mess up your decision. That's not what I'm talking about.
0:15:38 SC: I guess what I have in mind is that, I guess, there's a semi-famous example where you try to buy a house, and you put in a bid, and someone else puts in a bid that's just a little bit more, and you can't match it, you just can't quite afford it. And I think that the sort of rational utility maximizing would say, "Well, you shouldn't be sad about that, 'cause if you had paid more money, that would be worse than... But you are sad about it 'cause you didn't get the house." So somehow, like a tiny change in what happens leads to a huge change in how you feel about it. So is that a flaw in the rational decision theory kind of stuff? Or is that just a flaw in human beings and how they think about the world?
0:16:15 LP: That's a good question. I think it depends on how we tell the story. So if it's the case that there was some change that then adjust... So you got more information and that adjusted your preferences in some way, then you really... What happens is that you have to do a... If you did a re-assessment, and then you would maximize your utility by spending more and getting the house. Well, then it's rational to have wanted to do that. If instead, there really is no change in your preferences, but there's some other kind of psychological bias, some kind of regret or other kinds of things happening, then it's not rational to like fail, to be sad. It's not rational to be sad that you didn't get the house.
0:16:53 SC: But are we defining rationality to be that? [chuckle] Or is it just a true feature of rationality?
0:17:00 LP: Well, okay, so there are subtle questions here. I think that... Okay, two issues: One is that we wanna distinguish between what you might think of as a kinda normative or kind of objective standard of rationality, and then, what agents do in particular situations, given human psychology and kind of trying to do the best they can in various circumstances. That's the kind of more subjective sense of being rational, and we can come back to that. But it's also the case that there's a lot of things that go into decision-making. And so, what I was trying to work with, was a very simple idea that choosing rationally involves maximizing utility or maximizing your expected utility, and that as long as we're doing that, then we're doing something that, in some sense, approaches like rational action and rational choice.
0:17:44 SC: Yeah. Like you said, you're trying to raise a new problem for that, which is that... Tell me what it is, in this language now. Yeah.
0:17:51 LP: Okay. So... Actually, let me give you a quick definition first and I'll tell you this. Okay. So when I was talking about these experiences like becoming a vampire or becoming a parent for the first time, I described them as epistemically transformative in my work. And what I mean by that is that they change how you think in a certain way, they give you new information, they teach you something new in virtue of having these experiences.
0:18:14 SC: Right, but it's not just new information, it's a new way of thinking induced by that new information.
0:18:19 LP: Yeah, exactly. Well, I mean, the way that... It's complicated psychologically. So in virtue of having this new kind of experience, I think if it's, especially if it's an intense experience, it does change how you think. Now, you can try a new kind of food, and it might just give you new information, and it'll give you new abilities to imagine food like that, but it doesn't change or restructure, I think, how you think about yourself.
0:18:40 SC: Exactly, right.
0:18:41 LP: But when it scales up into what's also a personally transformative experience, again, like becoming a vampire or becoming a parent, then the radical discovery, epistemic discovery that you make, also then affects you in a very strong way, thus changing the way that you understand yourself, or how you think, and your preferences. Okay. So once we have that in play, and remember what's really important, is that you have to have the experience, so it's not like someone can tell you in the relevant sense what the experience is gonna be like, and that's not good enough.
0:19:10 SC: That's the super crucial thing. Right?
0:19:11 LP: That's the super... Yeah.
0:19:12 SC: Like you can't just ask somebody else what it's like.
0:19:14 LP: Exactly. Exactly.
0:19:15 SC: 'Cause well, they're a vampire and they're gonna say, "You just won't get it, man, you're just not a vampire."
0:19:18 LP: Exactly. Exactly. I mean, they can say, "Oh, it's great and there's all these things," but that's not enough. I have another example to try to bring that out in a second, but... So the thought is, just going back to the rationality question, if there's something that this dramatic thing that I can't know about beforehand, then there's a way in which I can't assign it value. That's the first part of the transformative experience issue that's relevant for their decision-making. 'Cause I can't then assign value to the outcome. But the other part that's really important is, because of this new information is so important to you, or it affects you psychologically so much, it changes how you think, and that changes your preferences.
0:19:53 SC: Right.
0:19:53 LP: So there's this kind of a one-two punch that you get when you have a transformative experience.
0:20:00 SC: Drinking blood is gross to me now, but it would be awesome to me once I were a vampire, so...
0:20:05 LP: Exactly, exactly.
0:20:05 SC: How do I judge?
0:20:06 LP: Exactly. And because you can't project yourself or model yourself forward as a vampire, there's a way in which you can't see who you're gonna become from the inside. And that's part of what I find so fascinating about these cases. So that's a different kind of objection from the kinds of worries about just kind of getting a model that's gonna fit the situation in the right way, given like, "Oh well, there could be these other probabilities," or sometimes we psychologically, we have these biases, or regret, or things like that. Those are all important questions, but I'm adding this one to the mix. And I also think it's something that people face in real life all the time, and it kind of goes unnoticed, and relates to how we praise people, and blame people, and things like that, so I wanted to talk about it.
0:20:47 SC: Well, and the other aspect that seems crucially important here, maybe this is jumping ahead, but that's okay, it's a podcast.
[chuckle]
0:20:53 SC: Not only rationality, but the idea that, Is it my preferences now that matter, or my preferences in the future? Because what does that say about the notion of "My preferences in the future"?
0:21:07 LP: Exactly.
0:21:07 SC: 'Cause I could be a different person and, How do I define myself over time?
0:21:12 LP: Exactly.
0:21:12 SC: For those of us who care about the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics, this is already an important question. So for those of us who care about just one world, making hard decisions, probably it's a another important question.
0:21:21 LP: Oh, that's interesting. We should talk sometime about how this might fit into the Many-Worlds Interpretation. Cool, okay. So no, this is exactly right. So there's a way, and this is related, this is part of the worry for decision-making, because this issue about self-change like, "Who I am now, ex ante." Right? I'm thinking about what I care about and how I want my life to go.
0:21:42 SC: You have to define "Ex ante" for the non-Latin speakers in the audience. [chuckle]
0:21:44 LP: Oh, sorry, sorry, sorry. [chuckle] Who I am now, before I've undergone any changes, as I'm making the choice. Right? I try to think about what it would be like to be a vampire, and imagine just like the nature of this life that I'm considering. And the problem is, is that if I choose to become a vampire, it will change not just my species, I'll become a vampire instead of a human. But I'll also change how I think. So there's a violation of what's called act-state independence. Normally, when you're... Think about when you're trying to test something ordinarily, and you wanna see, "Well, if I do this, I will see this effect." And so, you tweak one thing and you see if there's a tweak down the line. Right? And then, if there is, then you've established a certain kind of dependence, if you hadn't tweaked especially, and then there wouldn't have been that other tweak. And then, you can make certain kinds of inferences about that, but that assumes that nothing crazy is gonna change in between.
