Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas - 85 | L.A. Paul on Transformative Experiences and Your Future Selves

Episode Date: February 24, 2020

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. Support Mindscape on Patreon. 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. Web site Yale web page PhilPeople profile Google Scholar publications Amazon.com author page Wikipedia Twitter

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When you need the right person to cut through the chaos, this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. And listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsor job credit to help get your job the premium status it deserves at Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? This is a job for indeed sponsored jobs. Hello everyone. 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. 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, Lori 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 going to 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 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. The fanciful example that she uses is becoming a vampire, right? You mean, you can ask vampires, how do they like it? And they'll say, sure, we love being very. We love being very.

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. Hey, everyone. It's Cal Penn. I'm the host of Earsay, the

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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 and 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 Minescape community. And with that, let's go. Lori Paul, welcome to the Mindscape podcast. Hi, Sean. It's nice to be here. So we're going to be talking about transformative experiences.

I think this is an unusual slash challenging topic a little bit because unlike, you know, 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? Yeah, and one place, because the phrase transformative experience, has a sort of ordinary interpretation, and that what I want to talk about isn't completely different from that.

It's deeply related to that, but has some important nuances. Yeah, often 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 they're a little more. There's some details that we were going to 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 just give us the elevator pitch for like what we're talking about, and then we can back up and get there in a more detailed way. Okay. So the way that I want to think about transformative experiences are as life-changing experiences,

which is the sort of more ordinary way of thinking about them. But I think we have to be more specific than that because there are lots of life-changing experiences we have that 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, to like a set of very specific, big life changes, and often there 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? Yeah, we're definitely going to talk about the vampire thing.

Okay, all right, all right. So how about I tell you about vampires? Because that's my favorite case. Sure. 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 want to 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 know, you'll be able to have amazing new powers. And you'll look amazing in black. And you'll be one of my legions. And you'll never, you know, you'll be for all important. ways you'll be, you know, relatively immortal. I mean, okay, barring sticks with the heart and such.

Stay late for the day and hell things. 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, you know, why didn't you tell me? So, okay, so after things calm down, you start asking your 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. Some downsides, yeah. Yeah, and they drink blood. And that's kind of gross. And they have no soul or whatever, right? And she tries to tell you about it. And she says, well, you know, when she tries to tell you why she thinks it would be a great thing for you to do, you can't really kind of get the detail you need.

She says, well, it's really amazing. It's really incredible. And then she finally says, after you talk for a bit. But, well, look, you know, 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.

So, and actually, so, okay, you trust your mom and you check around, you text some friends, and you find out, in fact, that actually everybody you know has become a vampire. And pretty much you have the same conversation with everyone else about, well, should I do it? What are the pros and cons? they say there are some pros and there's some cons, but you won'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, 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. Sure. And we can talk about that. But sometimes we have a choice about whether to undergo one. The vampire thing is clearly a very thinly veiled metaphor for having kids. Yes, exactly. Maybe even, yes, exactly, because you're up all night and drained of...

Drain the blood of the innocent. I don't know. Exactly. Exactly. So 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 have 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're 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, a loving attachment bond with the particular child that you produce to really know what it's going to be like to live your life with that child as the parent of that child. 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 puncture or, sorry, they punctuate our lives in various kinds of ways. And so they're like the, you know, I think of as like if you were just watching, like, if you drew a line there would be these like large jumps whenever you had a transformative experience. Like think of it your world line. Like that's where you're going to see lots of variation, right, 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 your purpose. 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 inspect, in fact, some of the most important options. We can't evaluate them in the way that we want to. Right. Which means we can't assess the tradeoffs. we're going to be. We're not something like that. Yeah, two things. One is we don't know the nature of the outcome. And so that means there's a 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, we use 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. Are there degrees of these transformative experiences? 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 scaled up to the person's change. Vampires want different things. Yeah, yeah. They think like tasting, like that blood is, you know, incredibly tasty and has different flavors, presumably. And, you know, I mean,

we can elide the moral question by having it be artificial or, or something like that, but it's still pretty gross. Right. Okay. So that's what we're going to go. We're going to try to figure out what it means to make choices, to rationally deliberate, right, in the presence of these transformative experiences.

So because, so let's put something on the table that everyone can just agree with. Like, what is the ordinary way 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. Okay. All right. So I'm going to go with, I mean, there are lots of different models. And so what I'm trying to do is pick, in some sense, the most ordinary, generic way of thinking about this. So let's say you were trying to figure out which pair of socks to wear one day. 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 going to matter.

