“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.”
Robert Frost, “The Road Not Taken”
Indeed, you may, one day, find yourself at a crossroad in your life. You are, possibly, once again, faced with a big decision, whether it is at work, or in a relationship, or shifting your ideological orientation. You play out different scenarios. What-ifs and maybes. Deep down you know that your choice will inform your experience, and based on the value of your experience, you may learn something new, grow, and transform.
L.A. Paul is a professor of philosophy and cognitive science at Yale University. Her main research interests are in metaphysics, cognitive science, and the philosophy of mind. In this conversation, we look at how certain types of life decisions that involve transformative experiences, like having a baby or becoming a vampire, cannot be made based on evidence and rational thought. We discuss the value of exploring these philosophical questions and the wisdom that can come from embracing uncertainty. Laurie is the author of Transformative Experience, Causation: a user’s guide, and Causation and Counterfactuals.
Highlights:
- Metaphysics and Cognitive Science
- Transformative Experiences
- Limits of Rationality
Resources:
- Big Decisions: Opting, Converting, Drifting by Edna Ullmann-Margalit
- Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein
- What Experience Teaches by David Lewis
- What is it Like to Be a Bat? by Thomas Nagel
Listen:
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Full Transcript
Thal:
Welcome Laurie to the show.
Laurie:
Thanks for having me.
Thal:
Thank you.
Adrian:
Laurie, we wanted to ask you, let’s say you were at a dinner party with a bunch of non-academics and they asked you to describe what you do for work. What would you say to them?
Laurie:
I would tell them about the notion of transformative experience, which is something that I’m working on. Transformative experiences are big life experiences, in other words, they are experiences that change us, how we think it makes us make sense of the world and who we are personally. I’m super interested in these kinds of experiences because I think first they teach us a lot about the world, but they also teach us about ourselves. I also think that we can use them to construct ourselves in particular when we’re making certain kinds of decisions involving transformative experiences, what I would call transformative decision. They’re actually really important to us and they form us, inform our preferences and all kinds of interesting ways. Now I’m gonna use an example, one of my favorite examples is choosing to have a child because that’s an example where I think it’s a big life experience. It’s actually something that you have to undergo to really understand how it’s going to change you and that it does often change you, and it changes you in a very kind of permanent way. That’s an ordinary example of a transformative experience that a lot of people will contemplate. Some people undergo it. This sort of gives people a grip on the sort of ideas I want to explore.
Adrian:
When we were looking through some of the research you’ve done, I noticed there was an interesting convergence that it seems to overlap between, on the one hand there’s metaphysics that you’re interested in, and on the other hand there’s cognitive science. I’d love to hear how you describe, first of all, what is metaphysics?
Laurie:
Yeah, I do not know what metaphysics is but I’ll give it a stab. I mean this is something that’s probably been debated well for a long time, but very roughly. I would think of it as an attempt to understand the way we think about what there is, which includes how we think about the (inaudible) and the internal world. And it’s a way of doing it that sometimes goes beyond the science, both the physical and natural science as well as a science of mind. When I say it goes beyond, I just mean that some of the questions that metaphysicians explore just aren’t things that admit of empirical assessment or maybe they’re more foundational. There are decisions or things you have to think even to undertake empirical assessment. There’s not just some answers your find in the lab or whatever and figure out what the answer is. You know, sometimes you have to think about, what do I take causation to be? Or what is a self? Or you know, what’s the nature of rationality? And you have to lay down some foundational answers to those kinds of questions before you can even kind of formulate an experiment.
Thal:
I mean these are very important questions that you’re exploring in an academic setting and it’s the same kind of questions that we also explore in depth psychotherapy and depth psychology. I’m just thinking about words that can be problematic like spirituality and soul. These are all slippery words. How can we talk about metaphysics without slipping into dogma on one side or words that don’t have a firm footing. Does that make sense?
Laurie:
Yeah. I don’t think it’s easy to do that. I mean, the way that I approach it is by partly trying to proceed clearly and carefully and then anchoring a lot of what I’m interested in it too in empirical work. So when I think about causation, what is causation? I might say causation, maybe very basically, something that happens between events, when one of it brings about another event and we can measure it to some extent when we think about dependence relations. In other words, while if something hadn’t happened, if this person that hadn’t happened in the second one wouldn’t have happened and we seem to experience causation in our life so we can point to it in ordinary context and say, oh look, when the bat hit the ball and the ball was hit out of the park, well that the bat hitting the ball caused it to go out of the park.