0:22:45 SC: Yeah.
0:22:45 LP: But in this case, this case of making a transformative choice, it's exactly a case where you're choosing an outcome, but you are gonna get tweaked. Right? As you choose.
0:22:56 SC: It's inevitable that the tweak happens. Yeah.
0:22:57 LP: Exactly, exactly. So the agent is changed in virtue of making the choice. And so, then it's unclear first, what we can infer from the fact that down the line, the new agent is satisfied with the choice. Because would that old agent have been satisfied with the choice? And this matters from a rational decision model perspective, because the person making the choice is the one who's supposed to be acting rationally, and they had to make the right choice for themselves, ex ante. So but really what they're doing is making maybe the right choice for themselves ex post, after the decision.
0:23:30 SC: Right. Maybe we could just talk at a very elementary level about what it means to be a self over time. Right? We're the same atoms, but not exactly, 'cause some atoms we lose, some atoms we gain. And we certainly are a slightly different person five minutes from now, than we are right now. Why does it even make sense to treat ourselves as a unified individual over time?
0:23:52 LP: Well, fair enough. I think that there are lots of ways in which people change. I distinguish between the selves that realize a person over time, and being the same person, although ordinary language doesn't make that distinction.
0:24:06 SC: Yeah.
0:24:07 LP: And it just gets ambiguous with ordinary language. But we do change. I get my hair cut, you buy new clothes, whatever. But the way I'm thinking about the self here is primarily in terms of one's first-person experience of themselves and the nature of their life. And I think this is something that's obviously very important to us, it's especially important in Western contexts one might say, where we have a lot of choice over our lives, and we take a lot of personal responsibility based on these choices. So another thing that's important here is, I'm interested in cases where it's sort of morally open to you to do different things, so there's no moral or legal obligation to choose one way or the other. And I take, in many cases, like the choice to become a parent, to be like that.
0:24:52 SC: Yeah, usually not illegal, but... [chuckle]
0:24:54 LP: Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, there are moral arguments, but I'm setting some of that aside for the moment. So these kinds of choices that are kind of self-oriented or self-involved, in the sense that you're making a choice about you and your life, and a choice that can affect close others though. Like for example, if you choose to bring a child into the world, well, then that affects the child.
0:25:12 SC: Other people are affected by it.
0:25:13 LP: Yeah, exactly, I mean the other parent is affected. And so, the thought is that there's a natural sense in which we think of ourselves from the inside as this kind of, I don't know, consciousness moving forward in time, somehow. And we want it to be relatively continuous. We recognize there are changes, but we want it to be relatively continuous. And I also think of what we care about, how we value things, as an important part of what we take to be kind of who we are, and we want that to be continuous, or at least if we're not gonna make it continuous, that we know what we're doing when we're changing it.
0:25:51 SC: Yeah, yeah. So this opens up... I mean, maybe the vampire example is already good enough, but we can think of other examples like taking some kind of happy pills. They make you happy. Certainly, we see other people who take them and they're perfectly happy, but they also have bad consequences, nominally like they're just... People become indolent, and they stop exercising, and they eventually die within a few months. Right?
0:26:14 LP: Right.
0:26:14 SC: But if you asked any of them, they would say, "Oh yeah, this is great. The happy pills are awesome." And so, it would seem that from our present perspective, not taking the pills, we don't wanna do that even though they all say it's a good idea. Is that a good example?
0:26:27 LP: That is a really good example. I'm interested in cases where, from the outside, it seems to pretty much everyone that this person shouldn't have made the choice that they made, but they are actually, once they've made the choice, and they... Before they made the choice would have rejected it, but then somehow they find themselves in that new situation, maybe they have an accident or they make the choice under certain kinds of circumstances, and they're happy with it, and I'm super interested in how we judge that, and how we think about that, and whether it really is the wrong choice. I think it's an open question. Can I give you my... Go back to my parenting example?
0:26:58 SC: Yes, please.
0:26:58 LP: Okay. So one case I'm really interested in is where, say, somebody doesn't want to have a child, because let's say she has the opportunity, she has the modes, means, and opportunity. [chuckle]
0:27:08 SC: Yeah. [chuckle]
0:27:08 LP: Mode, means, and opportunity. Right?
0:27:12 SC: That's usually for murders, but sure, we can do it for having kids too. [chuckle]
[laughter]
0:27:16 LP: It's all part of the context here. She just doesn't wanna do it, but her parents are like, "Oh, you'll be so happy as a mother, you'll be... It'll really make you feel like a complete person." Yada, yada, yada, the whole story. And she says, "Look, mom... " Earlier, she was talking about being a vampire with her mom, now she's talking about having a kid. Right?
0:27:34 SC: Yeah.
0:27:35 LP: "I see the parents on the playground with the kids, they look exhausted. People... Every parent I know just complains about how they don't get any sleep, and about how stressful it is, how the child is crying or cranky, and they're worried about money, and they're having career issues. I mean, Why would I wanna do this?"
0:27:52 SC: Yeah.
0:27:53 LP: And the mom says, "Well, yeah, yeah, I understand that you're making sacrifices, but once you become a parent, you'll... "
0:28:03 SC: You'll get it.
0:28:03 LP: "Find joy. You'll love it." Yeah, exactly. This is exactly the kind of change of self that I'm interested in, because let's say that your mother is right. The descriptive facts on the ground...
0:28:16 SC: If they're wrong, then it's easy.
0:28:17 LP: Yeah, exactly, exactly. Then it's easy, no problem. But the interesting case is when they're right, and that's a version of the happy pill.
0:28:23 SC: Yeah.
0:28:24 LP: But the happy pill stuff... There are kinda cultural reasons why people might wanna choose against that. So why I like the parenting case is I think it's a really open question, where people have the right to not become parents and have good lives that way, people have the right to become parents and have good lives that way, so it's not simple.
0:28:40 SC: And I think that probably the obvious response to the question about transformative experience for a lot of the audience, for me certainly, when I first started thinking about this is, Can't you just ask people? Can't you just sort of gather data from a third-person perspective? And what you're saying is that's not quite enough. I mean, the happy pill's certainly a very obvious example of that. You can ask them and they're perfectly happy, but the parenting example is quite analogous and quite much more realistic, where it can be a difficult question.
0:29:10 LP: That's right. I mean, if something about the process of becoming transformed makes you value the end process...
0:29:18 SC: In a way that your present self doesn't.
0:29:19 LP: In a way that your present self doesn't, utterly rejects in fact...
0:29:22 SC: Yeah.
0:29:22 LP: Then this needs to be factored in to the decision. So one thing that I've been discussing with transformative experience is to say, well, maybe because of this violation of act-state independence that I mentioned earlier, then there's this possibility that a new preference is kind of implanted in you, in virtue of undergoing the experience, and that just changes how we should evaluate testimony. It changes how we should praise and blame people for the choices that they make. All kinds of things.
