Making Sense - Sam Harris - #327 — Transformative Experiences

00:00:00.000 Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast.

00:00:08.820 This is Sam Harris.

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00:00:45.700 Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast.

00:00:48.080 This is Sam Harris.

00:00:50.340 Today I'm speaking with L.A. Paul.

00:00:53.360 Lori Paul is the Millstone Family Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Cognitive Science

00:00:57.900 at Yale University.

00:00:59.700 Her main research interests are in metaphysics, cognitive science, decision theory, and the

00:01:05.700 philosophy of mind.

00:01:07.620 She's tended to focus on questions about the nature of the self, preference change, subjective

00:01:12.860 value, temporal experience, causation, time, perception, among others.

00:01:20.260 And her most recent book is titled Transformative Experience.

00:01:23.700 And that was really our focus in this conversation.

00:01:26.940 We talk about the nature of transformative experiences, how they change the self that has

00:01:32.360 had the experience, often ways that can't be understood unless that change occurs.

00:01:37.040 We discuss the nature of regret, changing belief systems, conspiracy thinking, empathy, doing

00:01:44.380 good in the world, our relationship to our future selves, what it might mean to change our

00:01:49.760 values, the nature of possibility, the ethics of punishment, moral luck, the moral landscape,

00:01:58.340 consequentialism, and other topics.

00:02:01.420 Anyway, fascinating territory.

00:02:03.820 I hope you enjoy it.

00:02:05.420 And now I bring you L.A. Paul.

00:02:13.240 I am here with L.A. Paul.

00:02:15.060 Lori, thanks for joining me.

00:02:16.720 Thank you for having me.

00:02:17.460 So, just we were talking before we started recording here about your name.

00:02:22.900 If people want to find your writing, it is under L.A. Paul, but I will call you Lori.

00:02:28.440 Can you summarize your background as a philosopher?

00:02:31.980 What kinds of topics have you focused on?

00:02:34.700 Sure.

00:02:35.080 So, I got my Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton in 1999, working in the area of metaphysics with

00:02:42.920 the philosopher David Lewis, and I love metaphysics.

00:02:47.400 I'm a metaphysician at heart.

00:02:48.940 And I focus on the nature of causation, but I also do a lot of work on time and how we

00:02:54.600 experience ourselves in time and how we understand and manipulate the world around us.

00:02:59.300 And I spent about, I'd say, the first half of my career thus far, last sort of 12 years,

00:03:05.980 or the first 12 years, focusing on those, on sort of deep metaphysical questions and

00:03:10.980 what the nature of reality, in particular, the kinds of things that you can't sort of

00:03:15.860 directly see, like time and cause and also the nature of the self.

00:03:20.860 And after, I don't know, sort of exploring those topics for a while, I turned to exploring

00:03:27.960 the way that we understand ourselves in the world, and there's a sort of natural progression

00:03:31.300 there, and started working on, in particular, how we understand ourselves through distinctive

00:03:36.240 kinds of experiences and how, and sort of use, there's a framework involving decision

00:03:43.060 theory that I have often used because if you try to embed these questions in a framework

00:03:49.740 like decision-making, all kinds of interesting questions come out.

00:03:53.000 So it's a way of sort of, I don't know, kind of pulling apart something that seems maybe

00:03:57.820 simple on the surface and realizing there's a lot of complexity underneath.

00:04:01.900 Well, I was introduced to your work through what you've written and said on the topic of

00:04:08.260 what you call transformative experience.

00:04:10.960 And I thought we'd focus on that, but I love the connection to David Lewis, and I would

00:04:15.800 love to talk about the nature of possibility and causation and all of the metaphysics there

00:04:22.040 too.

00:04:22.420 I hadn't thought we would talk about that, but that's, did you hear my conversation with

00:04:26.020 Tim Maudlin?

00:04:27.040 I did not, but I'm a big fan of Tim's.

00:04:29.620 And I should say that these topics are intimately related.

00:04:33.060 I'm working on a book now, actually, that brings out some of those deeper connections,

00:04:36.880 but the topic is the same.

00:04:39.060 We can just view it from different perspectives.