For example, what color is your outfit? Will anyone see your socks? I think that's always important. You get away with more. No one's going to see that. Exactly. You can know on the inside that you're wearing Pocodos. But if you're going to the airport and you're going to be taking off your shoes, maybe you might want to – well, it depends on.

on maybe you want to draw attention to yourself. Depends on who you want. 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, and maybe I'll wear the polka dot ones. And each act, you know, you can make a choice. You can choose the red ones. You can choose the polka dot ones.

And each choice you make has a certain value, right? And so you basically, 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. 100% chance. 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? Well, some things do have probabilities involved, right? Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. But I'm simplifying here.

We're going to ignore. Yeah. Because in this case, what's easy is that you know the value of each choice, right, of each outcome. And so what you want to do then is in a very simple sense. You want to choose the option that's going to give you the most value that you want the most that's going to 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 a stake there. Right. That's right. So you're maximizing something. You've been calling it value. We could also call it utility or something like that, right? That's the general.

And you can generalize it to. situations where there's a 50-50 chance of different things happening and the expected values there. Okay. So that's the ordinary rational way of making decisions. Now, is this completely unproblematic even before we get to transformative experiences? You know, I think about, I mean, let me just ask it this way. Is every decision-making process modelable in terms of maximizing some value or utility? No. I mean, it's totally problematic in all kinds of ways. I mean, that's, okay, good. So it's not like, oh, yeah. I mean, there's, and there's a huge amount of debate about whether we can really, well, ordinary people don't act rationally in all

kinds of contexts. That's also true. This model has all kinds of issues with it. I mean, we just were mentioning issues about like the probability of various outcomes happening. There's all kinds of crazy things. Like, what about the radical possibility that, you know, I don't know, that a mysterious new pair of amazing sparkly socks could appear just as soon as I move. There's all kinds of, you know, or whatever.

I mean, 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 instance, 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 infinite, like sort of infinitely small probabilities of crazy things happening that can kind of mess up your decision. That's not what I'm talking about. Since we're talking about transformational experiences, what better time to think about life insurance? I know. Pretty good segue, huh? PolicyGenius is a wonderful way to pick out the life insurance plan that is right for you

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So if you've been thinking about doing this, getting life insurance or getting any other kind of insurance, now would be the time. Don't get discouraged. Look at the different options. Think about what you need. At policy genius.com, it just takes a few minutes to find your best price and apply. It's difficult to know what's going to happen in the future. You might as well get your life insurance right. I guess what I have in mind is

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 just a little bit more and you can't match it you just can't quite afford it and I think that

you know the sort of rational utility maximizing would say well you shouldn't be sad about that because if you had paid more money that would be worse than but you are sad about it because you didn't get the house so somehow like a tiny change in what happens leads to a huge change

in how you're feel about it. So is that a flaw in the rational decision theory kind of stuff? Is that just a flaw in human beings and how they think about the world? 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 reassessment and that 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 or 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.

But are we defining rationality to be that or is it just a true feature of rationality? Well, okay, so there are subtle questions here. I think that, okay, two issues. One is that we want to distinguish between what you might think of as a kind of. kind of normative or kind of objective standard of rationality and then what agents do in particular situations given their given human psychology and like kind of trying to do the best they can in very circumstances that's a kind of more subjective sense of being rational we can come back to that um 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 uh choosing rationally involves maximizing utility or maximizing your expected utility and that um as long as we're doing that

then we're doing something that in some sense approaches like rational action. Right. So you're, 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. Okay. So actually, let me give you a quick definition first. I'll tell you this.

Okay. So when I was talking about these experiences of 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.

Right, but it's not just new information. It's a new way of thinking induced by that new information. 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 like try a new kind of food, and it might just give you new information and it will give you new abilities to imagine food like that. But it doesn't change or restructure, I think, how you think about yourself. Exactly, right.

But when it scales up into what's also a personally transformative experience, again, like becoming a vampire, 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, right, and remember what's really important is that you have to have the experience. So it's like not like someone can tell you in the relevant sense what the experience is going to be like. That's not good enough. That's the super crucial thing. That's the super crucial. You can't just ask somebody else what it's like.