0:29:52 SC: Is there... Again, probably skipping ahead but, Is there a simple answer to this? [chuckle] Is there a prescription you're offering?
[chuckle]
0:29:58 LP: I ask questions. I'm not good at answers though. [chuckle] I don't... I make some suggestions in my book, Transformative Experience, where I say one way to approach this is to kind of be open to the way that your preferences and who you are is going to change if you make a transformative choice, and to see that as what you're doing, like you're just discovering a new self, or you're choosing to discover a new self. I don't know if that's...
0:30:31 SC: So the process of changing has an intrinsic value.
0:30:33 LP: Something like that. I mean, I don't... I'm still thinking about it. And this was at the end of the discussion basically, developing all of the structure of the transformative experience, put a puzzle in terms of decision-making, it seemed to me that there is a way you can rationally approach these things, and that is being open to these possibilities and discovering who you'd become, maybe because it's intrinsically valuable to have those experiences. I'm not even sure we have to say that, but that... I do, I am oriented that way, but I don't think that's satisfying as a final solution, so I don't really know what to say. [laughter]
[laughter]
0:31:11 SC: Well, you put it in a language, at one point, about trying to be empathetic with your future self. Right?
0:31:16 LP: Yes.
0:31:17 SC: I mean, trying to imagine what it would be like. I do wanna dig in a little bit to these questions of the self and also the phrase, "What it would be like." Right? This reminds us of, on the podcast, we've had previous discussions about consciousness, we've had David Chalmers, and Philip Goff, and Daniel Dennett in different ways talking about qualia, and inner experience, and the famous Mary the Color Scientist argument, you know, experiencing the redness of red. Is there a secret or not so secret relationship between those kind of first-person perspective arguments, and what we're talking about here?
0:31:50 LP: There's a relationship. But what I did with my work was to take those discussions about consciousness and tweak them, pretty significantly, 'cause those debates are about whether or not we can kind of make sense or explain from a kind of physical or neural perspective what it's like, or what it's like to have experiences. And I'm not really, I'm not making that kind of argument, or I'm not... That's not really my...
0:32:16 SC: You're not arguing about physicalism versus panpsychism or anything like that. Right? Yeah.
0:32:17 LP: Absolutely not. No, no. Exactly. I'm interested, if you take the Mary case, where Mary grows up in a black and white environment and then, I think of it as, well, maybe she has the choice to leave her black and white room. And the question is, well, Does she wanna live in a world of color? But I'm not interested in, like at the end of all science, let's just say she's ordinary in some sense, ordinary Mary now, we don't have all the brain science to even know what her brain states will be like. She has testimony from people who live outside, but she could find it overwhelming and stressful, and there's a way in which she can't assign value to these different color experiences. She just doesn't know, she doesn't even have, technically, the right kind of phenomenal hypotheses to consider, and so she can't make the decision in a suitably informed way. She has to kind of flip a coin or just do it if she wants to find out what it's like, like I'm saying. But that's like the same solution maybe to becoming a parent or becoming a vampire. So there's a connection there. One of the way I kind of put it is, I think of the problem of... It's not about consciousness per se, but the problem of other minds, and knowing what other people are like from the inside, and when we're undergoing these radical self-changes, we turn that problem into a problem of knowing the minds of other... Of your other selves.
0:33:25 SC: Right.
0:33:25 LP: It's the same problem, but... An intra-self bubble.
0:33:26 SC: Your possible future self. Not even your simple, actual future self, but you have sort of...
0:33:31 LP: All the possible ones.
0:33:31 SC: Different alternatives to go down.
0:33:32 LP: Yes, yes.
0:33:34 SC: Which reminds me, I'm not sure if this is related or not, but I did have a fascinating podcast interview with Malcolm MacIver, who is thinking about the evolution of consciousness over time, and he makes the claim that a crucial step, there's probably many steps along the way, but a crucial step was when fish climbed on to land, because when fish are underground... Under water, you can't see very far ahead of you and all the evolutionary pressure is just to make decisions right away when you have a new stimulus come into your sensorium, whereas when you're on land you can see far and now you have enough time to contemplate different possible actions.
0:34:10 LP: Oh, interesting.
0:34:11 SC: So and he's actually made predictions that have come true in the fossil record and things like that. And the idea is that, suddenly, the ability to imagine alternative futures becomes a good thing and therefore evolution selects for it. And this is kind of what we're challenging here, the ability to accurately imagine possible futures.
0:34:31 LP: That's fascinating, but one thing that's really a big part of my work is to say that when we're talking about life-changing decisions, and especially, I just wanna go back to context where there are hard trade-offs to be made, so I'm kind of an academic woman with a career, so I'm a person who... That's very salient too, because the world is not carved up in a way for me to make my life...
0:34:52 SC: You have choices.
0:34:53 LP: Yeah, right, exactly. And different kinds of people have faced different kinds of this in different ways. But if it's not, if the world isn't kind of made... Isn't carved up so that it's... The choices are really easy, or there are no big trade-offs, or there's no time to deliberate, then that affects the way that we're thinking about things, obviously. But when we really do care about what's gonna happen over a reasonably sort of long time future period and I think it's... We think it's actually intrinsically valuable, like it relates to the way that we think about who we are, and how we evaluate life, and authentic living and choice making, which sounds like there's an interesting evolutionary connection, which is fascinating.
[chuckle]
0:35:33 SC: Yeah, yeah.
0:35:34 LP: When we're in that kind of context is when these sorts of problems become especially salient.
0:35:39 SC: Is it valid in this context to even think of ourselves even at one moment of time as a unified self? You do talk a little bit about the fact that sometimes we know to do something is irrational, but we just have an overwhelming compulsion to do it anyway. Like, I know in this household, where we're doing this podcast, there is a prescription against buying lime-dusted tortilla chips, because if there's a bag of lime-dusted tortilla chips...
[chuckle]
0:36:04 SC: They're gonna get eaten right away, and it's bad for you, and so, just don't buy them in the first place. Right?
0:36:10 LP: Yeah.
0:36:11 SC: Like I might know that there's a rational decision to be made, but I can't because real people are not quite that rational. How does that come into these kinds of deliberations?
0:36:19 LP: Well, I would say... Oh, by the way, my weakness is New York Super Fudge Chunk, Ben & Jerry's. I just can't... Ah... [chuckle]
0:36:22 SC: Okay, that's a very good weakness.
