Making Sense with Sam Harris - #327 — Transformative Experiences

Episode Date: July 21, 2023

Sam Harris speaks with L.A. Paul about the nature of transformative experiences. They discuss how certain experiences change the self, the nature of regret, changing belief systems, conspiracy thinkin...g, empathy, doing good in the world, our relationship to our future selves, changing our values, the nature of possibility, the ethics of punishment, moral luck, the moral landscape, consequentialism, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe. Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Thank you. of the Making Sense Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Today I'm speaking with L.A. Paul. Lori Paul is the Millstone Family Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Cognitive Science at Yale University. Her main research interests are in metaphysics, cognitive science, decision theory, and the philosophy of mind. She's tended to focus on questions about the nature of the self, preference change,
Starting point is 00:01:12 subjective value, temporal experience, causation, time, perception, among others. And her most recent book is titled Transformative Experience. And that was really our focus in this conversation. We talk about the nature of transformative experiences, how they change the self that has had the experience, often ways that can't be understood unless that change occurs. We discuss the nature of regret, changing belief systems, conspiracy thinking, empathy, doing good in the world, our relationship to our future selves, what it might mean to change our values, the nature of possibility, the ethics
Starting point is 00:01:53 of punishment, moral luck, the moral landscape, consequentialism, and other topics. Anyway, fascinating territory. I hope you enjoy it. And now I bring you L.A. Paul. I am here with L.A. Paul. Lori, thanks for joining me. Thank you for having me. So just we were talking before we started recording here about your name. If people want to find your writing, it is under L.A. Paul, but I will call you Lori. Can you summarize your background as a philosopher? What kinds of topics have you focused on? Sure. So I got my PhD in philosophy from Princeton in 1999, working in the area of metaphysics with the philosopher David Lewis. And I love metaphysics,
Starting point is 00:02:47 I'm a metaphysician at heart. And I focus on the nature of causation, but I also do a lot of work on time and how we experience ourselves in time, and how we understand and manipulate the world around us. And I spent about, I'd say the first half of my career thus far, last sort of 12 years, or the first 12 years, focusing on those sort of deep metaphysical questions, what the nature of reality, in particular, the kinds of things that you can't sort of directly see, like time and cause and also the nature of the self. And after, I don't know, sort of exploring those topics for a while, I turned to exploring the way that we understand ourselves in the world. And there's a sort of
Starting point is 00:03:30 natural progression there and started working on in particular, how we understand ourselves through distinctive kinds of experiences and how, and sort of use, there's a framework involving decision theory that I have often used because if you try to embed these questions in a framework like decision-making, all kinds of interesting questions come out. So it's a way of sort of, I don't know, kind of pulling apart something that seems maybe simple on the surface and realizing there's a lot of complexity underneath. Well, I was introduced to your work through what you've written and said on the topic of what you call transformative experience. And I thought we'd focus on that,
Starting point is 00:04:12 but I love the connection to David Lewis, and I would love to talk about the nature of possibility and causation and all of the metaphysics there too. I hadn't thought we would talk about that, but that's... Did you hear my conversation with Tim Maudlin? I did not, but I'm a big fan of Tim's. And I should say that these topics are intimately related. I'm working on a book now, actually, that brings out some of those deeper connections, but the topic is the same.
Starting point is 00:04:39 We can just view it from different perspectives. Great, great. So let's start with the transformative piece and then hit all the metaphysics you might want to touch there. Yeah, I mean, we'll see where we go, but it's all fascinating. So this phrase transformative experience, what do you mean by that? Because I think it's easily misunderstood. So let's bound the concept. So good question. So I use the phrase transformative experience, in part,
Starting point is 00:05:08 you can think of this as a bit of a pun on what people ordinarily think of as transformative experience. So the kind of ordinary meaning is some kind of wow, amazingly, you know, change-filled experience that changes who you are. And I mean that too, but I mean something a little bit maybe more kind of philosophically detailed. I mean that too, but I mean something a little bit, maybe more kind of philosophically detailed. I mean that when you face a transformative experience, you're facing an experience that at once you can't know in important essential details what it's going to be like. And also that is going to change you fundamentally. It's going to destroy some part of the self that you are now and recreate you by creating a new self. So there's those two parts.
Starting point is 00:05:50 It's really important that both those things happen together. Well, I guess let's ground this in some canonical life decisions that tend to be transformative in this way. My first thought is something like having kids. transformative in this way. My first thought is something like having kids. Perhaps you have a favorite, but let's talk about some of the details there. Okay. So you've touched on one of my two favorite examples. And so I think that for people who haven't had children, when someone becomes a parent, that often that really is a transformative experience. It's not that really is a transformative experience. It's not that everyone has a transformative experience in virtue of producing. And adoption is included here, although I often just talk about physically producing a child.
