I find this kind of exciting and incredible. And then he says to me: “Look, I think I kind of like you. I’m going to give you an opportunity, a once in a lifetime chance to become one of my followers, to become one of my own. I’m going to give you a one-time only chance to become a vampire.” 

I think this is amazing. I’m sort of floored by the possibility. He then follows up as I’m pursuing the kind of shots and says: “Look, I need a little time to think about it, so go back to your Airbnb. Think about the possibilities. You’ve got until midnight. And if you decide that you want to take me up on my offer, leave the window open. I’ll come to you. It will be painless, and you’ll have a beautiful night in your life before you.” 

He says then a little more ominously: “If you choose not to take me up on my offer, then leave and never come back.” I have this opportunity. I go back to my Airbnb and start reflecting on the possibilities. I call my mom. I start texting my friends. And it turns out, after I talked with them a little bit and told them about what happened, they all confessed to me that they have already become vampires. 

I especially get mad at my mom for not telling me. But then she was like: “Well, look, I just couldn’t tell you. You wouldn’t understand. It’s an amazing new kind of life.” And then I go say: “Look, should I do it?” 

And then, what my friends and mom told me is: “Look, you will have amazing new sensory powers. You’ll have all these kinds of physical abilities that you never would have when you’re human. You’ll look fabulous in everything that you wear.” There are lots of pluses. 

I mean, you have to drink blood. You sleep in a coffin. People will regard you as an undead monster. But those negatives pale in comparison to the positives that you won’t even carry anymore. Importantly, you’ll just laugh at those kinds of things. You’ll enjoy the taste of blood. 

After I hear the positives and the negatives from them, I’m just thinking: “Well, what should I do? What is it like to be a vampire? Is this something that I really want for myself? Is this how I should live my life?” 

Over and over again, I ask my friends. I ask my mom. Everyone tells me that they’re a vampire. And they all say the same thing: “Well, look, there’s no way for you to know until you actually do it. Take it from me. I think it’s fabulous. I know, you’ll be happy after you do it. Go ahead and do it. Life will have meaning and a sense of purpose that it never had when you were human. Take my word for it.” 

That’s the thought experiment. The question is, “What should I do?” What did I do? The concept that the thought experiment is supposed to illustrate is that sometimes you can be faced with life-changing experiences. You have to make a decision about whether you want to undergo this life changing experience. 

It’s not just about it being life changing. In the cases that I’m interested in, these are new kinds of experiences. It’s like a kind of experience that you’ve never had before. It’s the kind of experience that you have to have in order to really know what it’s like. 

If you’re faced with a life-changing experience, where you can’t in the most kind of intrinsic or essential way know what it’s like until you undergo it, how are you supposed to prospectively think about who you would become or the nature of your future life in order to make an informed decision? How are you going to do that? 

An important part of this is that maybe I know from testimony that, “Oh, yeah, if I do it, I’ll be happy.” But there’s an interesting question that comes up immediately. That is like with these vampires. Should you trust vampire testimony? Maybe there’s something evolutionary or something that rewires people, so that once they become vampires, they’re super happy with it. 

But right now, when I’m making the decision, I’m not a vampire. Why does it matter that the person, or that undead monster thinks that becoming a vampire is fabulous? What matters is when I’m making my choices were *inaudible*.

Sean Murray  6:55  

It’s a very interesting dilemma. As outlandish and fun as the thought experiment is, what you really bring out in the book is that these dilemmas are a lot more common than we think. We face these situations. 

Now, I haven’t yet been asked to become a vampire. But I have faced a number of these choices where I think about my future self. I tried to imagine my future life. I met a real disadvantage. You point out a couple different ways when I’m at a disadvantage. 

There’s the fact that there’s information I don’t know about my future self. I really can’t know until I become that person. I’m trying to make decisions about my preferences. I’ve got my preferences today, such as what I want in my life. But I’ll also have new preferences in the future if I change and become a new person. That’s a real dilemma. What am I trying to optimize here? What do I think about this?