[chuckle]
0:36:25 LP: Just helpless in the face of it. So this goes back to the distinction I was making between objective characterizations of rational decision-making and subjective ones. There's a way in which part of what I'm super interested in is the stuff like, what it's like for us as individuals faced with different possibilities to think through our choices, and then make a choice as rationally as we can in the moment, and we're imperfect agents, and we're often in imperfect circumstances. There's been lots of research on perfect agents, what they should do in perfect circumstances, and that's kind of like objective rationality. And then there's lots of research on what the perfect agent should do in imperfect circumstances, and I think there's research on what imperfect agents should do in perfect circumstances.
[chuckle]
0:37:15 LP: But that last box of the... It hasn't been filled in. And that's really where I'm targeting the project. So I wanna grant that there are all these imperfections and sometimes we just kinda can't help ourselves and do these kinds of things, but I'm not really thinking about those kinds of... Like that particular kind of psychological weakness. The kind of imperfection that I'm really interested in is one where just because we haven't had the background experiences, we lack the ability to imagine what we need.
0:37:45 SC: Yeah.
0:37:45 LP: One favorite example I have is of someone who grows up congenitally blind and then has the opportunity to, through having a retina operation or something like that, to become sighted, they might know from, actually from testimony, from people who've had the operation that they will regret that operation. This is something that does happen. And yet, they might really want to do it, even though there's a really deep sense in which they don't know what it's gonna be like. And maybe they wanna do it because they wanna discover what it's like to see, but they might also just be thinking, "Oh I can't. I know that the nature of my life will be better somehow, or I think it will be better." In any case, there's a sense in which they're an imperfect agent making a choice, because they're choosing to have this new sense capacity, and they don't have the ability to evaluate the nature of that sense capacity until they actually have it.
0:38:37 SC: I do feel like there should be, even if we grant that when you change in some transformative way, you have different values and you care about different things. Maybe this is wrong, but I wanted to think that there's something more objective going on. I mean, I think the happy pills are a hypothetical example, but there are drug addicts. Right? There are people who become heroin addicts and most people who are not heroin addicts do not want to be heroin addicts, but the people who are heroin addicts really want that heroin. Right? And so is there no standpoint outside of the first-person perspective where you could say, "No, one is just better than the other"?
0:39:13 LP: Right. Oh, I do think that... I don't wanna dismiss it all, but the importance of testimony, what we can know in general from science, and also these basic, these facts about kinda quality of life and well-being. So with the heroin addiction case, I think the hard case, by the way, is at the end-of-life cases, where there aren't other people depending on you, and where you're not gonna kind of miss out on various kinds of resources, and whether or not you wanna become a heroin addict there, is a more salient choice.
0:39:42 SC: Oh, I see. So you don't... End-of-life in terms of whether to end it, but whether to become a heroin addict before you do it.
0:39:45 LP: Oh, sorry, sorry, no. Yeah, if you're like [0:39:48] ____ by going into a hospice or something like that, because you have a terminal disease.
0:39:50 SC: Yeah.
0:39:51 LP: But so I think that like with the way that I wanna think about, like say, a drug addiction case, is that we know objectively that most of those options are bad, and addiction is funny because there it's not clear that the choice involved that we have enough kind of freedom mentally to be making the choice, in the way that I'm suggesting, to make it where you carefully evaluate each option and trade-off upon...
0:40:20 SC: Wouldn't that be an example of something that we're holding up objectively, that there's a certain transformative experience that takes away our ability to make choices or something like that, and we don't wanna do that.
0:40:28 LP: Yes. Yes. That's a good point. Yes. That's right. That's right, but then when somebody becomes addicted, and they've lost in some sense their ability to make certain kinds of choices, and they also enjoy like the high, and they don't want to leave that space. Well, I think actually we need to have more understanding of that. I think there's a lot of blame that gets attached to someone being in that state, and also people can't understand why that person in that state find... Like find it valuable. I mean, they understand that it kind of feels good or whatever but there's a way in which they don't understand, and I actually think that this needs more assessment. Not like, you know, endorsing becoming... Getting addicted to heroin, but I think that we're way too judgmental about these kinds of cases. And I'm fascinated with cases of disability, partly because I think that people who have like undergone traumatic accidents, or who just have different kind of physical characteristics from the kind of, I don't know, like bog standard, ordinary human beings, testify to how amazing their lives are in various contexts. And I think that people who don't share their physical characteristics, fail to understand what they're talking about. There's a kind of testimonial injustice involved here.
0:41:45 SC: Is there a strategy for doing better? Other than just talking to more people and trying to be empathetic?
0:41:50 LP: Well for me, the first strategy is understanding this issue about transformative experience like not assuming that... Like I think there's a kind of epistemic humility that we need to engage in. So by thinking, "Well, I can learn everything I need to know about like what it's like to be a parent by talking to people, I can learn everything I know about what it's like to be blind by talking to blind people," or whatever, pick your category. Right? I think it's... I think we're too optimistic sometimes that we can do that and this is related to the thing I said about praise and blame, because sometimes people choose to do things or refuse to do things, thinking that with testimony they have all of the information that they need. I think they have some of the information they need...
0:42:29 SC: But not that first-person perspective?
0:42:30 LP: No. That first-person perspective, yeah.
0:42:32 SC: And that's, again just to emphasize it, mentioning the first-person perspective is something that is intrinsically different than the third-person perspective, is not to mystify what it means to be conscious, or experience, or anything like that.
0:42:45 LP: Exactly. That's right.
0:42:45 SC: It's a different thing. Like, yeah, Mary has not seen the color red, and so I'm very happy to admit that she does not know what it's like to experience the color red.
0:42:54 LP: And that's all I need to get to go off and running then. I mean, you can see my project as, I love contemporary kind of academic philosophy, but for the longest time, the only way we were allowed to talk about first-person experience in phenomenology was in the context of the question about consciousness.
[chuckle]
0:43:10 SC: Right, okay, good.
0:43:10 LP: And that's a very important discussion. And I always loved all the examples like Nagel, Tom Nagel and others talking about like, well, maybe you couldn't know what it's like to be a bat, or maybe you couldn't know what it's like to be an octopus, or Mary in the black and white... I always thought they were super cool examples, but I'm like, "Look, there's just so much more that's interesting there."
0:43:26 SC: Yeah, and that's not gonna happen to me. Like I'm not gonna be offered the opportunity to become a bat. But I will be offered the opportunity to change jobs, or have a kid, or...
0:43:32 LP: Yes, yes. Go to war, maybe, like all these kinds of... And end-of-life questions I think are incredibly important, like facing potential like cognitive decline, or dealing with an accident, and I think we need to understand when we can't understand, and then change how we approach things.
0:43:49 SC: Is there some possibility for a new way of making judgments that is not either purely based on testimony or first-person perspective? I'm purely just babbling right now. I'm trying to be deductive though.
