#327 — Transformative Experiences
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Summary
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, and the philosophy of mind. She's tended to focus on questions about the nature of the self, preference change, subjective value, temporal experience, causation, and perception, among others. And her most recent book is titled " Transformative Experience." In this conversation, we talk about how transformative experiences can change the self in ways that can't be understood unless that change occurs. We discuss: What is transformative experience? Why is it important to understand it? What does it mean to be a "transcendent experience"? How does it relate to our understanding of the world and the world around us? And why is it so important to know what it means to have a "Transcendent Experience?" And how can we begin to understand the concept of transformative experience as something that can be understood in terms of a particular context? Is it possible to have such a thing as a "transformative experience?" And what does it have to do with the world, and how does it differ from our own experiences? How can we know that we can have such things as a transformative experience from the ones we have in the world? This episode is part 1 of a two-part conversation about what transformative experience is? The second part of this conversation will be posted on the Making Sense Podcast, where we will cover the first part of the conversation, and where we go from here? Thanks for listening to this episode! If you're interested in learning more about L.A. Paul's work and what she's working on the process of making sense of the "trans transformative experience" and why it matters so much more? Please consider becoming a supporter of the making sense podcast? We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore, we're made possible entirely through the podcast by the support of our subscribers are made possible by the podcasting service, making possible entirely by the supporter of our podcast, by the maker of the podcast - Sam Harris). Thank you, Sam Harris. I hope you enjoy what we're doing here, too consider becoming one of you, too become a member of The Making Sense Podcatcher. I'm making sense, I'll hear you, you'll need to subscribe to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content.
Transcript
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Lori Paul is the Millstone Family Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Cognitive Science
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Her main research interests are in metaphysics, cognitive science, decision theory, and the
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She's tended to focus on questions about the nature of the self, preference change, subjective
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value, temporal experience, causation, time, perception, among others.
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And her most recent book is titled Transformative Experience.
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And that was really our focus in this conversation.
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We talk about the nature of transformative experiences, how they change the self that has
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had the experience, often ways that can't be understood unless that change occurs.
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We discuss the nature of regret, changing belief systems, conspiracy thinking, empathy, doing
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good in the world, our relationship to our future selves, what it might mean to change our
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values, the nature of possibility, the ethics of punishment, moral luck, the moral landscape,
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So, just we were talking before we started recording here about your name.
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If people want to find your writing, it is under L.A. Paul, but I will call you Lori.
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Can you summarize your background as a philosopher?
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So, I got my Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton in 1999, working in the area of metaphysics with
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the philosopher David Lewis, and I love metaphysics.
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And I focus on the nature of causation, but I also do a lot of work on time and how we
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experience ourselves in time and how we understand and manipulate the world around us.
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And I spent about, I'd say, the first half of my career thus far, last sort of 12 years,
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or the first 12 years, focusing on those, on sort of deep metaphysical questions and
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what the nature of reality, in particular, the kinds of things that you can't sort of
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directly see, like time and cause and also the nature of the self.
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And after, I don't know, sort of exploring those topics for a while, I turned to exploring
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the way that we understand ourselves in the world, and there's a sort of natural progression
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there, and started working on, in particular, how we understand ourselves through distinctive
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kinds of experiences and how, and sort of use, there's a framework involving decision
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theory that I have often used because if you try to embed these questions in a framework
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like decision-making, all kinds of interesting questions come out.
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So it's a way of sort of, I don't know, kind of pulling apart something that seems maybe
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simple on the surface and realizing there's a lot of complexity underneath.
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Well, I was introduced to your work through what you've written and said on the topic of
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And I thought we'd focus on that, but I love the connection to David Lewis, and I would
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love to talk about the nature of possibility and causation and all of the metaphysics there
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I hadn't thought we would talk about that, but that's, did you hear my conversation with
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And I should say that these topics are intimately related.
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I'm working on a book now, actually, that brings out some of those deeper connections,
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We can just view it from different perspectives.
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So let's start with the transformative piece and then hit all the metaphysics you might
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Because I think the, yeah, I mean, we'll just, we'll see where we go, but it's all fascinating.
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So this phrase transformative experience, what do you mean by that?
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So I use the phrase transformative experience in part, you can think of it as a bit of a pun
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on what people ordinarily think of as transformative experience.
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So the kind of ordinary meaning is some kind of, wow, amazingly, you know, change-filled experience
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And I mean that too, but I mean something a little bit, maybe more kind of philosophically
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I mean that when you face a transformative experience, you're facing an experience that at once you
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can't know in important, essential details what it's going to be like.
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And also that it is going to change you fundamentally.
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It's going to destroy some part of the self that you are now and recreate you by, you know,
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It's really important that both those things happen together.
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Well, I guess let's ground this in some canonical life decisions that are, that tend to be transformative
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My first thought is something like having kids, you know, perhaps you have a favorite, but let's
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So, so you've touched on one of my two favorite examples.
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And so I think that for people who haven't had children, when someone becomes a parent,
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that often that really is a transformative experience.