Laurie Paul  7:51  

Exactly. I want to just put out an extra wrinkle. Sometimes we think, “Well, I can kind of step back and take an overall view, and evaluate that future self that I’m going to be from my vantage point now.” Right now, I might think, “Well, I don’t want to become a vampire. I just don’t like the kinds of things that vampires do.” 

If I thought that that perspective was going to stay constant through the change, then I would know what to do. The key here is it’s not just like my original thoughts, that now they’re gonna change. It’s basically, one might say, my high order of preference is all the way up. What I prefer to prefer is also going to change. 

It’s not like later on that higher order perspective of like, “Oh, it’s kind of just bad to be a vampire kind of person or a vampire kind of thing.” That’s not going to stick around either. All the way up to the chain, I’m going to think that being a vampire is fabulous. I prefer to be a vampire. 

Sometimes I prefer to prefer to prefer to be a vampire. It’s good all the way up. If you really have that kind of a switch, what you don’t have then is kind of what I would describe as “A kind of cross temporal consistency.” 

The self that you are now is just not consistent with the self that you’ll become at that later time. Our decisions assume that we will be the same self and the relevant way over time. That’s kind of the crux of the problem. 

Sean Murray  9:12  

Exactly. You also bring out this point on the testimony. We can’t just ask other vampires. We don’t know if their testimony is something that we can rely on. You bring up a good example in the book about, let’s say, taking a drug. It is a certain drug that once people take it, they feel the kind of ecstasy all the time. But maybe they become very lethargic. They stop pursuing their goals. They stop doing some of the normal activities that adults would do, and responsibility, and whatnot. 

Yet, if you ask them: “Oh, this is great. This is the life.” We certainly wouldn’t want to take that drug. We don’t want to be in that situation. In this vampire thought experiment, even if we are getting the sense that this could be fabulous, there are aspects of this new vampire life that really appealed to me. I think it’s going to be great. 

We talked to vampires. We’re getting a lot of positive feedback. But yet, we can’t trust that. There’s a lot of “epistemic,” as you call them, that were knowledge-based problems in facing this decision. 

Let’s stick with vampires before we bring into other aspects in other parts of our lives. What else about this challenge should we be thinking about to become a vampire? How should we be thinking about this decision that you face? You have until midnight tonight to make it. What are you going to do, Laurie?

Laurie Paul  10:28  

I’m in a bit of a pickle. There’s another element of this that I think makes the problem even harder. And that is, the testimony also told me: “Well look, there’s something that you can’t know. You can’t know the nature of this new life until you actually live it.” I sometimes compare it in other cases. 

Let’s say you were congenitally blind and then had the chance to see, or let’s say, you had to be able to taste this very interesting new flavor before you’ve actually had that taste, or before you’ve actually had the experience of seeing. There’s something that’s really important that you just don’t know. 

Becoming a vampire, by stipulation is also like that. Normally, when we think about making decisions, we try to not in all cases but in these kinds of big life decisions where we’re trying to think about possibilities for ourselves, sort of imaginatively project ourselves forward into the different situation. 

Let’s say if you’re choosing between two different vacations. Do I want to go to Paris? I’d love to go to Paris. Do I want to go to Sydney, Australia? I would love to go to Sydney. Maybe I could think about it. 

I Imagine myself in Paris doing all the amazing things that one can do in Paris. I imagine myself in Sydney doing all of the amazing things that one can do in Sydney. I’d kind of compare them. I’d think about how I respond to that imaginative assessment and then make a choice. 

Which one, do I value more? Which one seems better? That’s what you can’t do in this situation. So you can’t resolve a situation by accurately imagining yourself as a vampire. I can’t because I don’t know what it’s like. And so you think, “Well, then, maybe I’ll think about the testimony.” 

But then, wait a minute. There’s also this point with trusting the testimony. Even if the testimony is trustable in a sense that those vampires are right, that’ll be super happy being a vampire, what can I infer from that fact? Ordinarily, I’d think, “Well, if I was the same person, then of course, the fact that I would be happy is an argument that I should do it.” 