0:44:00 LP: No, no, no. That's super... The only thing... Okay. So here's the only kind of third way that I have come across that has some potential, but I don't think it's good enough, is thinking about the role of art. And so, there are ways in which we try to communicate... I feel like sometimes the whole point of kind of work in art is to communicate something that couldn't be expressed through ordinary testimony and description. Right? And sometimes you use language in evocative ways, and then you use other media in evocative ways, and that's important because it teaches us something about how to experience and value often, often it's like something that we're familiar with, and then we can find the art really very powerful that way, but sometimes it's what we're not familiar with. Right?
0:44:51 SC: Right. Yeah.
0:44:52 LP: And so...
0:44:54 SC: It's kind of, art can be kind of an empathy pump. Right? It can sort of help us empathize with people in very different circumstances.
0:45:01 LP: Exactly. And to understand things that we... That are kind of beyond our own individual experiences. That said, it's not enough. I mean, I can read all of the novels I want about what it's like to be diagnosed with terminal cancer, or watch amazing films about going to war, but if I go to like a Vietnam vet and say, "Oh yeah, man, I know, I get it. I know what it was like to be out... " They would just laugh at me.
[chuckle]
0:45:24 SC: I saw Platoon, yeah.
0:45:25 LP: Yeah, exactly, exactly. I mean that would be embarrassing. But it's still the case that I did learn something, so it's complicated, so...
0:45:31 SC: Sure. It's always interesting to me that almost every depiction on TV or movies of being the parent of a young child makes it look horrible. Right?
[laughter]
0:45:43 SC: There's very few attempts to capture the joy of it. Right? Or the value of it. I mean maybe, I don't know why, but it's just more comedic or something.
0:45:52 LP: Well, so here's an extra thing that we haven't talked about yet, but I think there's this other dimension to it, and it's related to doing stuff based on testimony, which is sometimes we choose to do things that involve suffering, and we find a kind of value in that suffering, and it's not straightforward to explain why that is or why we're doing it. So with the happy pill...
0:46:16 SC: So... Sorry, sometimes it is like, you work out and some people like working out, others are like, "Okay, it's a slog, but there's some future benefit that is clear."
0:46:24 LP: Exactly, exactly.
0:46:24 SC: But you're saying that there's even when there's not a clear future benefit, sometimes we do this.
0:46:27 LP: That's right. Even if you think there isn't a clear future benefit in a certain way, there's a way in which sometimes people choose to suffer, and they choose to reduce their well-being along a certain dimension, and they find that meaningful and valuable. And I don't think when someone...
0:46:42 SC: Why don't we mention some examples here?
0:46:44 LP: Well, actually, what I'm thinking about... Well, parenting is like that maybe. Okay? Or other kinds of...
0:46:51 SC: Certain aspects of parenting. [chuckle]
[chuckle]
0:46:55 LP: Yeah, many aspects of parenting. [chuckle]
0:46:56 SC: The 3:00 AM call, yeah.
0:46:56 LP: Well, many... I have two children, many aspects of that... [chuckle]
[chuckle]
0:47:00 LP: Are like that, but you get a kind of... Parenting does have lots of sort of straightforward joy with it, but there are lots of choices we make to... So the happy pill was actually a kind of a simple example. Let's say that if I had a tendency towards depression. I don't, I'm sort of actually annoyingly cheerful. [chuckle]
[chuckle]
0:47:19 LP: But If I had a tendency towards getting depressed, but I could take meds that would keep that at bay, in a very strong sense, but it would change how I experience my life, and in fact, I might think, "Oh, yeah, I'll be happier, but just like a little bit less on top of things, a little bit less savvy, and sophisticated, and thoughtful, a little less of me." Right? I might refuse, I think this does happen, to take the meds, and suffer. And it's because there's a sense in which I find, even though that there's suffering there, I still find it kinda more meaningful to live my life that way, than the way that arguably is gonna increase my well-being on most ordinary scales.
0:47:58 SC: I think that's actually super common. Right? People, not just with depression, but with bipolar disorders or something like that, they say, "Yeah, these meds keep me level, but they take away something of who I was." And...
0:48:08 LP: Yes, yes.
0:48:09 SC: And part of what you're saying is not necessarily that's right or wrong, but at least we should contemplate taking that claim seriously.
0:48:17 LP: Absolutely, and this goes back to some of the stuff about disability. So a blind person who then becomes sighted can, I think, very reasonably feel first they've lost... They lose certain capacities in virtue of gaining vision, and they can feel that... Or this comes up in the context of cochlear implants, and people trying to decide whether or not their child should have a cochlear implant, and become a member of a community with kind of ordinary language and ordinary audition, or be a part of the deaf community. All these issues come into play, because it's not a straightforward situation where there's a simple way of thinking about well-being. Sometimes you have to make these kinds of trade-offs and there's a kind of meaningfulness that's associated maybe with say, being a member of the deaf community, or being a member of the blind community. That gives you a kind of richness and meaning that is not detectable to someone who isn't a part of that community.
0:49:12 SC: Probably another example is autistic people versus neurotypical people, and different ways of thinking.
0:49:16 LP: Yes, yes, yes. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely.
0:49:17 SC: Is it really better or worse? Or is it just different? How do you know? How could you possibly know?
0:49:21 LP: Absolutely, and a thing to remember about the people who are, say someone who's like on the spectrum, is that... I think there's a very good argument that it's the way that society is structured, as opposed to how they are mentally structured, that really creates many of the issues here. And so, when we go back to what I was saying before, that choices often involve... Hard choices are often hard because the world is structured in a particular way, and maybe you don't fit into that structure straightforwardly. Then all of a sudden then we get faced with these special and difficult choices we have to make. And again, I just think that being really clear about the conceptual structure of these problems, and the epistemological hurdles we have to overcome, and the self-change involved, will allow us to be less judgmental and more thoughtful about how we understand the different ways people have to navigate the environment.
0:50:11 SC: Right. And so, you do have one example that is especially provocative, and I'm sure you chose it intentionally for this reason of atheists/skeptics and the possibility of them opening themselves to a sense of the divine. And saying that... Well, I'll let you say it.
0:50:27 LP: Okay.
0:50:27 SC: How would you put it?
0:50:28 LP: Okay, so this is from my new book, one I haven't published yet, that I'm working on, that should come out soon. And there I explore...
0:50:39 SC: Sorry, we should mention, you have a book out.
0:50:41 LP: Oh, yes.
0:50:41 SC: An academic book, The Transformative Experience, that does talk about these things, if anyone in the audience wants to dive in.
0:50:45 LP: Yes, yes. But I don't talk about religious transformation. And in my new book, I apply what I've been saying about transformative experience, not so much about decision-making straightforwardly, but just about transformative experience and how we think about it and understand it, to questions about religious transformation and tolerance. I'm very interested in those kinds of cases, and I don't think that I'm describing all issues about skepticism versus belief here, but there's a particular kind of debate that you see get carried out sometimes, between like a believer in a particular religious faith and a strong skeptic. The atheist who's committed to sort of rejecting the idea that there's a God. And one of the things that fascinates me about the kind of debate that you sometimes see, is that it doesn't... Evidence doesn't seem to matter.