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It's not that everyone has a transformative experience in virtue of like producing and adoption
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Although I often just talk about physically producing a child, but the process of attaching
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to the child, which is, I think, crucial for becoming a parent.
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It's a kind of psychologist will describe this as an identity defining and identity changing
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It changes in the way that I said before, the self that you are.
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And I think many people before they become parents, or if they're deliberating or maybe
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agonizing or ruminating about, well, maybe they'll become a parent.
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They know, you know, something dramatic and big is going to happen to them.
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And they know in essentials, like you're going to have a baby or you're going to adopt a child
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And then there's a sense in which they absolutely do not know.
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And only when they actually become a parent, when they actually form this attachment relation
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to this other being, will they both experience the change that's involved and also then in virtue
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of experiencing that change, understand the nature of that experience.
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So I could say more about that, but that's a big one.
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Well, it seems like these kinds of experiences pose a certain kind of challenge to rational
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decision-making because the decider is in advance of making the decision.
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And then if you decide to have this experience, you will become somebody quite different.
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And you may, in fact, know that in advance, right?
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But you know that the person who will be judging the consequences of having made a certain decision
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will be different from the person who is deciding whether or not to take, you know, one branch
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And so to take the decision to become a parent as the example here, I'm imagining that very
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few people ever regret having kids, even if the person they were before they had kids would
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have judged the outcome to be less than desirable, right?
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There's something beautiful about the kind of human psyche that allows that to happen.
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But let me back up for a second, if you don't mind.
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So imagine you're thinking about, well, if you're deliberating about whether you want
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So for at least a kind of standard version of rational decision theory, there's a process
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you're supposed to undergo where you map out your options, you look at the different values,
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like the value of having a child, the value of not having a child.
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And then you think about, well, which option is going to maximize my happiness or my life
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And a natural way that you think about doing this is you imaginatively kind of evolve yourself
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into, well, here I am with my baby or here I am, you know, hiking the world or whatever,
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like crossing, you know, crossing amazing vistas, child-free, you know, living my life
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And then you have to sort of compare these options to decide, because each one involves
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trade-offs and you can't do both, which one is going to be better for you?
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And when I had said before that the complex thing about transformative experience, as I
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understand it, is that first there's a dimension of the experience that you can't kind of grasp
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for yourself, in addition to the personal change that you just described, there's a problem
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because then you can't reliably, you know, envision the self that you're going to become
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or and understand the process that's going to make you into that new self.
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So if, you know, if you're sure you want to become a parent, well, maybe it's not such
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You know, yeah, as you said, you know, you'll be happy most likely afterwards.
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We should come back to that, by the way, because there's something really interesting and
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But if you're not sure, then what are you going to do, right?
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Like you can and you can then go and get evidence, like find out about, you know, what other people
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have said and done and ask your mother and that sort of thing.
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But that evidence is all about, you know, what people think after they've gone through the
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But if they've changed as a result of going through the experience, then there's a certain
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If you're not sure, say you really don't want to have a child or you're kind of inclined
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against and you go and you ask your your mom and she says, oh, no, you'll be so happy if
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You might think, well, fine, but that's because my brain will have been changed.
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Like, you know, I mean, I'll be changed into a different kind of person.
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You know, it's like I'm mentally kidnapped and sure, I know that parents are really happy,
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but I don't want that kind of that kind of mental magic worked on me.
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The self that you are who's trying to evaluate these things first maybe doesn't have the
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same desires as the self that you would become.
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And you can't even kind of imaginatively put yourself in the shoes of that other being,
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that other self that you could become to kind of evaluate what it would be like.
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Now that I think about it, I'm wondering if regret is also rare and perhaps even equally
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rare on the side of the people who don't have kids and who haven't had kids by choice,
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As opposed to just kind of a failure of opportunity.
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There are obviously people who really want to have kids and it just never happens for
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But there are people who decide they don't want to have kids.
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And I guess I would imagine they experience probably a vanishingly small rate of regret
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I don't know if there's any research on this, but so how do you think about regret in light
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So I think for me, what I immediately think of is regret.
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What is the regret or absence of it evidence of?
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You might think, oh, if you don't regret your decision, that's evidence that you made the
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Maybe you made the right decision for the self that you are, but there's maybe a larger
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sense in which it's kind of incoherent to say, I made the right decision for me because
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there's the right decision for you afterwards and there's the right decision for you beforehand.
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And so like when, like, so, okay, so I have two children.
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I remember my mother saying to me, wow, I never really expected you to have children.
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But, you know, is my happiness the result of me knowing all along I wanted to have children?
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It's actually that the process of forming this attachment relation to both of my children made
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There's a kind of circularity here that's absolutely what some of these experiences involve.
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But there's no way I can even access the person or the self that I would have been if I had never
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And I think she also might have been perfectly happy to live her life the way that, you know,
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And we think, oh, you know, who she is or would have been, wouldn't have been happy with children.