00:04:40.840 Tim Maudlin Great, great.

00:04:42.320 So let's start with the transformative piece and then hit all the metaphysics you might

00:04:46.960 want to touch there.

00:04:48.580 Because I think the, yeah, I mean, we'll just, we'll see where we go, but it's all fascinating.

00:04:54.280 So this phrase transformative experience, what do you mean by that?

00:04:59.240 And because I think it's easily misunderstood.

00:05:01.980 So let's bound the concept.

00:05:04.260 So good question.

00:05:05.260 So I use the phrase transformative experience in part, you can think of it as a bit of a pun

00:05:10.500 on what people ordinarily think of as transformative experience.

00:05:14.380 So the kind of ordinary meaning is some kind of, wow, amazingly, you know, change-filled experience

00:05:19.760 that changes who you are.

00:05:21.380 And I mean that too, but I mean something a little bit, maybe more kind of philosophically

00:05:25.840 detailed.

00:05:27.140 I mean that when you face a transformative experience, you're facing an experience that at once you

00:05:33.880 can't know in important, essential details what it's going to be like.

00:05:37.780 And also that it is going to change you fundamentally.

00:05:40.120 It's going to destroy some part of the self that you are now and recreate you by, you know,

00:05:48.200 creating a new self.

00:05:49.780 So there's those two parts.

00:05:50.880 It's really important that both those things happen together.

00:05:53.120 Well, I guess let's ground this in some canonical life decisions that are, that tend to be transformative

00:06:00.840 in this way.

00:06:01.480 My first thought is something like having kids, you know, perhaps you have a favorite, but let's

00:06:08.760 talk about some of the details there.

00:06:11.080 Okay.

00:06:11.840 So, so you've touched on one of my two favorite examples.

00:06:15.920 And so I think that for people who haven't had children, when someone becomes a parent,

00:06:21.640 that often that really is a transformative experience.

00:06:24.860 It's not that everyone has a transformative experience in virtue of like producing and adoption

00:06:29.960 is included here.

00:06:30.700 Although I often just talk about physically producing a child, but the process of attaching

00:06:35.300 to the child, which is, I think, crucial for becoming a parent.

00:06:40.020 It's a kind of psychologist will describe this as an identity defining and identity changing

00:06:44.320 attachment relation changes you as a person.

00:06:49.000 It changes in the way that I said before, the self that you are.

00:06:53.320 And I think many people before they become parents, or if they're deliberating or maybe

00:06:59.260 agonizing or ruminating about, well, maybe they'll become a parent.

00:07:03.080 They know, you know, something dramatic and big is going to happen to them.

00:07:07.400 And they know in essentials, like you're going to have a baby or you're going to adopt a child

00:07:11.020 or whatever.

00:07:11.500 So there's a sense in which they know.

00:07:12.800 And then there's a sense in which they absolutely do not know.

00:07:15.300 And only when they actually become a parent, when they actually form this attachment relation

00:07:21.760 to this other being, will they both experience the change that's involved and also then in virtue

00:07:27.880 of experiencing that change, understand the nature of that experience.

00:07:32.320 So I could say more about that, but that's a big one.

00:07:36.240 Well, it seems like these kinds of experiences pose a certain kind of challenge to rational

00:07:43.340 decision-making because the decider is in advance of making the decision.

00:07:49.480 You are one person.

00:07:51.180 And then if you decide to have this experience, you will become somebody quite different.

00:07:57.400 And you may, in fact, know that in advance, right?

00:08:00.660 But you know that the person who will be judging the consequences of having made a certain decision

00:08:08.120 will be different from the person who is deciding whether or not to take, you know, one branch

00:08:14.780 or another in that decision tree.

00:08:17.280 And so to take the decision to become a parent as the example here, I'm imagining that very

00:08:23.700 few people ever regret having kids, even if the person they were before they had kids would

00:08:33.260 have judged the outcome to be less than desirable, right?

00:08:37.840 Like, I mean...

00:08:38.480 Totally.

00:08:38.960 Yeah.

00:08:39.980 So there's something beautiful about that.

00:08:41.740 There's something beautiful about the kind of human psyche that allows that to happen.