0:51:38 SC: It's not relevant, yeah.
0:51:38 LP: Yeah, it's not... Right. An argument is not gonna convince people. Right?
0:51:41 SC: Right.
0:51:42 LP: And the skeptic in particular, there's this kind of skeptical stance where the skeptic thinks, "Well look, I'm the clear thinker. I'm the one who looks at the evidence."
0:51:50 SC: I have no idea what you're talking about. [chuckle]
[laughter]
0:51:55 LP: "I'm the one who really is careful, and facing the hard facts of reality, and it's the believer who needs comfort" or whatever. Right? So I see that point of view, but I'm suspicious of it as a kind of straightforward explanation of how to... All of this...
0:52:17 SC: And a good self-consistent skeptic should themselves be skeptical of it, suspicious of it.
0:52:22 LP: Yes, yes, yes. Exactly, exactly.
0:52:23 SC: Are we sure we're not fooling ourselves?
0:52:25 LP: Exactly, exactly.
0:52:25 SC: You should always be asking yourself that.
0:52:27 LP: Exactly, so what I explore in the book is a particular argument that certain... That basically theologians and epistemologists have explored, and what I look at in particular is one that descends from the Calvinist tradition, because John Calvin had this view about the sensus divinitatis, and this is about the sense of the divine. And very roughly, his view was that we have this sense within us but it has to be awoken. I believe he thought that it was kind of lost in the fall from grace. Right? And there are ways that you can awaken this sense of the divine, including being kind of out in nature and seeing the beauty of nature, and that can awaken our capacity to recognize the divine in nature, and other kinds of things, and once we recognize the divine, our capacity to see the presence of God and to recognize evidence is awakened, and we're naturally moved to belief. The kind of American advocate of this, originally, was Jonathan Edwards. He was a Protestant theologian and...
0:53:35 SC: Not the Presidential candidate.
0:53:37 LP: No, no. And I'm actually a member of the Jonathan Edwards College at Yale, and it was... So I have a special connection there.
[chuckle]
0:53:44 LP: That was kind of random, but anyway.
0:53:46 SC: You don't need to be a Calvinist to be a faculty member at that college?
0:53:47 LP: No, no, no, no.
0:53:49 SC: Okay.
0:53:49 LP: No. And Alvin Plantinga is a philosopher and theologian who also advocated this. And Edwards talked about the sensus divinitatis, and the idea was that you were supposed to kind of engage in certain practices to awaken this sense. Right? And you can find this, by the way, in other traditions, I think you can find it in Judaism and other... Expressed in different ways, but the idea is that practice and certain kinds of actions you perform can awaken and intensify your sense of the divine.
0:54:15 SC: And there's a clear analogy with a blind person choosing to...
0:54:18 LP: Exactly, discovering...
0:54:19 SC: Regain their sight, yeah.
0:54:20 LP: What it's like to see a rainbow, or something like that, or marry. Right? And... Right, there's a kind of... What happens is you open your mind in a certain way to having an experience, that experience is novel and distinctive. Edwards talked about it as though like you were tasting honey for the first time. Plantinga actually used the example of seeing red for the first time, and...
0:54:41 SC: He must have known what he was doing. [chuckle]
0:54:45 LP: Maybe. I mean, he doesn't... I think so, but I'm not sure.
0:54:48 SC: He's a professional philosopher, come on.
0:54:49 LP: Yeah, he knew he was...
[chuckle]
0:54:51 LP: Well, when I said... I'm sure he was brilliant. I'm sure that he knew that he... I mean he was intentionally harking back to the Jackson example, but I don't think he was thinking in terms of transformative experience explicitly.
0:55:05 SC: Sure, okay.
0:55:07 LP: Although... Yeah, I don't know how much... His work is fascinating. And what Plantinga did so beautifully in his work was to explain that, look, you have to be able to detect evidence before you can even see it as such. So the thought is that the believer says, "Look, you need to open your mind in the right way, to engage your... To awaken the sensus divinitatis, and then you can recognize the evidence of the divine, and be moved to faith." Okay, so go back to the skeptic. Right? What I'm interested in is the skeptic who refuses to make that move, and I think there's a real question. Now why would a skeptic refuse to make that move? And I think now, we can see now that we have the apparatus of transformative experience, like why they might do that, because if they...
0:55:58 SC: Sorry, let's just get on the table that it's not about divine persuasion or anything like that, where both sides are accepting that we should be rational about the evidence.
0:56:08 LP: Yes. That's right, that's right.
0:56:10 SC: It's just a matter of which evidence we have.
0:56:11 LP: Or what is... Yeah, what do I take to be evidence or what is the evidence in some sense, yes. Which evidence do we have? And if the believer says to the skeptic, "Well, you have to open your mind first to the sensus divinitatis, or to the right thing, so that your sensus divinitatis can then detect the evidence." Right? The skeptic might refuse to do that. Why would they refuse to do that? They're supposed to be open-minded, and looking at all the evidence, and be super kind of careful, and clear, and everything else. And the thought is that, well look, if opening your mind to engage the sensus divinitatis changes who you are and how you think, that's the first part, and it's something that you can't know about until you open your mind, because it's like tasting honey or seeing color for the first time, then you're risking your very self. That's the first problem. So you're asking someone to risk their very self to consider the possibility of this thing that they don't right now believe in. And second, they lose a certain kind of control of something I think is deeply important to them, namely how they think. Or at least potentially, from their ex ante perspective, they're being asked to open their mind up in a way that that... So that they can no longer, in some sense, control how they believe about something. To have an... And through having an experience that they can't actually assess the nature from within before they do it.
0:57:34 SC: And I think these worries seem to make sense whether or not you believe the sensus divinatis. Divinatis?
0:57:40 LP: Divina... Divinata... [chuckle] Now I can't say it.
0:57:43 SC: Now I've ruined it.
0:57:44 LP: Sensus... [chuckle] Let's move on. [chuckle]
0:57:45 SC: Okay, let's move on. Whether it's real or whether it's just self-delusion. Right?
0:57:50 LP: Yes, that's right.
0:57:50 SC: Either way...
0:57:50 LP: That's right.
0:57:52 SC: Once you're there...
0:57:53 LP: That's right.
0:57:53 SC: Once you get God is talking to you or you've convinced yourself God is talking to you, you are convinced. Potentially.
0:57:58 LP: That's right, that's right. No, well, that... The whole picture, the argument is supposed to be that once you engage the sensus divinitatis, that from within you realize, "Oh, this is the way to live one's life. Now I see the evidence of the divine all around me." And you're convinced, and you're satisfied, and happy. From the outside, it looks like a kind of mind control, but from the inside, and these are rational thought for people who are believers, it's not like taking a drug, it's really not like taking a drug. Then, but from the inside, basically a believer is very happy, and satisfied, and committed to the way that they understand the way the world is.