Exactly. Well, they're a vampire and they're going to say, you just won't get it, man. You're just not a vampire. 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 I, 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 the decision-making, because 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 affects you psychologically so much, it changes how you think. And that changes your preferences. So there's this kind of one-two punch that you get when you have a transformative experience. Drinking blood is gross to me now, but it would be awesome to me once I were a vampire. So how do I judge?

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 how, who you're going to 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 going to fit the situation in the right way, like 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. 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 kind of goes unnoticed and relates to how we praise people and blame people and things like that. So I want to talk about it. Well, in the other aspect that seems crucially important here, maybe this is jumping ahead, but that's okay. It's a podcast. 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, quote unquote, my preference.

preferences in the future. Because I could be a different person and how do I define myself over time? Exactly. 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, but making hard decisions, probably it's another important question. Well, that's interesting. We should talk sometime about how this might fit us to the many worlds. 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. You have to define ex-antee for the non-Latens

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 it. And the problem is, is that if I choose to become a vampire, It will change not just like 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, when you're,

think about like when you're trying to test something ordinarily and you want to see, well, if I do this, well, I'll see this effect. And so you tweak one thing and you see if there's a tweak like 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 going to change in between. Yeah.

But in this case, this case of making a transformative choice, right, it's exactly a case where you're choosing an outcome, but you are going to get tweaked, right? As you choose. It's inevitable. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. So the agent is changed, right? 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 have to make the right choice for themselves ex ante. But really what they're doing is making maybe the right choice for themselves ex post after the decision.

Right. I mean, maybe we could just talk at a very elementary level about what it means to be a self over time, right? You know, we're the same atoms, but not exactly because, you know, some atoms we lose, some atoms we gain. 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? 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.

And it just gets ambiguous with ordinary language. But we do change. I get my hair cut. You know, 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 kind of Western context, 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 apparent to be like that. Usually not illegal. Yeah, exactly. I mean, there are moral arguments, but I'm setting some of that aside for the moment. So, like, 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. So, like, for example, if you choose to bring a child into the world, well, then that affects the child. Yeah, exactly.

The other parent is affected. And so the thought is that there's a natural sense in which we think of ourselves, like from the inside as this. kind of, I don't know, consciousness moving forward in time somehow. And we wanted to be relatively continuous. We recognize there are changes, but we wanted to be relatively continuous. And I also think of like 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 going to make it continuous, that we know what we're doing when we're changing it.

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 that just, you know, they make you happy. Like, 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?

Right. 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 want to do that, even though they all say it's a good idea. Is that a good example? 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

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? Yes, please. 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 an opportunity. Mode means an opportunity, right? That's usually for murders, but sure. We can have to do it for having kids too. It's all part of the context here. She just doesn't want to do it, but her parents are like, oh, you'll be so happy as a mother you'll be, you know, to really make you feel like a complete person,

you know, yada, yeah, yeah, the whole story. And she says, look, mom, earlier she was talking about being a vampire with her mom. Now she's talking about like having a kid, right? I see the parents on the playground. They look, you know, with the kids, they look exhausted. 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 want to do this? Yeah. And mom says, well, yeah, yeah, I understand that you're making sacrifices.

But once you become a parent, you'll 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. Right. You know, I mean, it's the descriptive facts on the ground. If they're wrong, then it's easy.

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 thing. But the happy pill stuff, there are kind of cultural reasons why people might want to 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.

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 you just sort of, you know, gather data from a third person perspective? And what you're saying is, you know, that's not quite enough. I mean, the happy pill is 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, whereas it can be a difficult question. That's right.

I mean, if something about the process of becoming transformed makes you value the end process. In a way that your present self doesn't. in a way that your present self doesn't utterly rejects, in fact, 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. me. It changes how we should praise and blame people for the choices that they make, all kinds of

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Terms and conditions apply. Is there, again, probably skipping ahead, but is there a simple answer to this? Is there a prescription you're offering? I'm not good at answers. So I don't, I don't, I mean, I have. have, 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, 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. So the process of changing has an intrinsic value? Something like that. I mean, I don't, I have, I'm still thinking about it. And this was at the end of the discussion of basically developing all of the structure of the transformative experience, but a puzzle in terms of decision making, it seems 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 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. Well, you put it in a language at one point about trying to be empathetic with your future self, right?