Starting point is 00:06:33 But the process of attaching to the child, which is, I think, crucial for becoming a parent, a kind of psychologist will describe this as an identity defining and identity changing attachment relation, changes you as a person. It changes in the way that I said before, the self that you are. And I think many people before they become parents, or if they're deliberating or maybe agonizing or ruminating about, well, maybe they'll become a parent. They know, you know, something dramatic and big is going to happen to them. And they know in essentials, like you're going to have a baby or you're going to adopt a child or whatever.
Starting point is 00:07:11 So there's a sense in which they know. And then there's a sense in which they absolutely do not know. And only when they actually become a parent, when they actually form this attachment relation to this other being, will they both experience the change that's involved and also then in virtue of experiencing that change, understand the nature of that experience? So I could say more about that, but that's a big one. Well, it seems like these kinds of experiences pose a certain kind of challenge to rational decision-making because the decider is in advance of making the decision. You are one person. And then if you decide to have this experience,
Starting point is 00:07:54 you will become somebody quite different. And you may, in fact, know that in advance, right? But you know that the person who will be judging the consequences of having made a certain decision will be different from the person who is deciding whether or not to take one branch or another in that decision tree. parent as the example here. So I'm imagining that very few people ever regret having kids, even if the person they were before they had kids would have judged the outcome to be less than desirable, right? Totally. Yeah. So there's something beautiful about that. There's something beautiful about the kind of human psyche that allows that to happen. But let me back up for a second, if you don't mind. So I think of it this way. So imagine you're thinking about, well, if you're deliberating about whether you want to become a parent, so for at least a kind of standard version of rational decision theory, there's a process you're supposed to undergo where you map out your options, you look at the different values, like the value of having a child, the value of not having a child. And then you think about, well, which option is going to maximize my happiness or my life satisfaction or something like that. And a natural way that we think about doing this is you imaginatively kind of evolve yourself into, well,
Starting point is 00:09:20 here I am with my baby or here I am, you know, hiking the world or whatever, like crossing, you know, crossing amazing vistas, child-free, you know, living my life to the fullest and that kind of way. And then you have to sort of compare these options to decide because each one involves trade-offs and you can't do both, which one is going to be better for you. And the, when I had said before that the complex thing about transformative experience, as I understand it, is that first there's a dimension of the experience that you can't kind of grasp for yourself. In addition to the personal change that you just described,
Starting point is 00:09:59 there's a problem because then you can't reliably, you know, envision the self that you're going to become or and understand the process that's going to make you into that new self. So if, you know, if you're sure you want to become a parent, well, maybe it's not such a big deal. You know, yeah. And as you said, you know, you'll be happy most likely afterwards. We should come back to that, by the way, because there's something really interesting and tricky about that, I think. But if you're not sure, then what are you going to do, right? And you can then go and get evidence, like find out about what other people have said and done and ask your mother and that sort of thing. But that evidence is all about what people think after they've gone through the experience. But if they've changed as a result of going
Starting point is 00:10:43 through the experience, then there's a certain way in which that evidence is not relevant. If you're not sure, say you really don't want to have a child or you're kind of inclined against, and you go and you ask your mom and she says, oh no, you'll be so happy if you did. You might think, well, fine, but that's because my brain will have been changed. Like, you know, I mean, I'll be changed into a different kind of person. You know, it's like I I'm mentally kidnapped. And sure, I know that parents are really happy, but I don't want that kind of mental magic worked on me. I'm very happy the way that I am. And so that's part of the problem. The self that you are, who's trying to evaluate these things first, maybe doesn't have the same desires as the self that you would become. And you can't even kind
Starting point is 00:11:25 of imaginatively put yourself in the shoes of that other being, that other self that you could become to kind of evaluate what it would be like. So you're kind of stuck. Yeah. Now that I think about it, I'm wondering if regret is also rare and perhaps even equally rare on the side of the people who don't have kids and who haven't had kids by choice, right? As opposed to just a kind of a failure of opportunity. There are obviously people who really want to have kids and it just never happens for one reason or another, but there are people who decide they don't want to have kids. And I guess I would imagine they experience probably a vanishingly small rate of regret as well.