When you play pool, like if you sink the eighth ball in the corner pocket, it was hitting the cue ball into the eighth ball at the right angle that caused it to sink into the corner pocket. When we start trying to use specific examples and also talk about things in ways that are related to measurement that that can help.The other thing, I think, that can help is just to sort of anchor some of these discussions to history of philosophical discussion. Especially over maybe from me over the last hundred years or so, but there’s a much longer history, you know what I mean? Contemporary Western philosophy at least 2,500 years, and so kind of embedding, embedding these discussions in a richer context also helps to define them. Just using the words like, especially the way they get thrown around in ordinary conversation or in a metaphysical way or in a metaphorical way. I think can be, unhelpful.
Thal:
Absolutely.
Adrian:
On a more personal level, I’m curious, where this interest came from for you. How did you end up in philosophy and particularly these these domains?
Laurie:
I mean I always wanted to think more about how we understood ourselves in the world and about the process of discovery. What I think of as epistemic or mental conceptual revelation, like how we respond to new things in the world and discover new kinds of properties or new ways of being or, and make ourselves in various ways. Like, I think this rushed in on me when I was in high school. I grew up in a, you know, pretty vanilla upper middle class suburban environment and didn’t have a lot of experiences. Then what happened was when I was sort of, you know, 18 and escaped that environment, I moved to the city and then I started discovering culture and I went to, to university and I discovered, all kinds of ideas that I had never really had access to in different kinds of people.
It was so incredibly exciting and amazing that I think having those experience and starting to have more and more of those experiences like over the years that followed made me feel that this is something that I need to spend my life understanding better. There’s a way in which I see a lot of people sort of have a grip on these ideas in the ordinary sense, but that they don’t get studied too much in the academy I want to study it in the academy because I think that’s the way to deepen our, our grasp on the meaningfulness of these mental changes and understand how to use them, as I said, in the decision making context and how to under the world of rationality and discovery and learning in a precise way as possible.
Thal:
That’s something I struggled with, my background is in English literature and one of the things that I was struggling with at the time was, okay, so here we are studying English literature and it’s, but it’s also about the soul. Instead here we are just drowning in critical theory and all of that. It sounds to me that you are reconciling between the world of cognitive science and the metaphysical, which is a hard thing to do and you’re doing it in an academic setting. When you’re talking, I’m already seeing the connections between cognitive science, transpersonal psychology and metaphysics. It’s just exciting. I don’t even know what the question is, but I don’t know if you have more to say about that.
Laurie:
So something that’s going on. One thing that I have really been doing, and I think I’m not the only one, but not that many people have been doing is bringing together in particular metaphysics and contemporary, so called analytic metaphysics, like the study of causation, the nature of time. What we take the self to be constituted by, right, and also a formal epistemology together with cognitive science. I’m doing that here at Yale. I’m doing it both by collaborating with people who work in kind of congnitive vision science, social psychology, and behavioral economics. I’m also doing it in the classroom. Next year I’m going to be teaching a Grad level seminar with a vision scientist on basically temporal and causal perception where we explore the metaphysics along with contemporary cog-sci in a very kind of robust empirical, but also theoretical kind of way.
No one’s ever actually taught a class like that at Yale, especially not at the graduate level. I don’t know if anyone’s taught it anywhere in, to be honest, in the world. It’s exciting to do it here because there are a lot of psychologists and lot of philosophers and others who do a lot of research in related areas. I think it is a pretty exciting new cross-divisional graduate level course, and it also fits in, we’re building actually a quite special dual Phd program in the same areas. I think it’s in philosophy, it’s opening up to be sort of a new area of research and philosophy and psychology. Yale, is opening up, I think, new areas of graduate study to do the research. We’re doing all of that kind of at once together. There’s more, there is sort of conferences plans, and that kind of thing. It’s a new and opening up area of search is the way to put it.
Thal:
Yeah, I mean, just one of the things that we struggle with in the transpersonal psychology field is…okay…we’re always arguing against the mainstream psychology. Transpersonal psychology is not quote unquote recognized by mainstream psychology. There is a shift right now that’s going on and the fact that it’s happening at Yale is so exciting for me to hear.
Laurie:
I think you’re right, the challenge is to try to be clear about the topics and the terms.
Thal:
That’s true, the terms.