00:08:45.880 But let me back up for a second, if you don't mind.

00:08:48.240 So I think of it this way.

00:08:49.980 So imagine you're thinking about, well, if you're deliberating about whether you want

00:08:53.860 to become a parent.

00:08:54.600 So for at least a kind of standard version of rational decision theory, there's a process

00:08:59.460 you're supposed to undergo where you map out your options, you look at the different values,

00:09:04.480 like the value of having a child, the value of not having a child.

00:09:07.440 And then you think about, well, which option is going to maximize my happiness or my life

00:09:12.180 satisfaction or something like that?

00:09:14.360 And a natural way that you think about doing this is you imaginatively kind of evolve yourself

00:09:20.100 into, well, here I am with my baby or here I am, you know, hiking the world or whatever,

00:09:26.100 like crossing, you know, crossing amazing vistas, child-free, you know, living my life

00:09:31.800 to the fullest and that kind of way.

00:09:33.480 And then you have to sort of compare these options to decide, because each one involves

00:09:40.280 trade-offs and you can't do both, which one is going to be better for you?

00:09:44.660 And when I had said before that the complex thing about transformative experience, as I

00:09:50.260 understand it, is that first there's a dimension of the experience that you can't kind of grasp

00:09:54.720 for yourself, in addition to the personal change that you just described, there's a problem

00:10:00.380 because then you can't reliably, you know, envision the self that you're going to become

00:10:07.380 or and understand the process that's going to make you into that new self.

00:10:10.740 So if, you know, if you're sure you want to become a parent, well, maybe it's not such

00:10:14.140 a big deal.

00:10:14.840 You know, yeah, as you said, you know, you'll be happy most likely afterwards.

00:10:18.320 We should come back to that, by the way, because there's something really interesting and

00:10:20.800 tricky about that, I think.

00:10:22.420 But if you're not sure, then what are you going to do, right?

00:10:26.580 Like you can and you can then go and get evidence, like find out about, you know, what other people

00:10:31.980 have said and done and ask your mother and that sort of thing.

00:10:35.440 But that evidence is all about, you know, what people think after they've gone through the

00:10:40.560 experience.

00:10:41.360 But if they've changed as a result of going through the experience, then there's a certain

00:10:45.680 way in which that evidence is not relevant.

00:10:48.280 If you're not sure, say you really don't want to have a child or you're kind of inclined

00:10:52.140 against and you go and you ask your your mom and she says, oh, no, you'll be so happy if

00:10:56.120 you did.

00:10:56.880 You might think, well, fine, but that's because my brain will have been changed.

00:11:00.620 Like, you know, I mean, I'll be changed into a different kind of person.

00:11:03.560 You know, it's like I'm mentally kidnapped and sure, I know that parents are really happy,

00:11:08.100 but I don't want that kind of that kind of mental magic worked on me.

00:11:13.020 I'm very happy the way that I am.

00:11:14.400 And so that's part of the problem.

00:11:16.960 The self that you are who's trying to evaluate these things first maybe doesn't have the

00:11:20.940 same desires as the self that you would become.

00:11:24.000 And you can't even kind of imaginatively put yourself in the shoes of that other being,

00:11:29.940 that other self that you could become to kind of evaluate what it would be like.

00:11:33.540 So you're kind of stuck.

00:11:35.060 Yeah.

00:11:35.280 Now that I think about it, I'm wondering if regret is also rare and perhaps even equally

00:11:41.460 rare on the side of the people who don't have kids and who haven't had kids by choice,

00:11:47.280 right?

00:11:48.120 As opposed to just kind of a failure of opportunity.

00:11:50.380 There are obviously people who really want to have kids and it just never happens for

00:11:55.040 one reason or another.

00:11:56.280 But there are people who decide they don't want to have kids.

00:11:58.860 And I guess I would imagine they experience probably a vanishingly small rate of regret

00:12:06.700 as well.

00:12:08.000 I don't know if there's any research on this, but so how do you think about regret in light

00:12:11.500 of or its absence in light of this?

00:12:14.500 No, it's a great question.