Starting point is 00:12:08 I don't know if there's any research on this, but how do you think about regret in light of, or its absence in light of this? No, it's a great question. So I think for me, what I immediately think of is regret. What is the regret or absence of it evidence of? You might think, oh, if you don't regret your decision, that's evidence that you made the right decision for you. And there's a sense in which that's true. Maybe you made the right decision for the self that you are, but there's maybe a larger sense in which it's kind of incoherent to say, I made the right decision for me because there's the right decision for you afterwards and there's the right decision for you beforehand. And so like when, like, so,
Starting point is 00:12:44 okay, so I have two children. I love them both. I remember my mother saying to me, wow, I never really expected you to have children. I wasn't really sure early on. And I said, well, I'm so happy, but you know, is my happiness the result of me knowing all along I wanted to have children? No, it's actually that the process of forming this attachment relation to both of my children made me so like satisfied and happy to have them. There's a kind of circularity here that's absolutely what some of these experiences involve. So of course, I don't regret it for a second, but there's no way I can even access the person or the self that I would have been if I had never had children. And I think she also might've been perfectly happy to live her life the way that she had
Starting point is 00:13:26 chosen for it to go. And you think, oh, who she is or would have been, wouldn't have been happy with children. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they're even stranger. So this is pretty easy to understand. I think there's a, whether in fact it's a real fundamental change in what one values and one sense of what is good, or if it's a psychologically protective mechanism of just not wanting to admit in the case where one would still could regret this life decision, given that it's irrevocable and so much turns on one's kind of averting one's eyes from the dark reality that you in fact do regret having kids or not having kids, you know, it's easy to see why one
Starting point is 00:14:13 wouldn't want to be keenly aware of that moment to moment. But there are simpler cases where we experience a, actually we can experience the full tour. So you take something like, you know, eating ice cream, right? Well, you want to be on a diet, you want to lose weight, you don't want to eat ice cream, but when presented with ice cream, you actually want to eat that ice cream. And so the person whose willpower is overcome and who decides to eat ice cream and who's enjoying the ice cream while eating it gets to experience the full tour of not wanting, having the meta desire of not wanting to want the ice cream, wanting it, enjoying it, and then later regretting having eaten as much as one ate.
Starting point is 00:14:57 There's a strange picture of what the self is and what personal identity is all about when one experiences that full tour. But that's different than the transformative. It's a transiently transformative experience. Maybe that falsifies the concept. But one can experience this fluctuation between being the person who is inhabiting a higher-order desire and then you're the person who gives in to a lower order desire,
Starting point is 00:15:28 which nonetheless is sincere in the moment, and its satisfaction is no less pleasurable. But then after the fact, one boomerangs back to the higher order desire and wishes one hadn't done that thing. Yeah. So I think that the way to maybe pull these apart a little bit is to say, I want to focus on whatever like the highest order values are, right? And so the ice cream case, it might be that there's a difference between like all along, you kind of wish you weren't, you know, that you don't want to be someone who's eating the ice cream and then you kind of give in and you eat the ice cream and it's fabulous and you're really enjoying it. And then afterwards, once the enjoyment is over, it's like, oh God,
Starting point is 00:16:07 why did I do that? That might be a bit different from say someone who is like an addict, like someone who's in the throes of an addiction might have something where even like their higher order valuing, you know, involves like wanting the, like the willing at someone who's just like embracing their drug addiction versus someone who then later on rejects the appeal of the willing, as someone who's just like embracing their drug addiction versus someone who then later on rejects the appeal of the drug, there you might actually get someone who all of their values, their highest order values
Starting point is 00:16:34 are consistent with their action. And that might be in a case of someone kind of transforming and transforming and transforming in the sense that, in the way that I'm trying to articulate for maybe more minimal cases. I mean, religious experience might be one of those cases where somebody converts or loses their faith. And so, and that's, I think is a transformation and then they can revert. People sometimes do revert. And I think there, if, you know, if you're fully believing or fully not believing, then you're
Starting point is 00:17:06 kind of consistent up and down the hierarchy of values. How do you think about this in terms of knowledge and belief and just epistemology? So we have the experience of changing one's beliefs in response to evidence, but many of us have an experience of deciding not to entertain certain ideas or expose ourselves to certain images because we have prejudged that either it's a waste of time or we actually don't want to become the person we would be if we spent all the time exposing ourselves to that information. I mean, I'm thinking, I guess this can be an expression of cognitive bias or wishful thinking or cognitive closure in a way, but it can also just be an expression of a concern for mental hygiene.