Laurie:
I view it as the philosophers teaching the psychologist and the psychologist teaching the philosophers at the same time, and as we’re doing this, we’re trying to kind of establish, communicate like new kinds of communication and new ways of understanding each other’s work.
Thal:
I’m just thinking like at the root of it and if we’re going to think about sort of ancient knowledge, philosophy and psychology have always intersected and it’s really, psychology was born out of philosophy. Going further back, I’m thinking about mystics and sages of different traditions, have talked about the law of causation. I’m specifically thinking about a Sufi philosopher from the Andalusian times, Gazzali, he talked about causation and how sometimes it’s not linear and sometimes a cause doesn’t produce an effect, so then what do we do? This is showing up in quantum physics.
Laurie:
I think especially before the 20th century, most philosophy eastern and western basically was tied to if not mysticism, various kinds of faith-based orientations. That was important, actually, because it was important to allow the mind to kind of range as freely as possible and explore lots of different avenues. There are many ways in which you can allow the mind to explore freely. (Inaudible) limits on what you have to constrain yourself to like what you can test in the actual world. You know, what you can kind of materially put your hands on. Although now I think, if we blend those more historical perspectives with the kind of contemporary focus on the empirical, you get a really interesting way to take bits from the earlier work, and from the earlier ways of thinking and then follow like the follow a line of thought, but then develop it maybe in an empirical way. So it’s a new way to explore the older ideas that we find in some of the history.
Adrian:
Laurie, I would love to go into the weeds a little bit with regards to transformative experiences and maybe for listeners to lay a little bit of groundwork. I’d love to hear you explain the vampire thought experiment as a way to kind of frame these big life decisions. I know, I’ve heard you speak about these before.
Thal:
To go back to the empirical
Laurie:
So one of my favorite thought experiments to illustrate first the idea of transformative experience and then second, the way that that can be important for big life decisions is to think of a fictional case because it’s like idealization in physics, you sketch an ideal situation, think about how to make sense of that and then you move to the more real life case and take the structure that you isolated in the fictional case and see if you can apply it in practical ways. I like to imagine that you were somewhere in Eastern Europe exploring a castle, and you’re down in the dungeons kind of checking out all these kinds of cool interesting rather scary bits at the dungeon.
Suddenly Dracula comes to you and he says, okay, I’m going to offer you a one time chance to become a vampire, and then he says, you know, it’s going to be irreversible. You have to make a decision. You’ve got until midnight tonight to make your decision to go back to your hotel room and think about it. If you want to become a vampire, I will come to you at midnight, leave your window open. Okay? This is obviously very exciting. No matter what you think, you will probably go to back your hotel room and think about it. So you go back to your hotel room and you start texting your friends, you call your mom, and say, look, you tell them about this opportunity. You say, what should I do, and as you start asking them questions, it turns out that they’ve already all become vampires.
This is surprising. I think it’s right to say, mom, why didn’t you tell me? Right? Then there’s some surprise there, but then you start asking the questions. What does it like for you to be a vampire? How am I supposed to make this decision? As you ask these questions, they start telling you things like, it’s incredible, it’s amazing. You get these amazing new sensory powers, strength and you know, fluidity and you look fabulous in fashion clothing. You can even make ugly clothing look fabulous, but there are some negatives. You have to live in a coffin. You can’t roam aound by daylight without kind of special thick sunscreen, that’s really awful to put on. You have to drink blood or at least artificial blood, and you keep asking questions to try to find out more about like what it’s going to be like because if you want to do it, right, the way that you would make this decision very naturally, think about what is it like to be a vampire and do I prefer or what I prefer to be a vampire to be human. You then ask more about it and say what should I do? They start to say things like, well, actually I don’t think I can really explain it to you. I can’t really explain it. There’s a lot of things that are there to explain. I couldn’t explain to you what it’s like to see the color blue if you’ve never seen the color blue and being a vampire is like that, but don’t worry, it’s amazing. It is something that you can’t understand until you have become one. But once you do become one, you will realize that only now does your life have true meaning. It’s just nothing like being a vampire. What are you going to do with that, right? You’re basically told, it’s going to be fabulous, but it’s not something you can understand in the relevant sense. You don’t know what it’s going to be like until you actually become one. So should you just do it?
I think there are, that’s the way, in other words, what’s going on is that the empire experience is as I would put epistemically transformative. It’s a kind of experience that you have to have in order to fully grasp that the nature of that experience, and it’s also going to change you profoundly, right? It’s going to change you so much that in some sense you’re going to be a new kind of being. A new kind of person. You want to say [inaudible] people, but it’s going to change some of your kind of core preferences, like what you really care about, how you want to live your life.