If who I am changes as a result of the experience, or what it’s like to live that life is only knowable if I actually undergo the change? How am I going to think about the possibility? Here is where we start to think about what *inaudible* calls are “decision making in decision theory.” 

Normally, you think about your options. You assign them values. You look at the likelihood of the different options. What are my chances of making it to Paris? What are my chances of making it to Sydney? Let’s say, I choose Sydney, Australia over Paris.

First, I just think about it, I’d likely get there. I just think that I want to go to Bondi Beach and hang out. I make that choice rationally because ordinarily, I know enough about my different options. I can maximize my expected value by going to Sydney. 

But in the vampire case, I can’t imaginatively assess the situation. I can’t assign in any accurate way, what it’s really like to live a life as a vampire. What’s that like? And because of the self-change involved, I can’t rely on some of the ordinary decision making errors that I’ve used. How am I supposed to decide?

Sean Murray  13:25  

You just covered a lot of ground there from decision theory. I want to unpack that a bit. When we make these kinds of traditional decisions, like in your example of vacation in Paris versus Sydney, we use expected value. We estimate the probability or the likelihood of each outcome, and then multiply it with the value of that option. We assign that option a value, or how well it meets our preferences. 

In this case, we do that by running a little simulation in our head where we imagine ourselves in each location, and sort of match that up against our preferences. But the problem with the vampire case is that we can’t run the simulation. We don’t have enough information to know what it’s going to be like to be a vampire. We can’t use expected value. To your point, we can’t rely on the testimony. That’s a problem. So, what are you going to do, Laurie?

Laurie Paul  14:18  

I say, change the decision. At least, that’s what we have to start thinking about. Change how we’re going to regard these decisions. Don’t think about making the choice based on the testimony in a straightforward way. Don’t think about making the choice by projecting yourself forward and assessing what it’s like. 

Instead, recognize that you can’t know some of these very important things. And then effectively, I have to choose whether I want to discover what it’s like to become a vampire. Do I want to end my life as I know it now and replace myself effectively with this new vampire self? I don’t know what it’s going to be like. It’s a gamble of a very distinctive sort.

Sean Murray  14:59  

It is. It’s in this art of becoming a new person that really is the choice that we’re making, if we go down that path. It’s discovering who we are, as Nietzsche said, “Becoming who we are.” There’s something about that discovery that makes life meaningful. It gives us purpose. There’s also something authentic about it because it’s our choice. 

What you bring out in this example is that I think we often fool ourselves. We think, “Well, I’m just going to make the rational choice here. I’m going to weigh all my options. I’m going to project into the future. I’m going to run my simulations in my head. I’m going to look at my expected value, all the probabilities and outcomes, and everything.” 

What you really broke down for me, as I read the book was just that there really is no logical way through that maze. At some point, in my mind, I sort of lifted up to the soul, or to the spirit, or to intuition in some way that the rational mind is not going to be able to solve. I think that’s a really important discovery and something that our society doesn’t do a good job of preparing us for. 

I think it sort of tells us, “Oh, just make the rational choice.” You also break down the argument of scientific research. “Oh, I could look at the scientific research. Well, that doesn’t work either.” I don’t know if you want to talk about that. 

What do we do, Laurie? Let’s go back. “Have you decided yet? It’s getting close to midnight. You said you’re going to avoid the decision. You said to go around the decision. But how are we going to do it?”

Laurie Paul  16:30  

Let me touch back on just a couple of things that you said. You’re right. What’s important, I think for me in the book, and also in some of my data work is to try to look at this carefully and with precision. In other words, I do think that there are real issues here about intuition and authenticity, and how we should think about constructing ourselves. 

I want to start out by taking the decision theory and the decision theoretic perspective very seriously because I endorse rational decision making in many contexts. The thought is that there’s actually a precise way to say that there’s a problem. I’ll say that if you can’t assign value to the outcomes, there’s a way in which you can’t kind of build a model in the precise way to calculate how best to maximize your expected value. 