Starting point is 00:17:58 The instances where I know I've done this is, I recall at the time I was very focused on issues of terrorism and religious sectarianism and its consequences, and yet I decided that I didn't want to see the decapitation videos produced by the Islamic State, right? I was super focused on the issue, but I just decided I didn't need those images in my head because I was protecting myself from being the person who then had those images in his head for the rest of his life. There are other cases where, you know, if I have to take a certain medication, I will decide that I actually don't want to study the list of side effects, right? Because I've decided generically that I need to take this medication. I know in the abstract that all of the side effects are low enough probability that I'm not likely to suffer them. And I think I'm better served not actually priming the nocebo effect in my case and just being on guard for the side effects. So perhaps there are other examples of this sort of thing. How do you think about deciding to have certain information or not and the ways in which this can either be productive or go awry when we were actually closing ourselves off to evidence and ideas that are true and would be useful to know. Right. So, I mean, I think there are appropriate times to protect yourself from, let's say,
Starting point is 00:19:31 having a cognitive bias in the way that you are, you know, these images and other kinds of things, which are actually intended to manipulate in various ways. The connection to transformative experience is that if the problem is if you can't actually, so when you think about like, I don't want to see an image, a particular image, you know enough about it to know how you're going to react and to know that, well, actually the effect is going to be negative. So you make, I think, a good judgment to set that aside so that you're not affected by it in a negative way. to set that aside so that you're not, you know, you're not affected by it in a negative way. But what if you don't know about the nature of the experience? It could be great or it could be bad.
Starting point is 00:20:14 And there's no kind of higher order evidence that's going to tell you either way. This, I think, can be a way to understand questions about religious belief, because there's no sort of independent way of ascertaining whether or not the deity in question exists. And those that are advocates of the belief will argue that the evidence is all around us. It's just you're failing to detect it. And those that are opponents of the belief will say, no, there's no evidence, right? And then if the way to being able to learning how to grasp that evidence involves opening your mind to the possibility of having an experience, but where you as the, like, would, you know, fear that this experience could corrupt you, then you have a problem because you don't know about the nature of the experience independently. And to discover the nature of the experience involves a kind of corruption. It's basically
Starting point is 00:21:00 Ulysses and the sirens. I think the nice thing about for Ulysses was that the insanity that he experienced when hearing the song of the sirens was temporary, but in this kind of case, it wouldn't be temporary. So you have a problem. So that's what I mean. So what I'm saying is I think it can be perfectly rational to set aside evidence, so-called evidence, and perfectly rational to try to control various kinds of options when you know enough about them. But I'm really interested in cases where we don't know, and because it's transformative, it can kind of work on you at the highest level, right? And transform the way that you regard the nature of reality, for example. That's, I think, psychedelics involves that possibility. I think religious belief involves
Starting point is 00:21:39 that possibility. I think possibly certain kinds of love could involve that kind of possibility. Maybe even questions about the border of sanity and insanity, which is kind of a fascination for me. the social contagion component of that, and also the quasi-religious aspect of sunk cost with respect to having just spent so much time down any one of those rabbit holes. I mean, I see people whose podcasts or newsletters or books just become a testament to how much time they've spent entertaining certain ideas. And it seems like it's becoming harder and harder for them to step out of it because, again, in part it's got to be the fallacy of sunk cost or the perceived reputational harm of recognizing that they've just wasted a tremendous amount of time on certain topics. But it's also just the style of thinking that gets inculcated there where none of them are truly
Starting point is 00:22:53 falsifiable. There's a style of connecting random anomalies without an underlying theory that is coherent. And you can always find more anomalies. So it becomes self-perpetuating in a way that is very difficult to arrest. And so, yeah, it could be rational to decide in advance, okay, spending my time and attention in a certain way could erode some of the epistemic values I actually want to be anchored to. And so you do have a Ulysses and the mast kind of decision in advance where it's like, yes, there's a siren song that I may want to hear, but if I'm going to hear it, I need to at least maintain my purchase on something now that I know
Starting point is 00:23:39 as a kind of meta norm I'm going to want to stay attached to no matter what happens in the intervening hours. Yeah, but the problem is, I mean, I think that sounds right. The problem is what if the siren song is so seductive that you lose your attachment to that? I mean, that's the risk. I take it conspiracy theories are often that the whole idea is open your mind to this possibility and then what happens is that people lose, they lose kind of control over the other norms of thought that they had embraced. Yeah. How do you think about empathy in this context or just taking the perspective of other people or, you know, or failing to, I mean, just what, how does it, how does that fit in? No, it's a good question. I think with a lot of