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And I think it's, there's a, whether in fact it's a real fundamental change in what one
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values and one sense of what is good, or if it's a psychologically protective mechanism
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of just not wanting to admit in the case where one would still could regret this life decision,
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given that it's irrevocable and that so much turns on one's kind of averting one's eyes
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from the dark reality that you, you in fact do regret having kids or not having kids, you
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know, it's easy to see why one would, wouldn't want to be keenly aware of that moment to moment.
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But there are simpler cases where we experience a, actually we can experience the full tour.
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So you take something like, you know, eating ice cream, right?
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Where you want to be on a diet, you want to lose weight, you don't want to eat ice cream,
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but when presented with ice cream, you actually want to eat that ice cream.
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And so the person whose willpower is overcome and who decides to eat ice cream and who's enjoying
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the ice cream while eating it gets to experience the full tour of, of not want you having the
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meta desire of not wanting to want the ice cream, wanting it, enjoying it, and then later
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You know, there's a strange picture of what the self is and what personal identity is all
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about when one experiences that full tour, but that's different than the transformative.
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I mean, it's a transiently transformative experience.
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Maybe that falsifies the concept, but one can experience this fluctuation between being the
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person who is inhabiting a, a kind of a higher order desire.
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And then, then the person who you're the person who gives into a lower order desire, which
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nonetheless is sincere in the moment and its satisfaction is no less pleasurable.
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But then after the fact, one boomerangs back to the, the higher order desire and wishes one
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So, I mean, I think that the way to maybe pull these apart a little bit is, is to say,
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I want to focus on whatever, like the highest order values are.
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And so the ice cream case, it might be that there's a difference between like all along,
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you kind of wish you weren't, you know, that you don't want to be someone who's eating the
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ice cream and then you kind of give in and you eat the ice cream and it's fabulous and you're
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And then afterwards, once the enjoyment is over, it's like, Oh God, why did I do that?
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That would, might be a bit different from say someone who is like an, an addict, like,
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like someone who's in the throes of an addiction might have something where even like their higher
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order valuing, you know, involves like wanting the, like the willing at someone who's just
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like embracing their drug addiction versus someone who then later on rejects the appeal
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There you might actually get someone who all of their values, their highest order values
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And that, that might be in a case of someone kind of transforming and transforming and transforming
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in the sense that in the, in the way that I'm trying to articulate for maybe more minimal
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I mean, religious experience might be one of those cases where somebody converts or loses
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And so, and that's, I think is a, is a transformation and then they can revert.
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And I think there, if, you know, if you're fully believing or fully not believing, then,
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you know, you're kind of consistent up and down the, the hierarchy of values.
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How do you think about this in terms of knowledge and belief and just epistemology?
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So we have the experience of changing one's beliefs in response to evidence, but many of us
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have an experience of deciding not to entertain certain ideas or expose ourselves to certain
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images because we have prejudged that, you know, either it's a waste of time or we actually
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don't want to become the person we would be if we spent all the time exposing ourselves
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I mean, I'm thinking this, I guess this can be an expression of cognitive bias or wishful
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thinking or cognitive closure in a way, but it can also just be an expression of, of
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Like the, the instances where I know I've done this is, uh, I recall, I, I know at the
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time I was very focused on issues of terrorism and, and religious sectarianism and its consequences.
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And, and yet I decided that I didn't want to see the decapitation videos produced by the
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I was super focused on the issue, but I just decided I didn't need those images in
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my head because I was protecting myself from being the person who then had those images
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There are other cases where, you know, if I have to take a certain medication, I will
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decide that I actually don't want to study the list of side effects, right?
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Because I've decided generically that, that I need to take this medication.
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And I, I know in the abstract that all of the side effects are, are low enough probability
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And I think I'm better served not actually, you know, priming the nocebo effect in my case
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So perhaps there are other examples of this sort of thing.
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How do you think about deciding to have certain information or not and the ways in which this
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can either be productive or, or go awry when we were actually closing ourselves off to evidence
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and ideas that, that are true and would be useful to know?
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So, I mean, I think there are, there are appropriate times to, right, protect yourself from, let's
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say, having a cognitive bias in the way that you are, you know, these, these images and
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other kinds of things, which are actually intended to manipulate in various ways.
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The connection to transformative experience is that if the problem is, if, if you can't
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actually, so when you think about like, I don't want to see an image, a particular image,
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you know enough about it to know how you're going to react and to know that, well, actually
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So you make, I think, a good judgment to, to set that aside so that you're not, you know,
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But what if you don't know about the nature of the experience?
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And there's no kind of higher order evidence that's going to tell you either way.
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This I think can be a way to understand the questions about religious belief, because
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there's no sort of independent way of ascertaining whether or not the deity in question exists.
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And those that are advocates of, of the belief will argue that the evidence is all around
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And those that are opponents of the belief will say, no, there's no evidence.
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And then if, if the way to being able, learning how to grasp that evidence involves opening
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your mind to the possibility of having an experience, but where you as the, like would,
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you know, fear that this experience could corrupt you, then you have a problem because
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you don't know about the nature of the experience independently.
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And to discover the nature of the experience involves a kind of corruption.