Okay? So that’s a transformative experience, and the problem is that if you’re going to make this decision, right, you have to make it in the absence of a certain kind of information, and in particular, you don’t know what it’s going to be like to be a vampire. All you have is a bunch of testimony from other people, and the it’s the way I described it, everybody thought it was fabulous, but if there were any naysayers, let’s say some people who you talk to [inaudible] I actually didn’t work out for me, but I’m trapped in this, then things got even harder. Right? So if you have diverse testimony, then you can be in an even more difficult position. There’s something else too, and that is when thinking about whether or not to become a vampire, if you just wanted to listen to the testimony or just to rely on what your mother said, there’s another factor to take into account and we can describe that as the endogeniety of the preferences involved.
In other words, what if there’s something about becoming a vampire that makes you want to be a vampire. What if, in fact, there’s a kind of Stockholm Syndrome that occurs, right? So that of course once you become a vampire, that biological process converts your preferences into wanting to become a vampire. But if that’s the case and it doesn’t seem like this incredibly unlikely to be honest, from what we know about vampires, then, the way that you evaluate their testimony is also is going to be corrupted. It’s going to be affected in some sense. If you want a real life example, let’s say that you were thinking about having children, but you’ve actually decided you didn’t really want to become a parent, but all of your friends told you, oh no. You might not want it now, but once you become a parent, it’s going to be amazing.
Right? So there’s a question there, right? Well maybe they’re right. Maybe they’re right. Maybe you wouldn’t really be happy, but what’s the ground truth for what makes you happy? Is it because right now you want to become a parent? Or is it just because there’s something about becoming a parent? It’s kind of Stockholm like so that you know, the process of becoming a parent makes you also really happy to have produced the child that you produce. I guess what I’m saying is the vampire thought experiment describes a certain kind of situation. It involves undergoing a transformative life experience, but it is a particularly difficult kind of decision because you don’t know what you need to know or to make the decision in a way that you ordinarily would if you were making an informed choice. So there’s a decision problem or how do you decide, and it isn’t as simple as just evaluating the testimony because there’s this endogenous element that makes even the testimony sort of mysterious.
So if you can’t look within yourself and know what kind of process it is that you are, how you’re going to change in certain kinds of ways from the inside, and if the testimony is also complicated by that fact, how are you supposed to make the decision in an informed way? How are you supposed to do it rationally, right? I mean like choosing how it’s going to maximize your expense value. As I hinted, maybe even more than intent, I think there are other life decisions like this and choosing to have a child in some sense can be really like this. I mean, maybe you don’t really, you’re not going to make it up. Maybe you just want to have a kid because your parents did, or you, anyone participating in this. But if you want to think about it in the way that I was describing, do I want this kind of life is this the kind of person I want to become, there’s a certain sense in which…there’s all kind of variables that you can’t pull aside.
Adrian:
It sounds like you’re pointing at the limits of reason and logic, like we cannot rely purely on those faculties to make a decision like this so like changing jobs or other identity changes that are dramatic. So how do you suggest people approach these decisions if that’s not a reliable way?
Laurie:
I guess what I want to say is I think we need to look at evidence. We need to look at testimony. It’s very important to do everything that we ordinarily do. The problem is that we shouldn’t think that that’s going to give us the answer. It doesn’t give us the answer, not because we haven’t thought hard enough. It’s not like, well, just think a little harder, try a little bit more, read more information, then you’ll finally find that missing piece. I don’t think it works that way. So I think instead you have to recognize that there are some things that language and testimony and other people can’t teach us. There are some things you just have to experience in order to know how they’re going to affect you. It turns out maybe some of the most important things in our lives are like this.
I’m not giving you an answer. I mean, it may be that there’s a kind of humility and a kind of wisdom that we gain by recognizing, using rationale, you using logic and assessment and maybe empirical information to discover that that’s the situation we find ourselves in, and then there’s a kind of acceptance and understanding that I think should come next. With that understanding other people and the decisions that they, when they have to make those decisions as well. I think this also ties to thinking about responsibility and blame and basically not blaming people in certain contexts when they make decisions when they couldn’t possibly have known. Somebody tells that they discovered after that experience.