Starting point is 00:24:25 the things that I like to think about, I think there's a lot to say on both sides. I do think that affective empathy, so just feeling what others feel, is a really good source of cognitive bias. And Paul Bloom has written on this, I think, really, really well. But that's different from cognitive empathy, which is technically, I guess, is a kind of empathy where you aren't just kind of randomly opening yourself up to the feelings of others, but rather in a kind of reasoned way, you attempt to kind of enter into the perspective of the other and attempt to represent their beliefs and their emotions and their mindset, but without kind of losing yourself in it. Again, though, the kinds of problems that we're talking about, I think they're right here, because if you really are opening your mind to someone else and really are kind of empathizing with them, even if you're trying to do so in a kind of cognitively careful way, I see the possibility for losing yourself in that. And I think that
Starting point is 00:25:25 does happen sometimes to people. Yeah. Yeah. There's kind of an adjacent issue for me that I've resolved very much in the way that Ulysses resolved his problem with philanthropy, because I just know that the kinds of causes that really tug at my heartstrings are not the kinds of causes that tend to survive a truly rational analysis about how you can do the most good in the world. And there's really, they basically don't even overlap. The causes that I can rationally identify as the most efficient and reliable ways to mitigate human suffering or needless death or long-term risk, those are almost without exception less compelling to me than any cause that has a single identifiable victim and a good story and something that just really drives my altruism and compassion circuits in a very social primate sort of way.
Starting point is 00:26:28 So the classic example here is, you know, one little girl falls down a well. We have endless interest and availability to pay attention to that. You know, the CNN does 72 hours of continuous coverage of the story. But, you know, at the same moment, there's probably a genocide raging in sub-Saharan Africa, and it's just a matter of statistics, and nobody cares, right? You can hear about 500,000 dead,
Starting point is 00:26:53 and it's just too boring to even allocate 10 minutes in a broadcast to. So just knowing that, I just decide in advance to give to the causes that I can rationally identify, and then anything I give to other causes that are more compelling emotionally, I just do that over and above what I've allocated in advance to the rational one. So it is a sort of have your cake and eat it too strategy, but I have the rational priorities front-loaded in that paradigm.
Starting point is 00:27:28 So I agree with this, but I want to say one thing, and that is that in these kinds of discussions, I think it's really important to see that the rational calculus needs to include the value of experience. So I agree with what you're saying. It's just that sometimes I think people can think about a rational calculus in a kind of robotic way, one might say. And I mean that in the sense of like, take AI, which is not sentient and lacks any kind of feeling or consciousness. You could perform a mathematical calculation, one that doesn't account for the feelings and experiences of the human beings involved. Your example was great because it's like the experiences of one little girl versus the experience of 500,000 or whatever, I don't remember the number that you mentioned.
Starting point is 00:28:16 And obviously, then we're comparing experiences to experiences. So I guess what I'm trying to say is it's really important to not remove the human element from the rational calculus. Yeah. Because otherwise it becomes like a mathematical calculation versus a kind of a gut emotion. And I just don't think that's the right, that's a false opposition. I think it's really that in both cases, there's an enormous amount of pain and suffering. It's just that we can comprehend the smaller amount in a way that we can't comprehend infinity
Starting point is 00:28:43 in certain ways as well. We can represent it, but there's a way you can't imagine it. And that's just a limitation of the human brain. Yeah. Yeah. So I guess it's just an acceptance of that limitation in advance. Because what I noticed is despite my efforts to make doing good psychologically and emotionally salient, I think we run up against an intrinsic limitation to that because so much of our doing good philanthropically is by definition telescopic, right? Like you write a check and you send it to an organization that's doing the work. You have no face-to-face encounter with any of it. And yet it is just, in fact, real that that check and the organization funded by it is doing the best work, say, that can be done on that particular
Starting point is 00:29:33 front, and that your giving to that cause really does matter. And yet, I just noticed in my day-to-day life that the thing that is going to brighten my day is not going to be sending a check of whatever size to the best possible organization. It might just be this random and altogether brief encounter with a stranger in a coffee shop. I mean, literally, the example I've used before is I did actually notice this in the span of 24 hours in my life. actually noticed this in the span of 24 hours in my life, I noticed that just like holding the door open for a stranger at a Starbucks and just sharing a mutual smile was more important in the psychological change it created in me than having given a rather large donation to an obviously good cause within the same day, right? So, and yet I know I did much more good in the world making that donation than holding the door open for somebody.