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I think the nice thing about for Ulysses was that the insanity that he experienced when
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hearing the song of the sirens was temporary, but in this kind of case, it wouldn't be temporary.
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So what I'm saying is I think it can be perfectly rational to set aside evidence, so-called
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evidence, and perfectly rational to try to control various kinds of options when you
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know enough about them, but I'm really interested in cases where we don't know and the, because
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it's transformative, it can kind of work on you at the highest level, right?
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And transform the way that you regard the nature of reality, for example.
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That's, I think, I think psychedelics involves that possibility.
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I think religious belief involves that possibility.
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I think possibly certain kinds of love could involve that kind of possibility.
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Maybe even questions about the border of sanity and insanity, which is kind of a fascination
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Yeah, there's one, as a social phenomenon, I'm noticing the consequences of conspiracy thinking
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and the social contagion component of that, and also the quasi-religious aspect of sunk cost
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with respect to having just spent so much time down any one of those rabbit holes.
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I see people whose, you know, podcasts or newsletters or books just become a testament to how much
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time they've spent entertaining certain ideas, and it seems like it's becoming harder and
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harder for them to step out of it because, again, in part it's got to be the fallacy of sunk cost
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or the perceived reputational harm of recognizing that they've just wasted a tremendous amount
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But it's also just the style of thinking that gets inculcated there where none of them are
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There's a style of connecting random anomalies without an underlying theory that is coherent.
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You know, it's just, and you can always find more anomalies, so it just, it becomes self-perpetuating
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And so, yeah, it could be rational to decide in advance, okay, spending my time and attention
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in a certain way could erode some of the epistemic values I actually want to be anchored to.
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And so you do have a Ulysses and the Mast kind of decision in advance where it's like,
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yes, there's a siren song that I may want to hear, but if I'm going to hear it, I need
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to at least maintain my purchase on something now that I know, you know, as a kind of meta
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norm I'm going to want to stay attached to no matter what happens in the intervening hours.
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Yeah, but the problem is, I mean, I think that sounds right.
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The problem is, what if the siren song is so seductive that you lose your attachment to
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I take it conspiracy theories are often that the whole idea is open your mind to this possibility
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and then what happens is that people lose, they lose a kind of control over the other
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How do you think about empathy in this context or just taking the perspective of other people
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I mean, just what, how does it, how does that fit in?
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I think with a lot of the things that I like to think about, I think there's a lot to say
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I do think that affective empathy, so just feeling what others feel is a really good source
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And Paul Bloom has written on this, I think, really, really well.
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But that's different from cognitive empathy, which is, you know, technically, I guess,
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is a kind of empathy where you aren't just kind of randomly opening yourself up to the
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feelings of others, but rather in a kind of reasoned way, you attempt to kind of enter
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into the perspective of the other and attempt to represent their beliefs and their emotions
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and other, and their mindset, but without kind of losing yourself in it.
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And again, though, the kinds of problems that we're talking about, I think they're right
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here, because if you really are opening your mind to someone else and really are kind of
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empathizing with them, even if, you know, you're trying to do so in a kind of cognitively
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careful way, I see the possibility for losing yourself in that.
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And I think that does happen sometimes to people.
00:25:28.200
Yeah, yeah, there's kind of an adjacent issue for me that I've resolved very much in the way
00:25:34.800
that Ulysses resolved his problem with philanthropy, because I just know that the kinds of causes
00:25:42.120
that really tug at my heartstrings are not the kinds of causes that tend to survive a truly
00:25:48.940
rational analysis about how you can do the most good in the world.
00:25:53.360
And there's really, they basically don't even overlap, you know, the causes that I can
00:25:58.040
rationally identify as the most efficient and reliable ways to mitigate human suffering or
00:26:07.300
Those are almost, without exception, less compelling to me than any cause that has a, you know, a
00:26:15.420
single identifiable victim and a good story and something that just really drives my altruism
00:26:23.300
and compassion circuits in a very, you know, social primate sort of way.
00:26:28.600
So the classic example here is, you know, one little girl falls down a well.
00:26:33.220
We have endless interest and availability to pay attention to that.
00:26:37.680
We, you know, the CNN does 72 hours of continuous coverage of the story.
00:26:42.640
But, you know, at the same moment, there's probably a genocide raging in sub-Saharan Africa,
00:26:47.620
and it's just a matter of statistics and nobody cares, right?
00:26:51.620
You can hear about 500,000 dead, and it's just too boring to even allocate 10 minutes in a
00:26:58.540
So just knowing that, you know, I just decide in advance to give to the causes that I can
00:27:07.260
And then anything I give to other causes that are more compelling emotionally, I just do that
00:27:13.340
over and above what I've allocated in advance to the rational one.
00:27:17.940
So it's, it is a sort of have your cake and eat it too strategy, but it's, you know, I have
00:27:22.780
the rational priorities front-loaded in that paradigm.
00:27:28.020
So I agree with this, but I want to, I want to say one thing, and that is that in these kinds
00:27:33.260
of discussions, I think it's really important to see that the rational calculus needs to include
00:27:41.960
Because it can be the thing, so I agree with what you're saying.