Thal:
What you’re describing seems like a struggle for our modern mindset, to have to make a decision, despite the plethora of information that we have. I mean every time, I know personally, every time I want to make a change in my life, the first thing I do is I hit the bookstore. I’ve been in situations where the more I’ve read, I’ve, I was more confused and that I had to just take that quote unquote leap of faith and just make that decision. Then going through the experience was the learning and then whatever information that I collected was either confirmed or some of it was not. So…
Laurie:
Yes. In some ways it’s a distinctively modern problem. So first we’re encouraged to think that various kinds of science are going to give us the answers. And again, I’m a big fan of both natural, social, and psychological science. It gives us lots of information, but there’s this assumption that, well, we’re going to actually get all the answers that way. Well then if we just go out there, so much information available to us. Right. And the Internet. And also just because now so much has been kind of recorded and written down and you know, several hundred years ago, obviously many people, you know, they didn’t have any access to the information even if they have the ability to maybe write and whether they need to. And so now we have so much available to us. There’s this thought that well this is, we have everything that we need somehow and that we’re only limited by our own laziness or our own inability to search everywhere that we should. And I think that’s a mistake and it comes from misunderstanding the way that we work as humans. You know it’s, there are some ways we get information that come from experiences and experiences alone, and understanding that I think really changes the way that we should think about certain constraints. A leap of faith. Well, sometimes I do think because experiences, they only answer, you either leap into the experience to buy the ticket or you don’t.
That’s the choice, the choice is to discover what that experience is like or not. Let me draw a parallel that I find interesting. So there’s a way in which you know, we can understand at a deep level that we can’t understand another person’s first person perspective. We can to some extent, I can learn, you can talk to me about your life. I can think about it. We can empathize and various kinds of ways. But there’s another sense in which, I don’t know, I can’t know really what it’s like to be you, either of you and you can’t know in a deep way what it’s really like to be me. There’s a lot you can do, but you can’t know everything. Okay. Once we understand that it’s, I think then we can take that and apply that insight into thinking about who we might have been, our other possible (inaudible) of ours.
The problem of other minds and there was really understanding someone else’s mind can come into play when you think about understanding your own mind, if it were changed in certain important ways, like through these experiences. So, you know, the, I have two children, the possible self who never had children. My children are 11 and 15. It’s been a while. I really don’t have, I can’t jump into the mind of the possible person, Laurie, who never had children. She’s just too different from me now. She’s like another person. I think recognizing that, that this person, this thing we know about other people’s minds can also apply to ourselves. Kind of helps put this other discussion to context about how it looks. Sometimes there’s just some things that we can’t know and the wise response is to understand that and work with it. I’m not trying to pretend otherwise.
Thal:
It sounds like, in some ways, understanding ourselves deeply helps us then understand other people’s minds too to a degree and inform our decisions that are transformative. As you had mentioned…
Laurie:
I guess I would emphasize like understanding what we can know, what we can’t know, helps us to understand both ourselves better and also, that’s right, other people. Going back to parenting, which is a really useful example, it helps me to realize that there are things about my children that I can’t know and at this isn’t a failure. I mean it would be nice to know, I suppose when I have to make decisions for them about their lives. As they get older this is not important, but when they’re small, there’s a that you cannot know and you have to take chances, and sometimes you make mistakes.
Adrian:
It just reminded me of a very sort of zen thing, like the don’t know mind. It’s sort of cultivating, being okay with not knowing, which is hard, you know, and the uncertainty that people have to learn to sit with.
Laurie:
Yes. Well, epistemic humility. So a kind of humility in like what we expect ourselves and others to know and then becoming comfortable with uncertainty and not just uncertainty but unknowablility. So it’s one thing when I walk out of a room to be uncertain about what scene I might see, well, is it going to be, am I going to face a scene with some books in it or with a computer or with some trees? I could be uncertain which of those I’m going to face, but know that those are my three options. It’s a different kind of thing when I say if I open the door, I don’t know what’s going to be out there. So that’s an unknowability like let’s say I could be opening a portal to another world, right? Let’s go with that term, like that to kind of a radical kind of unknowability. Some of what I’m most interested in involves basically, if not as radical as like opening a portal to another world, a certain kind of unknowability like when you’ve never seen color, and all of a sudden you see colors and before you’ve seen the color, you just don’t know what it’s like to see color. It’s not about uncertainty in that case, and then you have to be comfortable even with unknowability.