Starting point is 00:30:32 But given that these are just sort of bugs in our psychological and moral makeup, this is the kind of thing that Adam Smith pointed out, you know, where he said that, you know, if someone knew they were going to lose a tip of their pinky finger the next day, they wouldn't sleep a wink that night for, you know, ruminating on it. But if that same person heard that an entire generation of people was annihilated by an earthquake in China, you know, they might give it just a few minutes thought and then move on to what they're going to have for dinner. what they're going to have for dinner. So it's just that mismatch is something that I think we just, if we can change it, it'd be wonderful. But if we can't change it, we just need to figure out how to navigate around it and do the most good we can on the one hand, but also be as happy and flourish as much as we can psychologically and socially on the other by whatever means govern that process. Yeah, I agree with that. I think that's right. The trouble is that there's this gulf between the concrete exchange with another human being that we can have that involves the way that we
Starting point is 00:31:40 experience and feel, and then the much more abstract kind of good that we can do that propagates through like a long causal chain where there's no kind of direct contact with any of the human beings. And I mean, you're right. If we're looking at how much good one can do and we think we can measure that from our feelings, or if we're also just looking at what's going to motivate us in various ways, there's a mismatch there in either case, right? It's hard to detect how much good you're doing in the experiential sense when there's a long causal chain between what you do and then the final output when some percentage of that money makes its way to the intended recipients. And not only that,
Starting point is 00:32:25 but you don't get any kinds of, you don't feel it, right? Like if there's no kind of direct exchange whatsoever. I mean, if you were confronted with the people, right, that would be an entirely different kind of experience and an entirely different kind of exchange. Yeah. And knowing that it might be wise to have the transformative experience of leveraging that change, right? So like, for instance, I can be telescopically philanthropic. I can just write a check to help solve a famine in some distant country. a plane and just confront the reality of that famine face to face and write the same check, but also be the person who had the experience of witnessing these human events directly. I can know in advance that that would be much more impactful and it would be a much closer marriage thereafter when I was writing a check, my connection to the good I was doing or intending to do would be much more salient having met the people or some of the people suffering from that
Starting point is 00:33:30 calamity. Yeah. Can I make a connection here? Yeah. So we're talking about causal chains between ourselves and other people, but part of the work that I've been doing is saying that, look, just as we can understand there are all these problems with our relationships with other people, understanding how they feel and act and think. And again, these kinds of sometimes long chains of causes and events between us, that same kind of structure can exist between yourself and other selves, both past selves and also future selves or even merely possible
Starting point is 00:34:05 selves. So some of the things that you're raising, those problems, I think, are reflected back into even like individual lives. Can you say more about that? How do you think about one's relationship to one's past and future selves and possible selves? Well, so think about something that you're doing now. It's going to have through a long chain of events, most likely an impact on the future Sam, maybe 10 or 15 years from now. And there's a sense in which that's a very remote effect, right? In fact, we do things like we throw our future selves under the bus all the time. Like when you agree to do something unpleasant for someone, if they're smart, they're going to ask you to do it like in the future,
Starting point is 00:34:47 maybe six months from now, rather than six minutes from now. Because when it's six months from now, that future self just seems quite remote. It's like those people on the other side of the world, as opposed to the person, you know, the self that's going to be existing six minutes or even six hours from now is much closer. Although I must say I'm getting much better at saying no to those things. I actually now consciously think, okay, if this thing were happening tomorrow, would I be saying yes or no? And if the answer is no, it doesn't matter if it's six months or six years, I'm going to say no to it at this point. That's the right thing to do. So that's like navigating it. But you see that the point is that
Starting point is 00:35:26 the closeness or distance, like we rely on what we kind of experience and feel and project a lot of times when making decisions. And what you realize is, oh, wait a minute, we shouldn't rely on that. Or at least we can rely on it if we can model it in the right way to give the right response, as opposed to kind of just neglecting that difference. the right response, as opposed to kind of just neglecting that difference. Yeah, well, so we're not strictly rational with respect to how we discount the importance of our future states of self, because, I mean, there's nobody who has a greater opportunity to ensure the happiness of your future self than your current self does. I mean, you really have just an enormous amount of control over your future health and your future wealth and your
Starting point is 00:36:11 future happiness, your future relationships. And yet, you know, it's all too common for us to hyperbolically discount the significance of all of those effects and to have just a much shorter term concern for our pleasures and pains and just what we value over time is just, as you say, it's just very hard to think about oneself 10 years hence or beyond that. One thing that's really interesting is like, I think that when you think about yourself 10 years from now, you think about it yourself differently from if you think about yourself 10 seconds from now, it feels different. Like, so if I think about myself 10 seconds from now, I'm going to imagine, I don't know, maybe like, you know, I might have a sense of how I'm feeling, or I might imagine the scene like from my first person perspective here, like from what I can see. But if I like,