I mean, trying to imagine what it would be like. I do want to 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. 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? There's a relationship, but what I did with my work was to take those discussions about

consciousness and tweak them pretty significantly. Because those debates are about whether or not we can kind of make sense or explain from a kind of physical or neural perspective, you know, what it's like or what it's like to have experiences. And what I, I'm not really, I'm not making that kind of argument. I'm not, that's not really my argument. I'm not arguing about physicalism versus pansechism or anything like that. 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 want to like live in a world of color? And. And. 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 like overwhelming and stressful. And there's a way in which like she can't assign value to these different color experiences.

She just doesn't know. She doesn't even have technically like the right kind of phenomenal hypotheses to consider. And so she can't make the decision in a suitably informed way. She just 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 your other selves. Right. It's the same problem, but an intrastile problem. Not even your simple actual future self-help, but you have sort of different alternatives to go down. Yes. Which reminds me, I'm not sure if this affiliated or not, but I did have a fascinating podcast interview with Malcolm McIver 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 onto land. Because when this fish are underground, underwater, 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. Oh, interesting. 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. That's fascinating. And so, but one thing that's really a big part of my work is to say that when we're talking about like life-changing decisions, and especially I just want to go back to context where there are hard tradeoffs to be made. So, I mean, I'm a kind of an academic

one with the career. So I'm a person who that's very salient to because the world is not carved up in a way like for me to make my life. Yeah, right, exactly. And different kinds of people have faced different kinds of this in different ways, you know. And, but if it's not, if the doesn't kind of made, isn't carved up so that it's, the choices are really easier, there are no big tradeoffs, or there's no, like, time to deliberate, then that affects, like, the way that we're thinking about things, obviously. But when, when we really do care about what's going to 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 kind of living and choice making, which sounds like there's an interesting evolutionary connection. Fascinating. When we're in that kind of context is when these sorts of problems become especially salient. Is it valid in this context to even think of ourselves even at one moment of time as a unified self? I mean, 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, they're going to get eaten right away, and it's bad for you, and, you know, so just don't buy them in the first place, right? So, 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? Well, I say, by the way, my weakness is New York Superfudge Chunk,

Ben Jerez. Okay, that's a very good business, yes. 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 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 like what the perfect agent should do in imperfect circumstances. And I think there's research on what imperfect agents should do in perfect circumstances. But that last box of the, it hasn't been filled in, and that's really where I'm targeting the project. So I want to grant that there are all these imperfections that sometimes we just kind of can't help ourselves and do these kinds of things. But I'm not really thinking about those kinds of psychological, 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, like we lack the ability to imagine what we need. Yeah. One favorite example I have is of someone who grows up congenally blind and then has the,

opportunity to like through having a retina operation or something like that to become cited um they might know from actually from testimony from people who've had the operation that they will that they will regret that operation this is something that does happen and yet they might really want to do it um even though there's a really deep sense in which they don't know what it's going to be like and maybe they want to do it because they want to discover like what it's like to see but they might also just be thinking oh i can't you know i know that the nature of my 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. I do feel like there should be, even if we grant that when you change in some transformative way, you have different values, right? You care about different things. Maybe this is wrong, but I want 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? So is there no standpoint outside of the first person perspective where you can say, no, one is just better than the other? Oh, I do think that I don't want to dismiss at all, both the importance of testimony, what we can know in general from kind of science, and also these basic, these facts about kind of quality of life and well-being. So with the heroin addiction case, I think the hard case, by the way, is that the end-of-life cases where there aren't other people depending on you and where you're not going to kind of miss out on various kinds of resources and whether or not you want to become a heroin addict there is a more salient.

Oh, I see. So you've done end of life in terms of whether to end it, but whether to be a heroin addict. I know, you know, if you're like considering by going into hospice or something like that because you have a terminal disease. But so, so I think that like with the way that I want to 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. I'm suggesting that we make it where you carefully evaluate each option and trade off. Wouldn't that be an example of something that we're holding up objectively that, you know, there's a certain transformative experience that takes away our ability to make choices or something like that? 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 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 is, this needs more assessment. I'm 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. with cases of disability, partly because I think that people who have like undergone traumatic accidents or who have, who are just have different kind of physical characteristics from kind of, you know, bog standard ordinary, you know, 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. Is there a strategy for doing better other than just talking to more people and trying to be empathetic? Well, for me, the first strategy is understanding this issue about transformative experience, like not assuming. Like, I think there's a kind of epistemic humility that we need to engage in. So, you know, by thinking, well, I can learn everything I need to know about, like, what it's like to be apparent 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, you know, to pick up. your category, right? 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. But not that first person. No, that first person. And that's, again, just to emphasize it, you know, the mentioning the first person perspective as 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. It's a different thing. Like, yeah, Mary has not seen the color red. So I'm very happy to admit that she does not know what it's like to experience the color red.