In addition, if the individual who is the agent, who’s making the choice changes who they are as they choose, then there’s a kind of violation of a certain kind of fundamental axiom of constancy. It’s sort of at the root of this puzzle. The thought is that, in fact, there’s a technical decision theoretic way of raising this problem. 

Let’s say that I’m texting my mom furiously, or whatever. Midnight is approaching. What I want to say is, “Well, we need to change the model.” If we change the way we think about the model, then we do start to get closer to the things that you were talking about. It could be understanding that what we’re doing is choosing to replace ourselves. 

We’re choosing to make a certain kind of discovery to discover who we are. That’s if you value that kind of discovery. Even if you’re taking a risk because you don’t know what you’re choosing in an important way. I mean, you’re choosing this new self. 

Human psychology is a beautiful thing. We tend to be sort of satisfied with who we are in lots of different ways. The odds are with us. However, it’s possible that you would make a choice to become a new self. This new self would be less happy, less satisfied with their life than the old self. That’s a risk you have to take.

Sean Murray  18:26  

What you’re saying here is when we choose the transformative experience, we’re essentially saying, “Look, there’s things we don’t know about how this is going to play out. But what I’m choosing is to become a new person. That’s really the choice I’m making.”

Laurie Paul  18:44  

Yeah. The thought is that we step back. We recognize what we can’t know. Don’t try to fool ourselves into thinking that with a little bit of testimony, or some more scientific information, or some good guesswork, we can just sort of straightforwardly solve the puzzle. Instead, say, “Yeah, there’s stuff we can’t know.” 

That’s a big part of living a life that’s in form. It’s part of wisdom to understand that there are certain things you can’t know, and can know when making a choice to know what you’re choosing.

Sean Murray  19:15  

Exactly. If there wasn’t an unknown like that, then would life really be interesting? Would we really have the unique human experience we’re having? I think there’s some real value in the unknown and in embracing the unknown.

To make a connection to the lives of many of my listeners, what immediately came to mind is you talked about the vampire example. You even talked about this in the book as the decision to have children. I agree with you. It’s personally transformative. It’s epistemically transformative. It’s very similar to what you described with vampires. 

We talk to our parents. We want to know what it’s like to be a parent. We talked to our friends who are parents, but we really don’t know. I have two kids. I’ve been through that transformative experience. 

You’re right. There is a real gap that’s temporarily between our current self and our future self when it comes to having children. It’s something that many of us face in our society today. I think in the past, we didn’t really face it because of birth control, of culture, and all the other reasons why it just sort of was a path in life.

But now, it becomes a choice. It’s sort of a modern challenge that we have to overcome some of these transformative decisions. Talk a little bit about that connection, and how we go about making a decision like having children.

Laurie Paul  20:36  

This is one of my favorite examples. It came about for me, partly because I have two children. When I had my first child, I was wowed by it in a certain way and thought, “Wait, there are a lot of philosophical ideas here.” None of my philosophical contemporaries seem to be talking about them. And in fact, if I looked at the history of philosophy, there just wasn’t a whole lot of discussion about these questions about having children. 

There’s something here that I really wanted to investigate as the result of that experience. And that’s right, there are intended connections between the vampire example. 

Let me run it this way. I think there are a couple of different ways to think about choosing to have a child and becoming a parent that have lessons for us. But let’s look at the case when before you become a parent, you think about it. You ask your friends, you ask your family members, or whatever. Maybe you see people, you babysit a little bit, or things like that. 

People tell you that you’ll be very happy if you become a parent. And so you choose to become a parent. Lo and behold, you are happy. You might think, “Oh, all along, I knew what I wanted. I knew what I was in for. And because of course I wasn’t, I made the choice. I looked forward and thought about things. And then afterwards, there I am testifying to how happy I am as a parent.” 

In that case, I would argue that you were still transformed. You still made a huge discovery when you formed what I think is an identity to finding a kind of attachment relation to your child. It changes at a very deep level I think of who you care about most. 

You just changed your own preference, I think, for life satisfaction and self-preservation, and replaced it with caring about the child. And then, this turns out into all these other kinds of things. 