0:58:37 SC: It's kind of like there are fitness landscapes to sets of beliefs. Right? Like in The Big Picture I called them "Planets of belief," where you have different beliefs that sort of fit together in a nice way, and there could be more than one such planets that are completely compatible, by your lights, with your experience of the world, but they're incompatible with each other.
0:58:55 LP: Which brings us to Kuhn and theoretical... And having new theories of the nature of reality. Right? So I think there's a really strong parallel here to the kind of radical, theoretical change that can happen in scientific communities, and the kind of radical belief change that an individual can undergo. And just as somebody who's totally committed, let's say, to the Newtonian world view or the Aristotelian... Like, an Aristotelian perspective on the nature of the external world is just not going to be able to make sense of, let's say, I don't know, a contemporary picture of reality in terms of, say, quantum mechanics.
0:59:35 SC: Right.
0:59:35 LP: It's just... They're like... It's just totally insane from the Aristotelian point of view.
0:59:37 SC: They don't hear the words. Yeah.
0:59:38 LP: No, exactly, exactly. And there's a... And we can understand that. Right? These very different ways of making sense of the external world. Well, I feel like the switch between the believer and the skeptic is like that. It's partly about thinking in a very radical way about how the external world would be different. But also, we're talking about an internal revolution as well. Like how you make sense of who you are and how you think about the external world is also changing. So it's even more radical than the ordinary kind of scientific conceptual revolution.
1:00:10 SC: There's also an obvious analogy with politics. Right? I did a recent podcast with Ezra Klein about political polarization, and it's not about political disagreement. Disagreement has always been there, but there has been a rise in recent decades in polarization, in the sense that different political camps' beliefs line up.
1:00:27 LP: Yes.
1:00:28 SC: Right? And then, once you're in that world, you don't even see what the other world sees anymore.
1:00:34 LP: I think that there's a direct relationship here. Another one of my Yale colleagues, [1:00:38] ____ does.
1:00:39 SC: The sensus trumpinatus. [chuckle]
1:00:39 LP: The sensus... [laughter] Okay, that's pretty good. [chuckle]
1:00:46 SC: Sorry for... Sorry for bringing us down. Sorry for lowering the tone there. [chuckle]
1:00:50 LP: Where... So I think that's exactly right. I think that there's this complex thing with... Again, this is not like a universal diagnosis, but in certain kinds of cases where there's political differences, the thought is like, "Can I really think myself into someone who's politically completely opposed to me? Because if I do empathize with that person's perspective, if I fully empathize with that person's perspective, then, Would that experience of stepping into their shoes and thinking about how they live their life, change the way that I think about things? And in ways that I can't right now endorse." So I might have a particular political view about what I... And be very committed to it. Views about, say, how women should be treated in a certain context, or transgender individuals. And then, if I really step into this other person's perspective and kind of take on their values, What if the experience of seeing the world through their eyes restructured my own internal preferences?
1:01:52 SC: Who you are, yeah.
1:01:53 LP: And that would change who I am in a very important way, because we define ourselves partly by our political beliefs and other kinds of things. So that makes it rational in a certain way for me, who I am not to wanna still be who I am. So there's a rational way in which I shouldn't step into the mind of that other person to the extent that I can, because it might change me. But that's terrible. Right?
[chuckle]
1:02:13 LP: That just means that I'm not supposed to be open-minded somehow. And I guess what I'm saying is... I'm not... I'm not setting up a prescription here, but I think we have to understand that there really is this barrier, and what can drive, I think, either a commitment like to the right or to the left, and a refusal to really, really wanna see the perspective of the other side, is a certain way in which we need to protect our own identities. And so, then it's not about the evidence.
1:02:38 SC: And it's not even irrational. Like by the lights of who you are, you're being rational.
1:02:39 LP: No it's not... Exactly. That's my point. That's right, there's an rational argument for this kind of refusal to be open-minded. That's very... I'm not... I think that we need to find some other way around it.
1:02:51 SC: It's disconcerting.
1:02:51 LP: It's disconcerting, but it's important to recognize that that's happening, 'cause I think people fail to see. And it might not even be rational. I mean, it's rational in a certain way but I think there's a very deep... We grasp the rationality but at a very deep, impulsive level.
1:03:05 SC: I probably... I think there is an imbalance, you do say at the end of a very long discussion, that of course all this is true also for the point of view of the believer contemplating becoming a skeptic.
1:03:12 LP: Yes. Absolutely. Yes, yes. Yeah, yeah. Yes, yes.
1:03:15 SC: There's a symmetry that way. But there is a little bit of an asymmetry, because by the self-proclaimed lights of the skeptic, they do have maybe... You could... They could be argued into thinking they have a duty to experience this other way of looking at the world, because their whole self-image is about gathering all the data and making a good decision, but if the believer thought that putting themselves in the cognitive space of a skeptic would cause them to lose their faith, they might think, "No. I just don't wanna do that. I know that's wrong." So there is a little bit of an asymmetry there.
1:03:50 LP: Right. I see. I see. No, that's a good point. I'd have to think about that some more, because I think there might be other asymmetries on the other side. But I'm not super moved by the skeptical argument, because I think there's a very, very basic way, kind of instinct for self-preservation that's gonna trump even your kind of high-minded commitment to evaluating different perspectives.
1:04:12 SC: As a practical matter. Sure, sure.
1:04:13 LP: Yeah, well and that's... And I'm interested here like in a certain kind of practical way, because the believer has that high-flown argument as well. Like if you truly believe in the divine, then there's a kind of commitment to seeking divine truth. I think that they might... They might even say, "If you're truly committed, then you should be able to go out and risk viewing the skeptical point of view and be able to come back." But then, I'm not sure even that...
1:04:38 SC: Well, maybe there's a different way of saying it, just that there's some kind of epistemic barrier to being the perfect skeptic who says, "Well, I should experience everything and know all the different viewpoints." And there are traps, like you can't experience all the different viewpoints. [chuckle]
1:04:52 LP: Yes. No, I think you're exactly... That is part of what... That is very much part of what I wanna say. And again, just bringing it back to the practical, I feel like this... It's this is kind of epistemic humility question, and we need to be clear about these constraints that we face as... We don't have a God's eye point of view, we can't take a God's eye point of view, and sometimes... See I think sometimes until analytic philosophers, I'm one, intellectuals, we think of ourselves as being able to take a God's eye, an objective point of view.
1:05:19 SC: Oh yeah. [chuckle]
1:05:20 LP: Yeah. And I think...
1:05:21 SC: Physicists certainly do.