And that's all I need to get to go off. I'm off running that. 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 and phenomenology was in the context of the question about consciousness.

Right, okay, good. And that's a very important discussion. And I always loved all the examples like Nagle, Tom Nagle 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 the Black American. I thought there were super cool examples.

But I'm like, look, there's just so much more that's interesting there. Yeah, that's not going to happen to me. Like, I'm not going to be offered the opportunity to become a bat. Yeah, yeah. But I will be offered the opportunity to, you know, change jobs or have a kid. Go to war maybe, like all these kinds of, you know. And end of life questions, I think are incredible. 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. 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 truly just babbling right now. I'm trying to be productive, though. The only thing, okay, so here's the only kind of third way that, that that I have come across that has some potential, but I don't think it's good enough, is thinking about the role of like art. And so there are ways in which we try to communicate.

Like sometimes the whole point of kind of work in artists to communicate something that couldn't be expressed through ordinary testimony and description, right? And sometimes you use language in evocative ways, sometimes use other media in evocative ways. And that's important because it teaches us something about how to experience and value. Often it's like something that we're familiar with and then we can find the art very powerful that way. But sometimes it's what we're not familiar with.

Right. Yeah. And so. It's kind of art can be kind of an empathy pump, right? Yeah. It can sort of help us empathize with people in very different circumstances. Exactly. And to understand things that we, that are kind of, you know, beyond our own individual experience.

experiences. That said, it's not enough. I mean, you know, I can read all of the novels I want about, like, what it's like to be diagnosed with terminal cancer or, you know, watch amazing films about going to war. But if I go to like a Vietnam vet and say, oh, yeah, man, you know, I get it. I know what it was like to be out. You know, they would just laugh at me. Yeah, exactly, exactly. I mean, that would be embarrassing. But it's still the case that I did learn something. So it's complicated. 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? Like 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. Well, so here's an extra thing that we haven't talked about yet, but I think there's this other dimension to what, 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 a happy pill. So sorry, sometimes it is like, you know, you work out. And some people like working out. Others like, okay, it's a slog, but there's some future benefit that is clear. But you're saying that there's even when there's not a clear future benefit, sometimes we do this. 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... I don't even mention some examples here. Well, actually what I'm thinking about, well, parenting is like that, maybe, okay? Or other kinds of... Certain aspects of parenting. Yeah, many aspects of parenting. Well, many, I have two children.

Many aspects of that are like that. But you get a kind of... Parenting does have lots of sorts of... straightforward joy with it. But there are lots of choices we make to, so the happy pill was actually 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. 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 experienced 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 thought, 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 there's suffering there, I still find it kind of more meaningful to live my life that way than the way that in, arguably, it's going to, like, increase my well-being on, like, most ordinary scales. I think that's actually super common, right? People not just with depression, but with bipolar disorder. orders or something like that. They say, yeah, these meds keep me level, but they take away

something of who I was. 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. And this goes back to some of the stuff about disability. So like a blind person who then becomes cited, right, 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 wanting, you know, 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 like well-being. Sometimes there's, 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, you know, 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. Probably another example is autistic people versus neurotypical people and different ways of thinking.

Is it really better or worse or is it just different? Absolutely. How do you know? How could you possibly know? 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're 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. 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 slash skeptics and the possibility of them opening themselves to a sense of the divine and saying that, you know, well, I'll let you say it. How do you put it? 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... Sorry, we should mention...

You have a book out. An academic book, transformative experience. It does talk about these things, if anyone in the audience. Yes, yes. But I don't talk about religious transformation. 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 a strong, like a believer in a particular religious faith, and a strong skeptic, the atheist who's committed to sort of rejecting, you know,

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. It's not relevant. Yeah, it's not right. And argument is not going to convince people. Right. And the skeptic in particular, there's this kind of skeptical stance where the skeptic thinks, well, like, I'm the clear thinker. I'm the one who looks at the ab.