Even if consistently, you wanted to become a parent. Before you made the choice, you knew you wanted it. After you made the choice, you’re happy you did it. I would still say, you replaced yourself. 

It’s not that you had some underlying clear perspective that was somehow just magically revealed, at least in most cases. It’s rather that, interestingly, who you were beforehand was one kind of self that wanted to do it. And then who you are afterwards is a much more informed self who’s also happy that they did it. But it’s not like there’s some kind of straightforward path from one to the other. 

Now, this comes out, when you think about somebody who doesn’t want to become a parent. And asks everyone, and they say, “Oh, you’ll be so happy if you do it, blah, blah, blah.” And then, they become apparent. Maybe somebody gets pregnant by accident, or whatever. They get kind of convinced to do it, in some sense, even against their inclinations. 

And then afterwards, they’re super happy to be a parent. Now, is this person just experiencing cognitive dissonance? Or was it like that they somehow just didn’t know what they really wanted in their heart of hearts? I mean, maybe. But I think it’s a lot more plausible to think that at least in lots of cases. 

This is just a good example of someone’s self being replaced. And in  here, just becomes a parent. I think it’s really important to bring this up because people, I think, lately, people who choose not to have children, for example, can feel insulted by being told, “Well, you’d be so happy if you became a parent.”

They feel insulted because they’re like, “Look, I know who I am and what I want. And just because I would be happy if I had a child isn’t a reason for me right now to have a child.” I think they’re absolutely right about that. It’s just that you have to be super clear about the conceptual structure to explain why they’re right about it. 

There are other cases, but I like to compare these two cases. You can see the connection to the vampire, aside from the fact that you don’t get sleep much at night. 

The idea is that there’s this kind of very revolutionary change. It changes who you are in an amazing way when you have a child. But just because there’s lots of testimony about it, and just because you can see people around you kind of becoming happier, that by itself isn’t really the right way to think about a choice. 

Sean Murray  23:58  

Exactly. There’s so much about that experience that I found personally rewarding. But I think that the revelation in your argument and reading the book is that we have this called a “hindsight narrative.” We like to tell the story of how we made the decision. It all fits together when we didn’t really logically look at all of our choices and make the best choice. 

We made a choice to become a new person. We gamble and take that risk. We were rewarded in some way. At least that was my experience. Interestingly, if you look at the happiness research, I think you cite Kahneman, and maybe Deegan, and some of these other economists. They have uncovered that many people who decide not to have children are as happy, or maybe even a little happier. 

I just had Jonathan Clements on the podcast. He’s a personal finance writer for The Wall Street Journal for years. He mentioned that too almost in passing. He has kids. He said, I find this hard to believe, but it came out as far as how we spend our money on how we find happiness. 

The research is even maybe going the other way, as far as happiness. Yet, it’s not just having children. There’s another thing I took away from the book. You start looking at your career choice. You start looking at going on a 10-day silent meditation retreat potentially could be transformative. I mean, these decisions are out there.

Laurie Paul  25:20  

Yeah, so hindsight bias is a real thing. We tend to look back and think, “Oh, I knew all along what I wanted.” I mean, I’m not saying that that isn’t the case sometimes. But I think that an awful lot of times, that’s just not the case. We don’t see it. 

The thing about happiness research, I think that research is evolving. It turns out it’s quite specific to countries, cultures, and things like that. But there’s an interesting feature about having children that involves a kind of suffering. 

My colleague, Paul Bloom and I are very interested in this uphol as a psychologist and as a developmental psychologist. He’s super interesting. He’s a great thinker. We have been talking about how there’s a kind of suffering involved in becoming a parent. 

There’s a way in which maybe thinking about happiness isn’t quite really what’s going on. We choose a kind of suffering because there’s a kind of joy that comes along with it. It’s just not even clear, I think that there’s a straightforward kind of comparison to make between the kind of happiness and satisfaction that someone leaves a child-free life, and the kind of satisfaction and happiness that a person needs when they have a child in  life. I mean, they’re just really different.