00:27:45.700
It's just that sometimes I think people can think about a rational calculus in a kind of
00:27:52.260
And I mean that in the sense of like, take AI, which is not sentient and, you know, lacks any
00:27:59.360
You know, you could perform a mathematical calculation, one that doesn't account for the feelings and
00:28:07.420
Your example was great because it's like the experiences of one little girl versus the
00:28:14.060
I don't remember the number that you, that you mentioned.
00:28:16.660
And obviously then we're comparing experiences to experiences.
00:28:20.480
So I guess what I'm trying to say is it's really important to not remove the human element from
00:28:27.200
Because otherwise it becomes like a mathematical calculation versus a kind of a gut emotion.
00:28:31.000
And I just don't think that's the right, that's the false opposition.
00:28:33.300
I think it's, it's, it's really that in both cases, there's an enormous amount of pain and
00:28:38.700
It's just that we can comprehend the smaller amount in a way that we can't, you know, can't
00:28:45.020
We can represent it, but there's a way you can't imagine it.
00:28:47.320
And that's just a limitation of the human brain.
00:28:50.500
So I guess it's just an acceptance of that limitation in advance.
00:28:55.040
Because what I noticed is despite my efforts to make doing good psychologically and emotionally
00:29:02.460
salient, I think we run up against an intrinsic limitation to that because, you know, so much
00:29:10.000
of our doing good philanthropically is by definition telescopic, right?
00:29:15.320
Like you, you write a check and you send it to an organization that's doing the work.
00:29:19.120
You have no face-to-face encounter with any of it.
00:29:22.680
And yet it is, it is just in fact real that that check and the organization funded by it
00:29:29.180
is doing the, the best work say that can be done on the, on that particular front and that
00:29:35.140
you're giving to that cause really does matter.
00:29:37.520
And yet I just noticed in my day-to-day life that the thing that is going to brighten my day
00:29:43.200
is not going to be sending a check of whatever size to the best possible organization.
00:29:49.960
It might just be this random and altogether brief encounter with a, with a stranger in
00:29:56.280
I mean, literally like, I mean, the example I've used before is, I did actually notice this
00:30:03.100
I noticed that just like holding the door open for a stranger at a Starbucks and just,
00:30:09.100
you know, sharing a mutual smile was more important in the psychological change it created
00:30:16.460
in me than having given, you know, a rather large donation to an obviously good cause within
00:30:26.540
So, and yet I know I did much more good in the world making that donation than, than holding
00:30:32.860
But given that these are just sort of bugs in our, in our psychological and moral makeup,
00:30:38.060
this is the kind of thing that Adam Smith pointed out, you know, where he said that,
00:30:42.100
you know, if someone knew they were going to lose a tip of their pinky finger the next
00:30:45.960
day, they wouldn't sleep a wink that night for, you know, ruminating on it.
00:30:50.860
But if that same person heard that an entire generation of people was annihilated by an
00:30:55.320
earthquake in China, you know, they might give it just a, you know, a few minutes thought
00:30:59.220
and then move on to what they're going to have for dinner.
00:31:01.820
So it's just that mismatch is something that I think we just, if we can change it, it'd be
00:31:06.240
wonderful, but we just, if we can't change it, we just need to figure out how to navigate
00:31:09.880
around it and do the most good we can on the one hand, but also be as happy and, you know,
00:31:17.540
and flourish as much as we can psychologically and socially on the other by whatever means
00:31:30.640
It's the, the trouble is that there's this gulf between the kind of concrete, the concrete
00:31:36.540
exchange with another human being that we can have that involves the way that we experience
00:31:42.300
And then the much more abstract kind of good that we can do that propagates, propagates
00:31:47.100
through like a long causal chain where there's no kind of direct contact with any of the human
00:31:54.720
There's, you know, if we're, if we're looking at how much good one can do, and we think we
00:31:59.820
can measure that from our feelings, or if we're also just looking at what's going to motivate
00:32:05.000
us in various ways, there's a mismatch there in either, in either case, right?
00:32:09.200
Like it's, it's hard to detect how much good you're doing in the experiential sense when
00:32:15.400
there's a long causal chain between what you do and then the final output when the, what some
00:32:20.360
percentage of that money makes it what its way to the intended recipients.
00:32:24.260
And not only that, but you don't get to, you don't get any kinds of, you don't feel
00:32:29.520
Like if there's no kind of direct exchange whatsoever, I mean, if you were confronted with the people,
00:32:34.840
right, and you know, that, that would be an entirely different kind of experience and
00:32:41.000
And knowing that it might be wise to have the transformative experience of leveraging that
00:32:50.180
So like, for instance, I can be telescopically philanthropic.
00:32:54.760
I can just write a check to help solve a famine in some distant country, or I could decide to
00:32:59.780
get on a plane and just confront the, the reality of that famine face to face and write the same
00:33:06.860
check, but also be the person who had the experience of witnessing these human events directly.