Starting point is 00:37:03 you know, from a GoPro camera kind of vantage point, but if I imagine myself 10 years from now, I think of like, it's like I have a camera on the situation and I can see myself there like performing some task, but that's like, I'm observing myself. I'm not occupying the perspective that I'm in right now. It's rather that I, there's this kind of distance that's encoded into that representation. And I think that's really weird and really interesting. And I think it affects the way that we think about things. And it might come back to, I think there's a relationship there between what we were talking about before, which is when someone's pain is very close to you, like it's in proximity with you, you can understand it and make sense of it and respond to it in a way that you can't when there's this, like, it's like you're viewing it through the, you know,
Starting point is 00:37:49 through a telescope or something. Do you recall Derek Parfit's thought experiment about, meant to highlight the strangeness of future bias? He talked about somebody who found himself in a hospital either awaiting surgery or recovering from surgery, and the nurse couldn't tell him whether or not he had had an extremely painful surgery or would soon have a more normal surgery, and she had to go look up his chart. Do you remember this thought experiment? Yes, yes. Yeah. So what's interesting there, I recently spoke about this on the podcast, but maybe I'll just revisit it for those who didn't hear it. Because I can't, as with many of Parfit's puzzles, I'm not always sure whether it really is a puzzle or whether it's a kind of pseudo puzzle, but a little bit like Zeno's
Starting point is 00:38:37 paradoxes of motion. But here he seemed to be remarking on how arbitrary it seems that we care so much about the future and so little about the past, and it might be more strictly rational simply to care about all of our experience in the aggregate, just like the whole area under the curve of phenomena, and to be timeless with respect to how we weight its value. And so his thought experiment here is that someone is in a hospital, they just woke up, they're not sure whether they are going to get a surgery or they've already had it and they don't remember it, but the two surgeries on offer is, one of two things is possible. Either they had an absolutely harrowing, protracted surgery that they don't remember because they were given an amnesic drug afterwards. So they were in fact tortured for 10 hours, but their memory was wiped clean.
Starting point is 00:39:35 But they did in fact have that lived experience of torture. Or they're going to have a more normal operation in the future. And if you had asked them on the previous week, which would you rather have? Let's say the present moment is on Tuesday. If you'd asked them the previous Friday, you can be tortured for 10 hours and have this awful experience and then have your memory erased, or you can have a normal procedure with normal anesthesia. Which would you want? procedure with normal anesthesia, which would you want? Well, they absolutely want the normal one, let's say on Wednesday, rather than the torture on Monday. But if you wake them on Tuesday,
Starting point is 00:40:18 and they're given a choice of either having gone through this thing they can now no longer remember, which was bad, or they yet have this more normal but still unpleasant procedure in their future, well, they're going to wish they had the thing in the past that was awful and worse because what people really care about is happiness or suffering in the future. It's enormously more important what's coming rather than what's in the rearview mirror. And he thought that was kind of weird. I'm not, yeah, what do you think about that? So I hate to say it, but with all due respect to Derek Preffett, I think he was kind of weird. I mean, he was brilliant. He was a brilliant philosopher. But okay, so I have views about this. And so what I think is that there's this kind of objective perspective that a metaphysician takes where they're just looking at what exists. And if you're interested in the value of a life and you think of it as, and you can calculate it in terms of the area under the curve where you collect up all the kind of temporal stages of that life and what matters is maximizing that area, then this kind of detached perspective
Starting point is 00:41:23 where it doesn't matter if that temporal stage is in the future or in the past or in the present is fine. But if you have a view where it's not just those objective facts, but rather also the kind of subjective conscious experience of the observer, which is just because of the way the human brains work, we're immersed in our present and we anticipate the future and we feel that the past is fixed and over in most cases. And so we value things differently depending on where they're arranged in time. And I think that's just a fact of human psychology. Even if there's an objective way to justify that, there's the contingent fact about how we experience the world. And so, as I was
Starting point is 00:42:04 saying, as much as I love the Parfit exploration, I feel that regularly, he was kind of a detached person, and he didn't really care about this immersed asymmetric and, yeah, not kind of objectively rational way of experiencing, but it's just the way we are psychologically. And that, I think, should be accommodated. So if you do that, there is definitely a future bias. And actually, A.N. Pryor, when he talked about the nature of time, he had a famous example about a headache when you say, thank goodness that's over. And the example was intended to illustrate how we feel differently about the present