They may also be different because of a different balance between joy and happiness and suffering. Maybe our preferences adjust so that in a certain way, we don’t mind the suffering as much as parents bizarrely. It’s like when someone says: “Hey, I’m going to stick your hand in this boiling pot of water. And you know what, it’s going to hurt, but you’re not really going to mind it that much. Just take some Percocet or something. 

I have a broken arm. I was given Percocet for a couple of days. It was very interesting. Like, I just wasn’t worried about the pain. It could be something like that. Is that appealing? No, it’s not. But it seems that something like that happens.

Sean Murray  27:00  

That’s a really interesting insight. I think the idea of the suffering involved in parenthood and the meaning that we can derive from that reminds me of Viktor Frankl’s work, “Man’s Search for Meaning.”

He talks about suffering. For those of you who aren’t familiar with “Man’s Search for Meaning”, Viktor Frankl was a Jewish psychologist or psychiatrist. I can’t remember exactly. But working in Vienna before World War II started.

When World War II broke out, he ended up in a concentration camp, surviving, and writing a book about it. He talked about the meaning he found in the suffering. That was deep. It helped him survive. He also found if he had a purpose, it’ll help him survive. And potentially, children could help us with purpose as well. 

You talk about the unselfish nature of the love we have for our children, and our willingness to even put our life down for them. It is like maybe an ultimate sacrifice. I think that there’s something there. I’d be interested in the work you’ve done there, if you’ve followed up on your books, or on papers, or whatnot that we could read about. I think that we can derive meaning from suffering.

Laurie Paul  28:08  

I think we can define meaning from suffering. I’m still working out some of my thoughts about that. But one way, just to go back to the question you’re asking about when we make a choice, I think we can find meaning from choosing to either remain that self that we are, say, rejecting the transformation, or choosing to become a new self. Like, we choose to become a vampire, or we choose to become a parent. 

The meaning comes, I think from having a purpose. I can’t talk about the kind of revelation involved in making a discovery that is associated with just a feature of the way we live our lives. What it is to be human, for example. It can involve becoming a parent. It doesn’t have to be like there are other ways to be human. But that’s just one very distinctive, interesting way to live one’s life.

Discovering that can be rich, regulatory, and amazing. I think there are other things you can do too. You can choose a particular career, then you’re discovering a way to live your life and a way to kind of be in the world that I think can be incredibly interesting. And especially if you choose a life where you give to others. 

Those kinds of discoveries connect for me with the way that we develop our minds, the way that we explore the world, and also the way that those two things interact so that we can construct ourselves. We live a life and construct a narrative through forming ourselves over and over again through these transformative experiences. There’s a kind of authenticity out there and there’s a kind of discovery. For me, I think that brings us a kind of meaning.

Sean Murray  29:41  

Absolutely. Have you in your research come across people that are more inclined to continually transforming, or continually reinventing themselves? We often learn so much from people that are living in extremes. Have you come across someone, or a lifestyle with continual reinvention? 

I mean, I think about Picasso, or certain artists that we look up to. It seems like they sort of lived on that edge in some way. Through art, we’re sort of creating and transforming. I don’t know if there’s a connection there too. But I guess we have to suffer to create art. I’m just curious if that line of inquiry is gone anywhere.

Laurie Paul  30:20  

That’s interesting. I think you’re right that one of the really interesting things about an artist is they are constantly creating. And often, they’re creating new works of art. But there’s a lot of one’s identity is, I think, contained within the art. 

That sort of self expression, and arguably self kind of recreation would be a good example of someone maybe who is really devoted to sort of transformative experiences as a way of life. 

I came to this partly because I love new experiences. I’ve definitely undergone transformative experiences in my life in several different ways. I think all of us have in various ways, but I may have had more than others. 

I’ve always been puzzled about how to make those choices. I noticed how interesting the transitions were, and how little I really knew about what I was getting into. But also, I find it valuable. 