I have no idea what you're talking about. I'm the one who really is, you know, careful and facing the hard facts of reality. and it's the believer who, you know, needs comfort or whatever, right? And so, I mean, I see that point of view, but I'm suspicious of it as a kind of straightforward explanation of how to... And a good self-consistent skeptic should themselves be skeptical of it, suspicious of it. Are we sure we're not fooling ourselves? Exactly, exactly.

You should always be asking yourself that. Exactly. So what I explore in the book is a particular argument 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 census divinitatus. 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. And there are ways that you can awaken this sense of the divine, including, you know, being

kind of out in nature and seeing the beauty of nature and that can awaken our capacity to recognize the divine, like 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 believe. the kind of American advocate of this originally was Jonathan Edwards, was a Protestant theologian. Not the presidential candidate. No, no.

And I'm actually a member of Jonathan Edwards College at Yale, and it was, so I have a special connection there. That was kind of random. But anyway. You don't need to be a Calvinist to be a faculty member of that college. No, no, no. And Alvin Plantiga is a philosopher and theologian who also advocated this. And Edwards talked about the... a sense is 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 find it in Judaism and other, you know, 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. And there's a clear analogy with a blind person choosing to regain their sight. What is like to see a rainbow or something like that or Mary, right? And there's a kind of, what happens is you have, 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. Plantica actually used the example of seeing red for the first time. He must have known what he was doing. Maybe. I mean, he doesn't, I think so, but I'm not sure. He's a professional philosopher. He knew he was, well, when I say, I'm sure he was, he's just, Brilliant. I'm sure that he knew that he, I mean, he was intentionally like harking back to the Jackson example, but I don't think he was thinking in terms of transformative experience explicitly. Although, yeah, I don't know how much.

His work is fascinating. So, but, and what Plantica 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 sensitive natatus. And then you can recognize the evidence of the divine and be moved to faith. So, 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... Sorry, let's just get on the table that it's not about divine persuasion or anything like that. We're both sides are accepting that we should be rational about the evidence. Yes. That's right. It's just matter of which evidence we have. Well, what is what is, 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 sensitive natatus or to the right thing so that your sensitive natatus 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 sensitive natatus 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, you're seeing color for the first time, then you're risking like 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 they can no longer in some sense control how they believe about something, to have an end, through having an experience that they can't actually assess the nature of from within before they do it. And I think these worries seem to make sense whether or not you believe the census divinatus. Divinatus. Divanitate.

No, I can't say it. No, I've ruined it. Let's move on. Okay, let's move on. Whether it's real or whether it's just self-delusion, right? Either way, once you're there, once either God is talking to you or you've convinced yourself God is talking to you, you're convinced. That's right. That's right.

No, well, the whole picture, the argument is supposed to be that once you engage the census 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 thoughtful people who are believers. It's not like taking a drug. It's really not like taking a drug. 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.

It's kind of like there are fitness landscapes to sets of beliefs, right? Like in the big picture, I call 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. Which brings us to Kuhn and theoretical, you know, 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, you know, just as somebody who's totally committed, let's say, to the Newtonian worldview or the Aristotelian, like an Aristotelian perspective on the nature of the external world, right, is just not going to be able to make sense of, let's say, I don't know, a contemporary, you know, picture of reality in terms of, say, quantum mechanics. Right. It's just totally insane from the Aristotelian's point of view. They don't hear the words, yeah.

No, exactly, exactly. And there's a, and we have, 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. Free is great, but only if it's useful. Free credit scores from some apps can differ by as much as 100 points from your actual FICO score that 90% of top lenders use when you apply for a credit card, personal loan, car loan, or mortgage. That can mean a higher interest rate, a bigger monthly payment, or worse. Denied. My FICO gives you your actual FICO score, the score lenders use straight from the company that created it. For the moments that matter, get the score that matters, your FICO score.

Visit MyFICO.com and get started for free today. 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. Disagreements always been there, but there has been a rise in recent decades in polarization in the sense that different political camps beliefs line up. Yes. And then once you're in that world, you don't even see what the other world sees anymore.

I think that there's a direct relationship here. Another one of my Yale colleagues, Zankai. This is Trumpinatus. Okay. That's pretty good. Sorry for bringing us down. Sorry for lowering the tone there. 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 these 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, you know? 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? And that would be changed, 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 a certain way for me, who I am not to want to 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? Like, that just means that I'm not supposed to be open-minded somehow. Right.