00:33:12.540
I can know in advance that that would be, that would be much more impactful and it would be a much
00:33:18.420
closer marriage thereafter when I was, you know, when I was writing a check, my connection to the
00:33:23.760
good I was doing or intending to do would be, it'd be much more salient having met the people or some
00:33:35.140
So we're talking about causal chains between ourselves and other people.
00:33:39.460
But part of the work that I've been doing is, is saying that, look, just as we can
00:33:45.080
understand, there are all these problems with our relationships with other people, understanding
00:33:48.720
how they feel and act and think. And again, these kinds of sometimes long chains of causes and
00:33:55.500
events between us, that same kind of structure can exist between yourself and other selves, both past
00:34:02.400
selves and also future selves or even merely possible selves. So some of the things that you're raising,
00:34:07.940
those problems I think are reflected back into even like individual lives.
00:34:13.160
Can you say more about that? How do you, how do you think about one's relationship to one's past
00:34:21.940
Well, so think about something that you're doing now. It's going to have through a long chain of
00:34:26.660
events, most likely an impact on the future, Sam, maybe 10 or 15 years from now. And there's a sense in
00:34:35.920
which that's a very remote effect, right? In fact, we do things like we throw our future selves under
00:34:41.980
the bus all the time. Like when you agree to do something unpleasant for someone, if they're smart,
00:34:45.600
they're going to ask you to do it like in the future, maybe six months from now, rather than
00:34:50.500
six minutes from now. Because when it's six months from now, that future self just seems quite remote.
00:34:56.840
It's like, it's like those people on the other side of the world, as opposed to the person,
00:34:59.780
you know, the self that's going to be existing six minutes or even six hours from now is much
00:35:05.580
Although I must say I'm getting much better at saying no to those things. I actually now consciously
00:35:10.500
think, okay, if this thing were happening tomorrow, would I be saying yes or no? And if the answer is
00:35:15.480
no, it doesn't matter if it's six months or six years, I'm going to say no to it at this point.
00:35:20.420
That's the right thing to do. So that's like navigating it. But you see that the point is that
00:35:26.060
the closeness or distance, like we rely on what we kind of experience and feel and project a lot
00:35:32.560
of times when making decisions. And what you realize is, oh, wait a minute, we shouldn't rely
00:35:36.080
on that. Or at least we can rely on it if we can model it in the right way to give the right response,
00:35:40.940
as opposed to kind of just neglecting that difference.
00:35:45.440
Yeah. Well, so we're not strictly rational with respect to how we discount the importance of our future
00:35:52.160
states of self. Because there's nobody who has a greater opportunity to ensure the happiness of
00:36:01.360
your future self than your current self does. I mean, you really have just an enormous amount of
00:36:07.240
control over your future health and your future wealth and your future happiness, your future
00:36:12.420
relationships. And yet, you know, it's all too common for us to hyperbolically discount the
00:36:19.300
significance of all of all of those effects. And to have just a much shorter term concern for
00:36:26.400
our pleasures and pains and just what we value over time is just, as you say, it's just very hard
00:36:33.920
to think about oneself 10 years hence or beyond that.
00:36:39.700
One thing that's really interesting is like, I think that when you think about yourself 10 years from
00:36:43.320
now, you think about it yourself differently from if you think about yourself 10 seconds from now.
00:36:47.940
Like, it feels different. Like, so if I think about myself 10 seconds from now, I'm going to imagine,
00:36:53.100
I don't know, maybe like, you know, I might have a sense of how I'm feeling or I might imagine the scene
00:36:59.280
like from my first person perspective here, like from what I can see. But if I, like, you know, from a
00:37:04.200
GoPro camera kind of vantage point. But if I imagine myself 10 years from now, I think of like, it's like I have
00:37:10.520
a camera on the situation and I can see myself there like performing some task. But that's like I'm observing
00:37:15.780
myself. I'm not occupying the perspective that I'm in right now. It's rather that I there's this kind
00:37:21.160
of distance that's encoded into that representation. And I think that's really weird and really
00:37:26.020
interesting. And I think it affects the way that we that we think about things. And it might come
00:37:31.660
back to in there's I think there's a relationship there between what we were talking about before,
00:37:35.820
which is when someone's like someone's pain is like very close to you, like it's in proximity with
00:37:41.160
you. You can understand it and make sense of it and respond to it in a way that you can't when
00:37:47.060
there's this like, it's like you're viewing it through the, you know, through a telescope or
00:37:51.160
Do you recall Derek Parfit's thought experiment about that meant to highlight the strangeness of
00:37:58.280
future bias? He talked about somebody who found himself in a hospital, either awaiting surgery or
00:38:05.720
recovering from surgery, and the nurse couldn't tell him whether or not he had had a extremely
00:38:10.980
painful surgery or would soon have a, a more normal surgery and she had to go look up his
00:38:15.760
chart. Do you remember this thought experiment?