Thal:
I was just thinking as you’re talking about that that there are aspects to that like opening the door and looking at the unknown. There are aspects that are hard to quantify from our human experience, like fear, guilt, shame, and these things can be associated with a decision, and there are also gut feelings. Sometimes you want to buy a house, everything looks good, but there’s a gut feeling that’s telling you not to buy the house. What can you say about that?
Laurie:
I think what I would say is feelings and emotions matter, I think as much as the kind of facts about something. So I assigned value to the nature of an experience. Right? Part of what I’m saying is that what it’s like to live one’s life after the fact, the value that one assigns, which should actually incorporate this kind of subjective character. The other thing I would say is that part of what what you’re talking involves for me stuff about motivation. It’s one thing to know various kinds of outcomes like you might know how to map out all the different outcomes and what weights to attached to how likely those outcomes might be. Yet you might not be motivated but you might be afraid or you might have other kinds of emotions that come into play that would affect the way that you make a decision. I think that’s a place where rationality straws.
Adrian:
What are your thoughts on using visualization? Is that sort of reliable to imagine with your mind using images or scenarios to imagine the home that you’re contemplating to buy in and sort of watching maybe perhaps how your body’s responding as information. How does that fit into your model?
Laurie:
Good. Yeah. I think there are lots of different ways we make decisions. In one way we’d like to make decisions involves some kind of visualization that you imagine yourself in a situation. Sometimes what you’re doing is putting yourself in that situation messily and then trying to figure out what should I do, like what are my preferences. Sometimes though in virtue of imagining yourself in a situation you form your preferences, right? You might not even have had preferences until you actually are in that situation. The way this comes back to a transformative experience is that part of what I’m saying is that we use that tool often when we’re trying to figure out what to do, but if you don’t have the information you need, if you say, well, I want to decide, do I want to like put them on enchroma glasses and be able to see colors in the world or don’t I, maybe I will find it overwhelming and frightening and in disruptive or maybe I’ll think it’s fabulous.
Well, if you’ve never seen color, you don’t have the ability to imagine in an accurate way what that’s going to be like. So you can’t discover your prefrences. I think the same thing happens. Take somebody who’s been in prison for 25 years who’s never used the internet, who’s never used a cell phone. They’re up for parole. They have to go and face the parole board and describe how they’re gonna respond to and preparing themselves for various kinds of difficult situations to convince the parole board to let them out. There’s a way in which we’re asking you to do something impossible. It’s just, they can say things. I think people do say things, you get prepared and hopefully obviously they’re there and prepared enough to answer the questions, but I think often we’re actually putting a quite an unfair burden on this person because the (inaudible) changes so much in ways that they’ve had no experience. They can’t possibly perform from the kinds of visualizations that they would need to be able to assess what they’re going to face in the outside world and make the right decisions.
Adrian:
Yeah. For some reason, I am thinking about Elon Musk and the mission to Mars, it’s like, if that was an option, would you like to move to Mars? That’s one of those scenarios where you just have no reference.
Laurie:
Exactly. I think parallel cases are, say someone is thinking about emigrating, right, and there might be political reasons forced you to leave, and so maybe you don’t have a choice, but even then it’s a kind of opening a door to like another world. People will go because maybe they have to, but if you’re making the decision, maybe you have to make a choice between moving to one country that’s very different from the one that you’re in. Again, you faced this sort of problem, like it’s an unknown really how all the things you’re going to experience and how you’re going respond to how you’re going to change. What do I want to discover, what it’s going to be like or do I want to pass up that chance because even though there are opportunities there, it’s also going to change me and I value who I am now, and I think it can be totally rational to pass up the chance like that.
Thal:
One of the main reasons we started this podcast was to sort of address or walk around the issue of the meaning crisis that we’re going through right now. We feel like your work around transformative experiences can offer an answer or a prespective to that crisis. Is there anything you’d like to speak to about that?
Laurie:
I’ve said a few things about revelation and what I think of as wisdom rather than truth. In other words, I think that first recognizing that experience is something where we, that we can use to learn about ourselves in the world in virtue of having the experience. There’s a way in which something is revealed to you. What’s revealed to you is in a sense how you respond to the world, right? So when you go out into the world and see color for the first time, what you really discovering is how you respond to various kinds of (inaudible) things like that. The way that you’ll experience beauty and so what beauty is then for you. I think parenting is like that as well. I don’t think there’s a right choice or wrong choice with respect to parenting. I think, often, becoming a parent carries as much suffering with it as joy. In fact, it probably carries more suffering with it, than it carries joy and the decision to undergo these kinds of experiences aren’t simple calculations and I don’t think they’re specially informed calculations when it comes to thinking about like pluses and minuses or how much joy or satisfaction or sadness you experienced.