00:12:15.300 So I think for me, what I immediately think of is regret.

00:12:18.560 What is the regret or absence of it evidence of?

00:12:22.080 You might think, oh, if you don't regret your decision, that's evidence that you made the

00:12:26.120 right decision for you.

00:12:27.100 And there's a sense in which that's true. 0.72

00:12:29.720 Maybe you made the right decision for the self that you are, but there's maybe a larger

00:12:33.420 sense in which it's kind of incoherent to say, I made the right decision for me because

00:12:37.260 there's the right decision for you afterwards and there's the right decision for you beforehand.

00:12:43.280 And so like when, like, so, okay, so I have two children.

00:12:45.860 I love them both.

00:12:46.920 I remember my mother saying to me, wow, I never really expected you to have children.

00:12:50.460 I wasn't really sure early on.

00:12:52.340 And I said, well, I'm so happy.

00:12:53.740 But, you know, is my happiness the result of me knowing all along I wanted to have children?

00:12:58.900 No.

00:12:59.640 It's actually that the process of forming this attachment relation to both of my children made

00:13:05.260 me so, like, satisfied and happy to have them.

00:13:09.080 There's a kind of circularity here that's absolutely what some of these experiences involve.

00:13:13.260 So of course, I don't regret it for a second.

00:13:15.560 But there's no way I can even access the person or the self that I would have been if I had never

00:13:20.440 had children.

00:13:21.520 And I think she also might have been perfectly happy to live her life the way that, you know,

00:13:25.600 the way that she had chosen for it to go.

00:13:27.660 And we think, oh, you know, who she is or would have been, wouldn't have been happy with children.

00:13:34.080 Yeah.

00:13:34.480 Yeah.

00:13:34.880 I mean, they're even stranger.

00:13:36.560 So this is pretty easy to understand.

00:13:38.780 And I think it's, there's a, whether in fact it's a real fundamental change in what one

00:13:45.260 values and one sense of what is good, or if it's a psychologically protective mechanism

00:13:51.980 of just not wanting to admit in the case where one would still could regret this life decision,

00:13:59.100 given that it's irrevocable and that so much turns on one's kind of averting one's eyes

00:14:05.680 from the dark reality that you, you in fact do regret having kids or not having kids, you

00:14:11.740 know, it's easy to see why one would, wouldn't want to be keenly aware of that moment to moment.

00:14:18.040 But there are simpler cases where we experience a, actually we can experience the full tour.

00:14:25.440 So you take something like, you know, eating ice cream, right?

00:14:28.080 Where you want to be on a diet, you want to lose weight, you don't want to eat ice cream,

00:14:31.820 but when presented with ice cream, you actually want to eat that ice cream.

00:14:36.000 And so the person whose willpower is overcome and who decides to eat ice cream and who's enjoying

00:14:42.540 the ice cream while eating it gets to experience the full tour of, of not want you having the

00:14:47.580 meta desire of not wanting to want the ice cream, wanting it, enjoying it, and then later

00:14:53.800 regretting having eaten as much as one ate.

00:14:57.760 You know, there's a strange picture of what the self is and what personal identity is all

00:15:01.940 about when one experiences that full tour, but that's different than the transformative.

00:15:08.540 I mean, it's a transiently transformative experience.

00:15:11.380 Maybe that falsifies the concept, but one can experience this fluctuation between being the

00:15:16.800 person who is inhabiting a, a kind of a higher order desire.

00:15:22.600 And then, then the person who you're the person who gives into a lower order desire, which

00:15:28.400 nonetheless is sincere in the moment and its satisfaction is no less pleasurable.

00:15:33.760 But then after the fact, one boomerangs back to the, the higher order desire and wishes one

00:15:40.080 hadn't done that thing.

00:15:41.440 Yeah.

00:15:42.120 Yeah.

00:15:42.380 So, I mean, I think that the way to maybe pull these apart a little bit is, is to say,

00:15:47.160 I want to focus on whatever, like the highest order values are.

00:15:51.460 Right.