I’m saying no, I haven’t come across anyone in particular, but I think the ideas are interesting. I also want to compare it to the kind of person who rejects uncertainty, and finds value in kind of a steady state and not changing. 

*inaudible* “It’s always better to seek the new.” In fact, it can be a lot worse to seek the new. I’m not arguing that this strategy of finding new things is necessarily good. It’s just a kind of life that involves a distinctive kind of revelation and a *inaudible* kind of valuing. But if you like a life that’s very steady, that doesn’t change, and you value that constancy, then that’s another way to find value. I respect that too.t

Sean Murray  31:44  

That would be the other extreme. I think that’s really interesting. I don’t know if that’s a monk who lives in a meditative state, who’s almost in the silence. There are people in religious orders that live a life that’s sort of like that. It’s almost the same every day, and they’re praying. I think that would be really fascinating too. 

You’ve got a chapter in the book called, “The Shock of the New.” Talk a little bit about that. What is the shock of the new?

Laurie Paul  32:07  

This goes back to what I was saying earlier about what I think of as the intrinsic character of lived experience. I’m interested in this. I mean, I also do philosophy of mind. I’m interested in the way that we experience the world and come into contact with properties of the world. 

It relates to consciousness. But my interest in consciousness is not what many philosophers are interested in, which is what’s called, “the hard problem of consciousness.” What’s the relationship between the brain and the mind? I care about that. 

But what I’m especially interested in is just how we, as conscious experiencers, kind of interact with the world and discover its properties. Again, in a sense, it’s to receive meaning and insight from discovering these properties. 

I like what you were saying about meditation and the monks. I do think that there’s a way in which your contemplation, or where you’re focusing, or often, just basic qualities of the world. It trains you to extract the kind of insight and meaning from exploring. One might say, “The texture of those particular properties.” The silence, or even some mundane thing, like a teacup.

The idea is that you learn how to extract something important from the way that the mind kind of makes contact with the external world. I’ve just always been fascinated by that. The thought is that when you come across a new kind of experience, such as seeing a new color for the first time, or the example I like, being blind and then gaining sight, or being deaf, and gaining the capacity to hear ordinary sounds or music. That’s super interesting. 

I think that’s really interesting for the mind. It’s a huge discovery. It’s not necessarily good. People who are congenitally blind, I think, often lose amazing abilities if they gain vision. There’s a trade-off here. 

I’m not saying it’s automatically good. I just think it’s pretty fascinating. Discovering new qualities of the world, I think can just be intellectually valuable and interesting. Even when their bad quality is actually going back to the suffering. Sometimes experiencing pain in various ways, or the pain that maybe you would experience when caring for someone else, or for sacrificing something about your life for someone else. That also can carry value, partly because of what it’s like to do it, not just for the good that it does in the world. 

Sean Murray  34:21  

As we think about these transformative experiences, through journaling, is that something that can help us temporarily connect the two selves that we’re dealing with here? In decision theory, we talk about keeping a decision journal, and talking about the reasons why you make a decision, or what’s going on in your life when you make the decision. 

Maybe we do that before a transformative experience. We know we’re going to transform. What I like about your book is I really feel like now I know I’m going to transform. The next time this decision happens, I’m going to look at it a little bit differently. I’m going to think, “Okay, I’m going to be a new person in the future.” 

I guess what I’m saying with this writing example, Laurie is that I sort of want to write a letter to myself in the future, and remind my new self what it was that brought me to that point. Is that something that you’ve explored or talked to people about?

Laurie Paul  35:14  

I love that idea. Not journaling it, per se. I think that nostalgia in general, or some of the emotions we feel when we have certain kinds of experiences can help us make the kinds of contrasts and comparisons that you’re talking about. Journaling seems like one way of doing it. 

If you think about going back to your childhood home, or the example of Proust. He talked about dipping the cookie into the blind blossom tea. The thought is that you can create an experience somehow that calls back something to your mind, and allows you to simulate a past experience. 

Meeting what you were writing might be able to do that. Having other kinds of experiences might be able to do that. I think the value of that is that it can help us to understand the sort of change that we underwent.