Starting point is 00:42:39 versus the past. We would be glad that the painful experience is in the past rather than the future. And so part of what I guess I want to say is when we were talking about rationality and decision making, I think it's really important to not lose sense of the maybe bizarre psychological contingencies of how we as thinking and feeling human beings experience the world and to bring that in somehow into the rational calculus. Well, this does sort of relate to this notion of a transformative experience because so when you think about many painful experiences, even most painful experiences,
Starting point is 00:43:18 there is this common feature which is once they're over, the net result isn't necessarily even negative. In many cases, it's positive. You have the people who go through some terrible ordeal. They have cancer, and then they recover, and they can honestly say that the cancer is the best thing that ever happened to them because it reoriented their priorities and they got their lives straight and their heads straight. And they couldn't have done it but for having had everything interrupted by what was in fact a truly terrible experience while it was happening. And yes, so they're not in a position of regret or wishing it hadn't happened once it's over. And if we can know that about most bad experiences, I mean, if we know that generally speaking, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, shouldn't that change how we view most future
Starting point is 00:44:24 bad experiences? I mean, shouldn't we be able to price that in? And wouldn't that be psychologically helpful to try to do that insofar as we can do that? So it's a good question. I mean, I do think that we should be able to price it in, but I think it's more complicated, which is, I know, unsatisfactory, but I'm a philosopher, so I'm always raising problems. And so I'm fascinated by cases, for example, of disability. So I think it makes perfect sense for someone to, let's say someone has, they have cancer, they have a terrible accident, they undergo this horrific transformative experience, like transform, like, because in the sense that the person who emerges or the self that emerges
Starting point is 00:45:02 is quite different from the self that began. And I think there's a very sensible way in which someone can say the self that emerges, I value who I am now. I have all these strengths that I didn't have before, but I just, I value who I am now. And so I don't regret having the experience because that experience produced me, who I am now. By the same token, I think it can make perfect sense for the person, for someone to say, I don't want to have a horrific accident. I don't want to be diagnosed with cancer. In other words, the self that someone is before they undergo the transformative experience can also value who they are. And so- And you don't think one of them is right?
Starting point is 00:45:42 Well, I think that's where the problem is. I mean, sometimes I think you can say one of them is right and one of them is wrong. But going back to having a child case, I actually don't think either of them is objectively right. I don't think there's an objective fact of the matter. I think each self, say there's the self that doesn't want to have children, and then the self that has had children and is very happy that they did. doesn't want to have children and then the self that has had children is very happy that they did i think each self can glory in their own set of values and can and and you know i think it's can can respect their own values and say the values that i have are the ones that i want to have
Starting point is 00:46:15 okay and that there's just no objective fact about which set of values is better like the one the childless person versus the person who never who's a parent or the person who's never had an accident versus the person who is there are i mean we could step back and say the person who's a parent, or the person who's never had an accident versus the person who is. I mean, we could step back and say the person who had the accident, maybe they're living a better life in various ways, and maybe they have a kind of larger measure of happiness. But to tell someone that they should act against their values, as long as they have respectable values, I think isn't really something that we should be doing. their values, as long as they have respectable values, I think isn't really something that we should be doing. What about the possibility of changing one's values deliberately? I mean, this is something that we can do inadvertently just by the ways in which we get educated or
Starting point is 00:46:55 miseducated, the type of company we keep, the sorts of practices we do. But I think we're at some point going to experience a much more direct and intrusive opportunity to change our values. science of the mind, you would be able to pose the question, well, do you want to value X as much as you do? And might you want to remove that value? Are you happy being as compassionate as you are? Would you want to be more compassionate? You want the Dalai Lama's version of compassion? Or would you like to be a little bit more of a sociopath than you are and be super productive? You can have the optimal CEO sociopathy implant, and you'll care less about the consequences of your decisions, but you'll make those decisions knowing that opting for a certain change would change the very basis upon which, would it be good to do that, all the while knowing that the standard by which you would judge its goodness is one of the things that can be changed. Exactly. Yeah. Okay, so this is what, I mean, for me, this is fascinating,
Starting point is 00:48:39 but also very murky territory, and this is the territory of transformative experience as well, right? There's this kind of, it's an endogenous change, basically, that changes the very thing that's sort of at issue. And I don't know. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber-only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support.
Starting point is 00:49:16 And you can subscribe now at SamHarris.org. Thank you.

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