00:15:51.740 And so the ice cream case, it might be that there's a difference between like all along,

00:15:56.460 you kind of wish you weren't, you know, that you don't want to be someone who's eating the 0.96

00:16:00.280 ice cream and then you kind of give in and you eat the ice cream and it's fabulous and you're

00:16:03.380 really enjoying it.

00:16:04.300 And then afterwards, once the enjoyment is over, it's like, Oh God, why did I do that?

00:16:09.160 That would, might be a bit different from say someone who is like an, an addict, like,

00:16:13.920 like someone who's in the throes of an addiction might have something where even like their higher

00:16:18.460 order valuing, you know, involves like wanting the, like the willing at someone who's just

00:16:23.500 like embracing their drug addiction versus someone who then later on rejects the appeal

00:16:29.040 of the drug.

00:16:29.920 There you might actually get someone who all of their values, their highest order values

00:16:34.180 are consistent with their action.

00:16:37.100 And that, that might be in a case of someone kind of transforming and transforming and transforming

00:16:41.480 in the sense that in the, in the way that I'm trying to articulate for maybe more minimal

00:16:47.080 cases.

00:16:48.220 I mean, religious experience might be one of those cases where somebody converts or loses

00:16:53.140 their faith.

00:16:54.080 And so, and that's, I think is a, is a transformation and then they can revert.

00:16:58.780 People sometimes do revert.

00:17:00.720 And I think there, if, you know, if you're fully believing or fully not believing, then,

00:17:05.740 you know, you're kind of consistent up and down the, the hierarchy of values.

00:17:10.500 How do you think about this in terms of knowledge and belief and just epistemology?

00:17:17.120 So we have the experience of changing one's beliefs in response to evidence, but many of us

00:17:23.760 have an experience of deciding not to entertain certain ideas or expose ourselves to certain

00:17:31.980 images because we have prejudged that, you know, either it's a waste of time or we actually

00:17:38.440 don't want to become the person we would be if we spent all the time exposing ourselves

00:17:45.080 to that information.

00:17:46.380 I mean, I'm thinking this, I guess this can be an expression of cognitive bias or wishful

00:17:52.220 thinking or cognitive closure in a way, but it can also just be an expression of, of

00:17:56.720 a concern for mental hygiene.

00:17:58.560 Like the, the instances where I know I've done this is, uh, I recall, I, I know at the

00:18:04.000 time I was very focused on issues of terrorism and, and religious sectarianism and its consequences.

00:18:10.160 And, and yet I decided that I didn't want to see the decapitation videos produced by the

00:18:17.200 Islamic state, right?

00:18:18.220 I was super focused on the issue, but I just decided I didn't need those images in

00:18:22.720 my head because I was protecting myself from being the person who then had those images

00:18:28.820 in his head for the rest of his life.

00:18:31.620 There are other cases where, you know, if I have to take a certain medication, I will

00:18:35.540 decide that I actually don't want to study the list of side effects, right?

00:18:40.740 Because I've decided generically that, that I need to take this medication.

00:18:45.420 And I, I know in the abstract that all of the side effects are, are low enough probability

00:18:52.280 that, that I'm not likely to suffer them.

00:18:55.380 And I think I'm better served not actually, you know, priming the nocebo effect in my case

00:19:02.820 and just being on guard for the side effects.

00:19:04.800 So perhaps there are other examples of this sort of thing.

00:19:07.080 How do you think about deciding to have certain information or not and the ways in which this

00:19:13.500 can either be productive or, or go awry when we were actually closing ourselves off to evidence

00:19:20.480 and ideas that, that are true and would be useful to know?

00:19:24.480 Right.

00:19:24.640 So, I mean, I think there are, there are appropriate times to, right, protect yourself from, let's

00:19:30.680 say, having a cognitive bias in the way that you are, you know, these, these images and

00:19:34.820 other kinds of things, which are actually intended to manipulate in various ways.

00:19:38.540 The connection to transformative experience is that if the problem is, if, if you can't

00:19:45.940 actually, so when you think about like, I don't want to see an image, a particular image,

00:19:50.660 you know enough about it to know how you're going to react and to know that, well, actually

00:19:55.820 it's the, the effect is going to be negative.