It’s just rather, look, this is what it is to live it is to undergo some of these experiences. It’s not wrong to try to control them as much as you can because you want to have a say over them even if you don’t know what’s going to happen even if there’s both unknowability and uncertainty. So what you’re seeking is a kind of discovery and revelation and opportunity, not necessarily knowing what the truths are and then judiciously choosing the ones that are right for you and rejecting the ones that are wrong for you. That sometimes is what we do, but in many other kinds of context, that’s just the wrong way to think about the trick does that we’re making in the way that we’re understanding things, and all that then goes back to like philosophy and going back to what we said in the beginning about natural, like empirical sciences, like often empirical sciences are about uncovering truths, uncovering like what the road is like in, in various ways and getting answers to questions. Philosophy isn’t about that. Philosophy is about asking questions, discovering questions, and then sometimes recognizing that there are things that … that we can’t know or understanding like how we’re supposed to kind of face and understand the place of a person in the world, and that’s kind of what wisdom involves. There’s a contrast there and that’s fine.
Adrian:
I’m reminded of our conversation with John Vervaeke and he mentioned the term existential inertia. There are these moments in our lives where there’s this stuckness because it feels like you just, you just can’t get going or can’t move. It sounds to me just hearing you speak, there’s a wisdom in continuing to just keep treading, like to not reach a point of stillness where you’re just not moving, and it could be because it’ll be really hard to get going again.
Laurie:
I think that’s right. This goes back again and accepting unknowablitiy and uncertainty and not feeling like you have to act in order to eliminate in order to create certainty because sometimes maybe you do, but sometimes that’s the wrong impulse. Instead of thinking that you must eliminate all the unknowns, you must eliminate all the uncertainty, you can just allow it to be. Even when you do make choices, you don’t have to think about your self as always making the right choice as much as I’m just discovering basically a way that the world’s going to reveal itself to be more evolved in various kinds of ways and not thinking that we have to be in control in all respects of our life.
Thal:
What you’re saying too is like, it really just goes in line with a lot of the mystical language that I’ve explored in my life and just you saying that just allowing and surrendering and these are very important concepts. Sometimes we don’t, we can’t just tread along. Sometimes we just have to sit with the unknown, with the paradox and just allow things to unfold.
Laurie:
I’m going to say it’s not giving up either. I think people feel anxiety when they feel that they have to try to create certainties and just kind of being and not controlling is actually a way of a kind of establishing a kind of control at a higher level. Being at ease with the way that things change is a response that shows kind of stability and a kind of understanding. In some ways the right way to approach the kind of anxiety of like all the different ways. It seems like we’re supposed to construct and control things.
Thal:
Yes, I mean it’s so easy to talk about, but really anxiety is like, we’re all struggling with it and I’m just thinking like someone listening to this and like, okay, I will sit with it but it really is about that and you know, trusting and allowing.
Laurie: It’s incredibly hard and it can be really unpleasant. It is not like, “oh, I’ll just be uncertain. Let it all sit and everything will feel wonderful.” No, I think usually it often, I mean maybe things feel wonderful after awhile or maybe you get a reduction of anxiety in some ways, but that doesn’t mean that there are no unpleasant things to the endure.
Thal:
That’s part of the experience. I mean, it comes with the positive and it comes with a negative and it’s experiential work essentially.
Adrian:
What can you tell us about, we noticed the book that you’re currently working on is called Becoming, I feel like this is a good time to bring that word. What do you mean by Becoming?
Laurie:
I don’t actually know if that’s going to be the title. I hate to say this expression because apparently Michelle Obama wrote a book that has that title. I can’t compete with Michelle. Another title that I have sort of played around with is, “Who will I become?” What I’m trying to get at there is again, how we construct ourselves sometimes how we construct ourselves through making decisions to have experiences and sometimes we’re just constructed by experiences. I want to explore that in the book. I talk about transformative experience but I also talk about how, actually I talk a good bit about how embracing various ways in which we dispense with old selves and parts of ourselves and new selves can surface sometimes unexpectedly, through choices that we make or life experiences that we have to undergo. Sort of understanding that kind of ebb and flow of one’s own kind of first personal perspective, especially oer the span of a lifetime, and the other thing that I spend some time talking about is how we often I think make judgments about, whether we think it would be better or worse to be a certain kind of person. I think when we make those judgments, sometimes they’re good judgments, but sometimes they’re born out of ignorance and a failure to remember that kind of self can really be impenetrable and we have to respect again, we can’t know about other people and about who we could become after various kinds of experiences.