For the forward-looking thing, that is important. It’s for those who are looking back and trying to sort of draw wisdom from the changes that you underwent. And so, yeah, I mean, I’m a big fan of that. 

I write philosophical books and articles for a living. It’s partly through writing about these things and thinking about them that I’ve learned about them for myself. It’s not like I understood this project when I started writing about it. I think I still don’t understand it. I’m writing about it all the time. I’m still trying to figure it out. 

Sean Murray  36:31  

In closing, can we go back to this idea of becoming who we are? I think that the big takeaway for me, and thinking about transformative experience in the way that you write about in your book is that when I face a transformative experience or a decision, if I decide to undergo it, I will be deciding to become a new person in some ways.

A part of the value there is that I authentically decided to take that step. I’m sort of authoring my life. We’re authoring our lives when we do that. 

What else can you tell us about becoming who we are? Is there another way to think about it? How do we become who we are? I guess it seems almost like an oxymoron, but there’s something there.

Laurie Paul  37:17  

If we’re just thinking about time, of course, you become who you are over and over and over again. But the thought is that you make choices that affect the way who you are in the moment. Your past causes you to have the present that you exist in. 

A part of what I’m hoping people will think about more is that first, there’s a way in which you have responsibility. You have authenticity in making choices where you choose kind of knowledgeably to become a new self. Even if you don’t know what that new self is going to be like, you know in a different sense what you’re doing. 

But also, this relates to the work of Hanna Pickard who is a philosopher at Johns Hopkins. She does really extreme work distinguishing between basically kind of praise and blame, and responsibility.

You can be responsible for being who you are when making certain kinds of choices. But that doesn’t mean, especially if you make a mistake that you shouldn’t be blamed. Maybe you shouldn’t even be praised either. There’s a sense in which you take responsibility for who you are when you make these choices in an informed way. 

But you know that what you’re doing involves a lot of uncertainty and unknowability. That gives you a kind of freedom because then you’re not going to look back and say: “Oh, I made such a mistake. I should have known better. I regret making this choice.”

No, you weren’t choosing or knowing what it was like to see or know what it was like to be a parent. You were choosing to discover this. Maybe it wasn’t quite what you thought it was going to be. But you shouldn’t choose it thinking that you knew what it was going to be. You choose it so that you can discover.

Sean Murray  38:45  

That sort of takes the stakes down a little bit when you look back at your life, especially when things didn’t work out the way you thought. There was uncertainty there. You chose to become a new person in some way. You didn’t know how it was going to unfold beforehand. 

This gets back to that hindsight bias. We sort of think that, “Oh, that was the way it was meant to be, or I should have known it was going to turn out that way.” But we really didn’t. That’s an important distinction to remember. 

You really didn’t know how things were going to work out. You made a decision based on the information you had at that time, and projecting ahead to the future self that you’re going to be, and all those things. But you really didn’t know how it was going to play out. That alone kind of psychologically, free you up to maybe discover a little bit more, or maybe be a little bit more human or free when it comes to your next decision.

Laurie Paul  39:39  

We’re both tolerant of yourself and of others’ choices.

Sean Murray  39:43  

Well, we’ve come to the end of the podcast, Laurie. It’s got to be close to midnight in your vampire thought experiment. What are you going to do?

Laurie Paul  39:52  

I’m not telling you whether I’m a vampire or not, but I did have a disco in front of a dance party last Halloween.

Sean Murray  40:00  

We can infer from that about what happened. We’ll see. Laurie, where can people find out more about you, your book and your writing?

Laurie Paul  40:06  

My website at Yale is www.lapaul.org. That’s my personal website. You can also find it if you look in the Philosophy Department. There’s a link there. I have a lot of links to articles and some media things. If you’re interested, you can read my book. *inaudible* listen to some of those podcasts. And obviously, our discussion has been super fun.

Sean Murray  40:30  

It was really fun for me as well. Thanks for being on The Good Life. 

Laurie Paul  40:34  

Thank you.

Outro 40:36

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