00:19:57.640 So you make, I think, a good judgment to, to set that aside so that you're not, you know,

00:20:03.000 you're not affected by it in a negative way.

00:20:05.220 But what if you don't know about the nature of the experience?

00:20:09.220 It could be great or it could be bad.

00:20:11.020 And there's no kind of higher order evidence that's going to tell you either way.

00:20:14.040 This I think can be a way to understand the questions about religious belief, because

00:20:18.480 there's no sort of independent way of ascertaining whether or not the deity in question exists.

00:20:24.260 And those that are advocates of, of the belief will argue that the evidence is all around

00:20:31.680 us.

00:20:31.980 It's just, you're failing to detect it.

00:20:33.340 And those that are opponents of the belief will say, no, there's no evidence.

00:20:36.620 Right.

00:20:37.200 And then if, if the way to being able, learning how to grasp that evidence involves opening

00:20:42.300 your mind to the possibility of having an experience, but where you as the, like would,

00:20:49.200 you know, fear that this experience could corrupt you, then you have a problem because

00:20:54.140 you don't know about the nature of the experience independently.

00:20:56.360 And to discover the nature of the experience involves a kind of corruption.

00:20:59.880 It's basically Ulysses and the sirens.

00:21:02.120 I think the nice thing about for Ulysses was that the insanity that he experienced when

00:21:05.680 hearing the song of the sirens was temporary, but in this kind of case, it wouldn't be temporary.

00:21:10.960 So you have a problem.

00:21:12.940 So that's what I mean.

00:21:13.680 So what I'm saying is I think it can be perfectly rational to set aside evidence, so-called

00:21:17.520 evidence, and perfectly rational to try to control various kinds of options when you

00:21:21.760 know enough about them, but I'm really interested in cases where we don't know and the, because

00:21:27.380 it's transformative, it can kind of work on you at the highest level, right?

00:21:30.520 And transform the way that you regard the nature of reality, for example.

00:21:34.940 That's, I think, I think psychedelics involves that possibility.

00:21:38.320 I think religious belief involves that possibility.

00:21:40.540 I think possibly certain kinds of love could involve that kind of possibility.

00:21:45.000 Maybe even questions about the border of sanity and insanity, which is kind of a fascination

00:21:49.900 for me, so.

00:21:51.040 Yeah, there's one, as a social phenomenon, I'm noticing the consequences of conspiracy thinking

00:21:59.260 and the social contagion component of that, and also the quasi-religious aspect of sunk cost

00:22:09.440 with respect to having just spent so much time down any one of those rabbit holes.

00:22:15.200 I see people whose, you know, podcasts or newsletters or books just become a testament to how much

00:22:23.400 time they've spent entertaining certain ideas, and it seems like it's becoming harder and

00:22:28.900 harder for them to step out of it because, again, in part it's got to be the fallacy of sunk cost

00:22:36.740 or the perceived reputational harm of recognizing that they've just wasted a tremendous amount

00:22:45.040 of time on certain topics.

00:22:46.520 But it's also just the style of thinking that gets inculcated there where none of them are

00:22:52.820 truly falsifiable.

00:22:54.240 There's a style of connecting random anomalies without an underlying theory that is coherent.

00:22:59.960 You know, it's just, and you can always find more anomalies, so it just, it becomes self-perpetuating

00:23:05.320 in a way that is very difficult to arrest.

00:23:08.880 And so, yeah, it could be rational to decide in advance, okay, spending my time and attention

00:23:15.260 in a certain way could erode some of the epistemic values I actually want to be anchored to.

00:23:23.320 And so you do have a Ulysses and the Mast kind of decision in advance where it's like,

00:23:29.020 yes, there's a siren song that I may want to hear, but if I'm going to hear it, I need

00:23:34.960 to at least maintain my purchase on something now that I know, you know, as a kind of meta

00:23:41.500 norm I'm going to want to stay attached to no matter what happens in the intervening hours.

00:23:49.560 Yeah, but the problem is, I mean, I think that sounds right.

00:23:51.940 The problem is, what if the siren song is so seductive that you lose your attachment to

00:23:57.300 that meta?

00:23:57.640 I mean, that's the risk.