1:05:22 LP: Yes, and yeah... Well, us philosophers as well. And it doesn't mean, like it's not that, "Oh... " I think that that's a mistake, and sometimes there's this energy, "Well, if you can't think about these things clear, it's because you're kind of stupid," or something, or you're limited somehow. It's like, "Well, you know what? We're epistemically limited as human beings, but it's not about intelligence, it's about our capacities to know things that we haven't experienced, it's just the way the brain works."
1:05:48 SC: Yeah, yeah. And you seem to make a great effort of not being too judgy or prescriptive here. Right?
1:05:54 LP: Yeah.
1:05:55 SC: And probably part of that is just strategic, like you want to emphasize that there is a difficulty that people aren't even recognizing. Do you have secret [chuckle] prescriptions for overcoming these difficulties?
1:06:07 LP: No, no. I mean, a lot of my work actually in some ways is very personal. Even though I try to kind of be very abstract, and I actually...
1:06:14 SC: You're a self, you have...
1:06:15 LP: I'm a self...
1:06:15 SC: Interests and rationale.
1:06:16 LP: And I try actually very hard to be empathetic with lots of different perspectives, and I do a lot of mentoring and teaching for lots of different reasons, I'm often put in that role, it isn't actually, especially one that I even want but I just end up doing it, I think it's important. And with respect to... So for example, I'm very committed, I'm a very pro-choice person, but I have always, always been drawn in a certain way to the arguments against abortion. Because I have two children, I love them dearly, I really do think that there's a frightening argument involved about ending the viability of a fetus, that I think should be taken seriously, but I don't fully know how to take it seriously, given my pro-choice commitments. So I'm just speaking very personally here, and so there are other reasons why people might be kind of pro-life and that sort of thing, but I think there is a really compelling argument at the heart of those discussions, and I'm not sure I'm able to give it a fair shake, and I think that it's important to recognize that.
1:07:21 SC: Yeah, I think this is a good sort of... It takes me to the last time I went to talk about the question of authenticity. And even if you don't have a prescription for how to be perfectly rational in these possibilities of transformative experiences, there are questions of still, How should we live our lives? Right? It's kind of a question we have to answer. What do we do? Right? Even if I admit that there's this lacuna in my possible knowledge, I still gotta act in some way. Is there some sense in which being true to ourselves is the basis for acting, or is this also undermining that, because ourselves can change in these interesting ways?
1:07:57 LP: I think the way to be true... What we have to be true to is, maybe not ourselves, but to our epistemic limitations. So what we have to recognize is that, as we live our lives, we change in these radical ways and we replace, or we have the chance to replace our current self with new selves. Sometimes we do that, sometimes we don't get to choose, it just happens. And that's part of what living life involves, and that we should care about the nature of lived experience for ourselves and others, and not pretend that it doesn't matter. I think that's also part of what... And recognize sometimes when we're trading off like well-being for... That's another reason, but we're making choices to suffer. And this is for me, like philosophy is sometimes about truth, but it's more about wisdom. And so, this is the way that I think we can connect some of these questions about rational decision-making, and consciousness, and the metaphysics of selves and persons to authenticity and being... And living our life in a way that's as wise or informed as we can, and kind of also understand there's a ton of uncertainty here.
1:09:05 SC: Yeah, I mean that it relates very clearly in my mind to questions of how to be moral, if you're a naturalist and anti-realist as I am. Right? I can say sentences, and I can and do believe them of the form, we have moral inclinations, they come from a bunch of places. From evolution, from how we're raised, and from our rational reflection. And even if they're not objectively grounded out there in the world, we can use them to construct a moral code for ourselves. But there is a foundational problem. Where did they come from? If I were a very different person, if I had different genes or different upbringings, maybe my morality would be different. Isn't that bad? Isn't that scary? And now you're saying I can become a different person because it's something that happens to me, it's now becoming scarier and scarier, you're making my life harder, Laurie. [chuckle]
1:09:56 LP: I know, I'm sorry. That's my job, I'm a philosopher. [chuckle]
[chuckle]
1:10:01 SC: Is there any sort of good... You use the word wisdom, which is a very good word to use. Are there words of wisdom, I mean the existentialists talk about this. Right? You talk about your relationship to existentialism, they seem to find an answer in authenticity. So God doesn't tell us how to behave, but being our most authentic selves is still the right way to behave. Have you pulled that rug out from under them entirely?
1:10:26 LP: Yeah, a little, I hope so. I mean, my thought is that authenticity involves understanding what we can know about ourselves and our futures. And understanding what we can't know about ourselves and our futures, and coming to terms with that. It's a different take on...
1:10:40 SC: That humility/honesty thing again.
1:10:42 LP: Yes.
1:10:43 SC: Yeah.
1:10:43 LP: And then, doing the best we can.
1:10:45 SC: Doing the best we can. That's a good message. I always like to leave on an optimistic note. So I think we can still do the best we can, and I think that we all agree that having a more informed understanding of what the best we can do is, is good. Right?
1:11:04 LP: Yes, yes. The whole point is that you get wisdom, and tolerance, and a better way of assessing praise and blame. If you know as much as you can about, I think, the structure of what we can... What agents are capable of, how the human brain works, what we can expect from people, and what we can't expect from people.
1:11:25 SC: Alright, it's something to chew on. Okay, Laurie Paul, thanks so much for being on this podcast.
[music]
I’m so glad I found this podcast.(85)
Thank you both for recording and sharing it with the world. I think this will help me a bit.
Hi, I ponder taking a drug(s) that may help me, hurt me, or even kill me.
I don’t take “happy pills” or pain pills, because of the fear that it will damage the brain I have. I had a life that hasn’t been kind to my body, brain, and the biological software my brain runs on.
I’m in pain 24/7, 365.25 days a year!
I feel that I will never meet a person that will hear me out, to understand me. I’m an atheist in Utah.
I’m depressed around 95% of the time, but have to hide it, or I get insulted, mocked, or worse by the few people that care about me to some degree. I need help, but I can’t get it. I’ve found only one Doctor, that might be able to help me, but she doesn’t take the goverment insurance I have. I can’t work, and I can’t get or find real help.
Anyways, life sucked for me, and I can only do what I can, then die. Haa, ha, so much drama, but real. I’m writing this asking for help of some kind, I don’t know how. Sorry.
Qualitative change seems undervalued in emphasizing uncertainty
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Anticipate longer discussions regarding issues such as trans and end of life. As per Kant, how do you know?
Even listening through a noise-canceling headset, I couldn’t decipher half of what the guest was saying. She spoke too fast and with poor enunciation. I finally gave up after listening to about a third of the podcast.
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Hey Kyle, sounds like you may be able to find some relief with Cannabis.
Pain and depression are just a fraction of the ailments that many people are
getting positive results from the use of Cannabis. Maybe try it out?