00:38:18.220
Yeah. So what's interesting there, I recently spoke about this on the podcast, but maybe I'll,
00:38:23.180
I'll just revisit it for those who didn't hear it. Because I can't, as with many of Parfit's
00:38:28.840
puzzles, I'm not always sure whether it's really is a puzzle or whether it's a kind of pseudo
00:38:34.820
puzzle, but a little bit like Zeno's paradoxes of motion. But, you know, here he would, he seemed
00:38:41.840
to be remarking on how arbitrary it seems that we care so much about the future and so little
00:38:48.860
about the past. And it might be more strictly rational simply to care about all of our experience
00:38:56.120
in the aggregate, just like the whole area under the curve of phenomena. And, and to be timeless
00:39:02.280
with respect to how we, how we weighed its value. And so the, his thought experiment here
00:39:07.280
is that, you know, someone is, is in a hospital, they just woke up, they're not sure whether
00:39:11.780
they are going to get a surgery or have they, they've already had it and they don't remember
00:39:15.840
it. But the two surgeries on offer is, you know, one of two things is possible. Either
00:39:20.400
they had a, an absolutely harrowing protracted surgery that they don't remember because they,
00:39:27.340
they were given an amnesic drug afterwards. So they were, they were, they were in fact
00:39:31.280
tortured for 10 hours, but their memory was wiped clean, but they, they did in fact have
00:39:37.560
that lived experience of torture, or they're going to have a more normal operation in the
00:39:42.980
future. And if, if you had asked them on the previous week, which would you rather have?
00:39:48.920
Let's say they, the present moment is on Tuesday. If you'd asked them that, you know, the previous
00:39:53.480
Friday, you can be tortured for 10 hours and have this awful experience and then have your
00:39:57.400
memory erased, or you can have a normal procedure with normal anesthesia, which would you want?
00:40:03.560
Well, they absolutely want the normal one, let's say on Wednesday, rather than the torture
00:40:09.720
on Monday. But if you wake them on Tuesday and they're given a choice of either having
00:40:15.880
gone through this thing they can now no longer remember, which was bad, or they have, they
00:40:21.760
yet have this more normal, but still unpleasant procedure in their future. Well, they're going
00:40:27.440
to want, they're going to wish they had the thing in the past that was awful and worse,
00:40:31.580
because what people really care about is happiness or suffering in the future. It's enormously more
00:40:39.040
important what's coming rather than what's in the rear view mirror. And he thought that was kind of
00:40:44.920
weird. I'm not, yeah, what do you think about that? So, I hate to say it, but with all due respect
00:40:51.120
to Derek Perfett, I think he was kind of weird. I mean, he was brilliant, he was a brilliant philosopher,
00:40:56.100
but okay, so I have views about this. And so, what I think is that there's this kind of objective
00:41:02.540
perspective that a metaphysician takes, where they're just looking at what exists. And if you're
00:41:08.760
interested in the value of a life, and you think of it as, and you can calculate it in terms of
00:41:13.780
the area under the curve, where you collect up all the kind of temporal stages of that life,
00:41:17.220
and what matters is maximizing that area, then this kind of detached perspective, where it doesn't
00:41:23.960
matter if that temporal stage is in the future, in the past, or in the present, is fine. But if
00:41:28.940
you have a view where it's not just those objective facts, but rather also the kind of subjective
00:41:34.840
conscious experience of the observer, which is just because of the way the human brains work,
00:41:39.960
we're immersed in our present. And we anticipate the future, and we feel that the past is fixed and
00:41:47.080
over, in most cases. And so, we value things differently depending on where they're arranged
00:41:51.960
in time. And I think that's just a fact of human psychology. Even if there's an objective way to
00:41:57.620
justify that, there's the contingent fact about how we experience the world. And so, as I was saying,
00:42:04.440
as much as I love the parfit exploration, I feel that regularly, he was kind of a detached person,
00:42:10.500
and he didn't really care about this immersed asymmetric, and yeah, not kind of objectively
00:42:16.340
rational way of experiencing it, but it's just the way we are psychologically. And that, I think,
00:42:21.260
should be accommodated. So, if you do that, there is definitely a future bias. And actually, A.N.