00:23:59.480 I take it conspiracy theories are often that the whole idea is open your mind to this possibility

00:24:03.980 and then what happens is that people lose, they lose a kind of control over the other

00:24:09.000 norms of thought that they had embraced.

00:24:11.620 Yeah.

00:24:12.640 How do you think about empathy in this context or just taking the perspective of other people

00:24:18.820 or, you know, or failing to?

00:24:20.680 I mean, just what, how does it, how does that fit in?

00:24:23.340 No, it's a good question.

00:24:24.180 I think with a lot of the things that I like to think about, I think there's a lot to say

00:24:28.420 on both sides.

00:24:29.660 I do think that affective empathy, so just feeling what others feel is a really good source

00:24:35.580 of cognitive bias.

00:24:36.780 And Paul Bloom has written on this, I think, really, really well.

00:24:39.480 But that's different from cognitive empathy, which is, you know, technically, I guess,

00:24:46.080 is a kind of empathy where you aren't just kind of randomly opening yourself up to the

00:24:51.840 feelings of others, but rather in a kind of reasoned way, you attempt to kind of enter

00:24:55.760 into the perspective of the other and attempt to represent their beliefs and their emotions

00:25:01.920 and other, and their mindset, but without kind of losing yourself in it.

00:25:05.940 And again, though, the kinds of problems that we're talking about, I think they're right

00:25:10.000 here, because if you really are opening your mind to someone else and really are kind of

00:25:16.520 empathizing with them, even if, you know, you're trying to do so in a kind of cognitively

00:25:20.720 careful way, I see the possibility for losing yourself in that.

00:25:25.400 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

00:26:04.620 needless death or long-term risk.

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

00:26:57.720 broadcast to.

00:26:58.540 So just knowing that, you know, I just decide in advance to give to the causes that I can

00:27:05.540 rationally identify.

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

00:27:39.060 the value of experience.

00:27:40.740 Yeah.

00:27:41.200 Okay.

00:27:41.640 Yeah.

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

00:27:50.660 robotic way, one might say.

00:27:52.260 And I mean that in the sense of like, take AI, which is not sentient and, you know, lacks any

00:27:56.380 kind of like feeling or consciousness.

00:27:59.360 You know, you could perform a mathematical calculation, one that doesn't account for the feelings and

00:28:05.560 experiences of the human beings involved.

00:28:07.420 Your example was great because it's like the experiences of one little girl versus the

00:28:10.940 experience of, you know, 500,000 or whatever.

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

00:28:25.340 the rational calculus.

00:28:26.620 Yeah.

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

00:28:38.240 suffering.

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

00:28:43.240 comprehend infinity in certain ways as well.

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.

00:28:49.860 Yeah.

00:28:50.280 Yeah.

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

00:29:55.300 a coffee shop, right?

00:29:56.280 I mean, literally like, I mean, the example I've used before is, I did actually notice this

00:30:00.820 in the span of 24 hours in my life.

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

00:30:25.160 the same day, right?

00:30:26.540 So, and yet I know I did much more good in the world making that donation than, than holding

00:30:31.860 the door open for somebody.

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 0.99

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

00:31:23.380 govern that process.

00:31:26.540 Yeah, I agree with that.

00:31:27.340 I guess I, I, I, I think that's right.

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

00:31:41.400 and feel.

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

00:31:51.900 beings.

00:31:52.960 And I mean, you're right.

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

00:32:28.960 it, right?

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

00:32:37.560 an entirely different kind of exchange.

00:32:40.860 Yeah.

00:32:41.000 And knowing that it might be wise to have the transformative experience of leveraging that

00:32:49.060 change, right?

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

00:33:29.240 of the people suffering from that calamity.

00:33:31.800 Can I make a connection here?

00:33:34.940 Yeah.

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

00:34:18.720 and future selves and possible selves?

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

00:35:04.720 closer.

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

00:37:50.180 something.

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?

00:38:17.380 Yes. Yes.

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 1.00

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 0.89

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

00:46:44.020 that we should be doing.

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,

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Making Sense - Sam Harris - July 21, 2023

#327 — Transformative Experiences

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