And I guess what I'm saying is 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 want to see the perspective of the other side is a certain way in which we, we need to protect our own identities. And so then it's not about the evidence. It's not irrational. Like by the lights of who you are, you're being rational. That's right. There's a rational argument for this kind of refuse to be open-minded.

That's very, I'm not, like, I think that we need to find some other way around it. It's disconcerting. It's disconcerting, but it's important to recognize that that's happening because I think people fail to see. And it might not even be rational. I mean, I mean, it's rational in a certain way, but I think there's a very deep, we grasp the rationality of it at a very deep, like, impulsive level. I probably, I think there is an imbalance. You do say at the end of a very long discussion that, of course, all of this is true also for the point of view of the believer contemplating becoming a skeptic.

Yes. There's a symmetry that way. But there's a little bit of an asymmetry because by the self-proclaimed lights of the skeptic, they do have maybe, 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, that, I just don't want to do that. I know that's wrong. So like there is a little bit of an asymmetry there.

I see. I see. No, that's a good point. I don't have to think about that some more because I think there might be other asymmetries on, 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 going to trump even your kind of high-minded commitment to evaluating different perspectives. As a practical matter, sure. Yeah, well, and that's, and I'm interested here 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, like, you know, seeking divine truth. I think that they might, they might have to say.

If you're truly committed, then you should be able to go out and risk, like, you know, viewing the same. skeptical point of view and be able to come back. But then I'm not sure. Maybe it'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. Yes. No, I think that is part of what, that is very much part of what I want to say. And again, just bring it back to the practical. I feel like this is this kind of epistemic humility question. And we need. need to be clear about these constraints that we face as we don't have a gods eye point of

view. We can't take a gods eye point of view. And sometimes, see, I think sometimes until like analytic philosophers, one, intellectuals, we think of ourselves as like being able to take a God's eye or objective point of view. Yeah. And I think, certainly. Yes. And yeah, well, philosophers as well. And it's, it doesn't mean like, it's not that, oh, I think that that's a mistake. And it's not a, and sometimes there's this attitude, well, if you can't think about these things clearly, it's because you're kind of stupid or something. Or you're limited somehow. It's like, well, you know what? Maybe we're epistemically limited as human beings, but it's not about like intelligence. It's like, it's about our capacities to know things that we have an experience,

just the way the brain works. Yeah. Yeah. And you, you seem to make a great effort of not being too judgy or prescriptive here, right? 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 prescriptions for overcoming these difficulties? I mean, you know, a lot of my work actually in some ways is very personal, like even though I try to kind of be very abstract. And I actually, I'm a self 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 like 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, you know, against abortion.

Because I have two children, I love them dearly. I really do think that there's a frightening argument involved about, you know, ending, you know, 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 by people that 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's important to recognize that. Yeah, I mean, I think this is a good sort of takes me to what the last time I want 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? Like, 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 got to act in some way. Right. 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? 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, you know, as we live our lives, we change in these radical ways. We have the chance to replace our current self with new selves.

Sometimes we do that. Sometimes we don't get to choose and it just happens. And that that's part of what living life involves, that and that we should care about the nature of lived experience for ourselves. others and not pretend that it doesn't matter. I think that's also part of what, like, and recognize sometimes when we're trading off well-being for, as in other words, when we're making choices to suffer. And this is for me, like philosophy isn't, it's 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, like, 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. Yeah, I mean, it relates very clearly in my mind to questions of how to be moral if you're a naturalist and an anti-realist as I am, right? You know, I can say sentences and I can and do believe them of the form, you know, 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, you know, construct a moral code for ourselves. But there is a foundational problem, like where they come from. If they were, 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, like, I can become a different person because of something that happens to me. It's not becoming scarier and scarier. You're making my life harder, Lori. I know. I'm sorry. That's my job. I'm a philosopher.

But do you find, I mean, is there any, you know, 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? 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. That's, it's a, it's a different take.

It's a humility slash honesty thing again. Yes. And then doing the best we can. Doing the best we can. That's a good message. We always like to leave. 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? 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 epistemote, like the structure of what we can, what agents are cases.

capable of how the human brain works, you know, what we can expect from people and what we can't expect from people. All right. Something to chew on. Okay. Lori Paul, thanks so much for being on this podcast. Deadlines move. Plans change.

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