00:42:27.120
Pryor, when he talked about the nature of time, he had a famous example about a headache. When you
00:42:33.680
say, thank goodness that's over. And the example was intended to illustrate how we feel differently
00:42:38.440
about the present versus the past. We would be glad that the painful experiences in the past rather
00:42:43.500
than the future. And so, part of what I guess I want to say is when we were talking about rationality
00:42:48.240
and decision-making, I think it's really important to not lose sense of the maybe bizarre psychological
00:42:55.440
contingencies of how we as thinking and feeling human beings experience the world and to bring
00:43:02.540
that in somehow into the rational calculus. Well, this does sort of relate to this notion
00:43:08.900
of a transformative experience because when you think about many painful experiences, even most
00:43:17.180
painful experiences, there is this common feature, which is once they're over, the net result isn't
00:43:27.540
necessarily even negative. In many cases, it's positive. You have the people who go through some
00:43:32.980
terrible ordeal. You know, they have cancer and then they recover and they can honestly say that the
00:43:41.260
cancer is the best thing that ever happened to them because it reoriented their priorities and
00:43:45.460
they got their lives straight and their heads straight and they couldn't have done it but for
00:43:51.940
having had everything interrupted by what was in fact a truly terrible experience while it was
00:43:58.360
happening. And yes, so they're not in a position of regret or, you know, wishing it hadn't happened
00:44:06.800
once it's over. And if we can know that about most bad experiences, I mean, if we know that generally
00:44:15.460
speaking, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, shouldn't that change how we view most future bad
00:44:24.480
experiences? I mean, shouldn't we be able to price that in? And wouldn't that be psychologically
00:44:30.020
helpful to try to do that if insofar as we can do that? So it's a good question. I mean, I do think
00:44:36.280
that we should be able to price it in, but I think it's more complicated, which is, I know, unsatisfactory,
00:44:41.000
but I'm a philosopher, so I'm always like raising problems. And so here's the, I'm fascinated by cases,
00:44:46.620
for example, of disability. So I think it makes perfect sense for someone to, let's say someone has,
00:44:52.300
they have cancer, they have a terrible accident, they undergo this horrific transformative
00:44:56.740
experience, like transform, like, because, and in the sense that the person who emerges or the self
00:45:02.260
that emerges is, is quite different from the self that began. And I think there's a very sensible way
00:45:09.520
in which someone can say the self that emerges, I value who I am now. I have all these strengths
00:45:14.920
that I didn't have before, but I just, I value who I am now. And so I don't regret having the experience
00:45:21.020
because that experience produced me, who I am now. By the same token, I think it can make perfect sense
00:45:26.120
for the person, for someone else to say, I don't want to have a horrific accident. I don't want to
00:45:30.320
be diagnosed for cancer, with, with cancer. In other words, the self that someone is before they
00:45:35.820
undergo the transformative experience can also value who they are. And, and so-
00:45:40.720
And you, you don't, you don't think one of them is right?
00:45:42.480
Well, I think that's where the problem is. I mean, sometimes I think you can say one of them is right
00:45:46.820
and one of them is wrong, but, you know, take, take, you know, going back to the having a, having a,
00:45:50.980
having a child case, I actually don't think either of them is objectively right. I don't think
00:45:55.140
there's an objective fact of the matter. I think each self, say there's the self that doesn't want
00:46:00.680
to have children. And then the self that has had children is very happy that they did. I think each
00:46:05.600
self can glory in their own set of values and can, and, and, you know, I think it's, can, can respect
00:46:12.020
their own values and say the values that I have are the ones that I want to have. Okay. And that
00:46:16.440
there's just no objective fact about which set of values is better. Like the one, the childless person
00:46:20.820
versus the person who never, who's, who's a parent or the person who's never had an accident
00:46:25.880
versus the person who is. I, there are, there, I mean, we could step back and say the person
00:46:29.700
who had the accident, maybe they're living a better life in various ways, and maybe they're,
00:46:32.720
you know, they have a kind of larger measure of happiness, but to tell someone that they should
00:46:39.320
act against their values, as long as they have respectable values, I think isn't really something
00:46:44.820
What about the possibility of changing one's values deliberately? I mean, this is something
00:46:49.940
that we, we can do inadvertently just by, you know, the ways in which we get educated
00:46:54.840
or miseducated, the type of company we keep, the sorts of practices we do. But yeah, I think
00:47:01.740
we're at some point going to experience a much more direct and intrusive opportunity to change
00:47:10.200
our values. I mean, we, you know, if you just imagine directly changing the brain, if insofar
00:47:17.020
as we ever arrive at something like a completed science of the mind, you would be able to pose
00:47:22.880
the question, well, do you, do you want to value X as much as you do? And might you want to remove
00:47:29.360
that value? You know, are you, are you happy being as compassionate as you are? Would you want to be
00:47:35.640
more compassionate? You want the, you want the Dalai Lama's version of compassion? Or would you, would
00:47:40.460
you like to be a little bit more of a sociopath than you are and be super productive? You know, I
00:47:45.300
mean, you're just, you, you can have the, the optimal CEO sociopathy implant and you'll care less about
00:47:52.520
the consequences of your decisions, but you'll make those decisions, you know, far more efficiently
00:47:57.360
and you'll sleep peacefully at night and all of it. So if we can decide these things, we would be making
00:48:02.840
these decisions knowing that opting for a certain change would change the very basis upon which we
00:48:10.960
would judge the goodness of the change, right? I mean, you're, you're, you, if what's eventually
00:48:15.580
on the menu is changing your intuitions about good and bad, then you, you, you can ask in advance,
00:48:22.620
well, would it be good to do that? All the while knowing that the standard by which you would judge
00:48:28.300
its goodness is the, is one of the, one of the things that is, that can be changed.
00:48:33.540
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. This is, okay. So this is what, I mean, for me, this is fascinating,
00:48:39.440
but also very murky territory. And this is the territory of transformative experience as well,
00:48:44.080
right? There's this kind of, it's an endogenous change, basically, that changes the very thing
00:48:49.260
that's sort of an issue. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation,
00:48:57.300
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