Thal:
And with that judgment, really, is rigidity and the black and white thinking and it’s not a good place to go to.
Laurie:
We can uncover certain kinds of truths, but there’s a kind of humility that’s really important to recall and to say, well, look, I can think I know some things, but to assume that I know all the information that’s necessary, in these kinds of context when we’re talking especially about knowing other human minds and knowing other ways our own line could be, I think is just naive. There’s a kind of self-change that can be so dramatic that you simply can’t put yourself in the shoes of another version of you. If you think about yourself 15 years ago, for example, when I think about myself, there’s, I remember things about what it was like to be me then, but there is way where I can’t put myself back in those shoes 15 years ago, I had just changed too much. When I think about myself 15 years from now, or myself, 35 years from now, descending into dementia. Right? I mean, maybe not even 25 years, but let’s, let’s not go there.
Thal:
That’s black and white thinking right there.
(Laughter)
Laurie:
I think it’s like reasonable to say there’s a way in which I can’t both put myself in those shoes as that future self and still be who I am now. There’s a kind of incommensurability in our mental lives that has to be recognized. So just assuming, oh yeah, I know enough about what I’ll be like then to make choices for that future self with full knowledge and full certainty is just wrong. We shouldn’t try to put that burden on ourselves because that’s the wrong way to approach the changes in the ways that life bring us and the ways that we teach our own lives.
Thal:
I have to say, I mean, I find your work fascinating, which takes me to the question I’m thinking about, what philosopher inspired you or continues to inspire you or what kind book that you’ve read that sort of transformed your life or changed your perspective and is there anything you specifically would recommend?
Laurie:
Edna Ullmann Margalit is a political philosopher who wrote about various kinds of life changes and she talked about opting, drifting, and converting. There’s a paper that I would recommend. I’m also a fan of some of Cass Sunstein’s work on nudging and self change. Those are useful things to read. The philosopher that motivated me the most was someone David Lewis. He w,as a technical philosopher. He wrote hard to read and hard to understand books, so you really have to be committed if you want to read David Lewis, and his work, in particular, he wrote a paper called “What Experiences Teaches” and he’s written other work on decision-making and the metaphysics of selves that I love. You could read Thomas Nagel’s paper, what it’s like to be a bat, and you could read. I think I’ll stick with that. Yeah. A lot of my work, even though I’ve been talking about it in ways that I hope are accessible to non-philosophers. A lot of the work really is based on academic work in metaphysics and epistemology. My own book, transformative experience was written for philosophers, although lots of non philosophers have read it, and that makes me really happy. The book that I’m writing now is actually written for non-philosophers. So my hope is that people would read that book, to get a kind of a glimpse onto some of the philosophical issues, and then if they were really interested, they could read like my philosophical books or other works of other philosophers that I cite.
Thal:
When you mentioned that title, is how to be a bat? (inaudible) I’m reminded of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, and waking up as a beetle. That’s my literature mind, but I’m like, to make those connections between the different fields is fascinating.
Laurie:
Great and actually in my new book, I talk about a number of different works of art in literature and connections. Another thing that you could read, philosophical discussions of Plato’s cave and how…which is an old dialogue where you have Socrates talking with Glaucon about people who are in a cave who are just looking at shadows on the wall and they think they’re seeing reality because they have never been allowed to kind of escape the cave, but actually there’s the way in which everything you’re seeing is an illusion. I don’t want to say that the external world is an illusion or anything like that. What I think is great about that example is that it’s a way of understanding how…what we see and experience is a reflection in some sense of how the outside world is affecting us. I think it is a really good mental exercise to engage.
Adrian:
One final question, Laurie. If you could say one thing to your future selves, what would you like to say?
Thal:
I like that.
Laurie:
I would say that I need to pay attention to what I’ve learned from my past selves to not forget about epistemic humility.
Thal:
Awesome.
Adrian:
It was a real treat. Thank you very much, Laurie.
Laurie:
Yeah. Nice to talk with you guys. Thank you.