“If you cannot know what it will be like to have an experience, and if having that experience is what defines your future self, how can you rationally decide whether to undergo it?” - L.A. Paul
Yale philosopher Laurie "L.A." Paul came up with this thought experiment about a transformative experience involving vampires:
Imagine that you have the chance to become a vampire. With one swift, painless bite, you’ll be permanently transformed into an elegant and fabulous creature of the night. As a member of the undead, your life will be completely different. You’ll experience a range of intense, revelatory new sense experiences, you’ll gain immortal strength, speed and power, and you’ll look fantastic in everything you wear. You’ll also need to drink blood and avoid sunlight.
She's going to apply the analogy to a familiar, real-world situation. But first:
Suppose that all of your friends, people whose interests, views and lives were similar to yours, have already decided to become vampires. And all of them tell you that they love it. They describe their new lives with unbridled enthusiasm, and encourage you to become a vampire too. They assuage your fears and explain that modern vampires don’t kill humans; they drink the blood of cows and chickens. They say things like: “I’d never go back, even if I could. Life has meaning and a sense of purpose now that it never had when I was human. I understand Reality in a way I just couldn’t before. It’s amazing. But I can’t really explain it to you, a mere human—you have to be a vampire to know what it’s like.” Suppose that you also know that if you pass up this opportunity up, you’ll never have another chance. (p. 1)
For some (like me), this would be an easy decision, because you're not remotely tempted, even in a hypothetical world, to become a vampire. But you can probably appreciate the idea:
Think of a point in your life when you had a decision to make about a possible future that includes an experience that is unlike any experience you have ever had before.
You have almost no idea what it is like to be on the other side of the decision.
Of course, you can go on as you are, and you do know what that’s like.
When I asked you to think of a point in your life where you were faced with a decision like this, I wonder what you immediately thought of.
Maybe you thought of a conversion, a career change, a breakup, a loss…
What made L.A. Paul want to dive deeply into the topic of transformative experience was the decision whether or not to have kids.
It’s hard to imagine a more transformative experience than that one.
And for many parents, you can probably relate to the vampire analogy a bit better now, knowing the context.
Your life will be completely different. You will experience a range of intense, revelatory new sense experiences.
But you will certainly not gain immortal strength, speed and power, and, sorry to say, it’s very likely that you will not look fantastic in everything you wear.
To extend the idea, imagine I could tell you every fact imaginable about being a parent, or (if I had this ability) every fact imaginable about you being a parent. You know every fact there is to know about it.
Unless you actually cross that threshold and experience what it’s like to be a parent, your knowledge of being a parent will be incomplete and insufficient in many important ways.
At the risk of using too many analogies, the philosopher Frank Jackson illustrates the difference between knowledge about and experiential knowledge this way:
Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black-and-white room via a black and white television monitor. She specialises in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like “red,” “blue,” and so on. She discovers, for example, just which wave-length combinations from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via the central nervous system the contraction of the vocal chords and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the uttering of the sentence “The sky is blue”…
What will happen when Mary is released from her black-and-white room or is given a colour television monitor? Will she learn anything or not? It seems just obvious that she will learn something about the world and our visual experience of it. But then it is inescapable that her previous knowledge was incomplete. But she had all the physical information. Ergo there is more to have than that, and Physicalism is false. (The Norton Introduction to Philosophy, p. 368-369)
Not only does transformative experience add some puzzling features to crucial decision points in our lives, but there is something about this experience thing that significantly adds to our factual knowledge.
If “vibes” have everything to do with subjective experiences, vibes are real, and they are powerful drivers.
About a week ago, I was so excited to see that Laurie Paul was on one of my favorite podcasts, The Tim Ferriss Show*, for a few reasons:
- It is rare to see a legitimate, professional philosopher on a major, big-platform podcast (more on that below).
- Transformative experience has become one of my favorite topics to explore, and I was not aware of Paul’s book until this episode; I was more aware of her work on causation.
- It’s rare (though it shouldn’t be) to see a philosopher talk about the significance of family.
- Tim asked several questions about the accessibility and (lack of) appeal of philosophy, and there was a recognition from both Tim and Laurie that philosophy has an appeal problem. More significantly for me, neither were sure how to fix that.
When I look at how the general public—Tim’s audience—has received the episode, I’m both encouraged and discouraged.
Tim has 1.63M subscribers on YouTube. That's a lot.
The L.A. Paul interview currently has 11k views, which is the least by far among recent episodes.
Not even 1% of his YouTube audience thought, “I’d like to see this conversation about philosophy”. That’s the discouraging part.
Philosophy has a marketing problem.
Compare that 11k number to an episode where Tim interviewed a poet, which has over 3x the views of Paul’s episode.
Nothing against poetry, but really? Poetry is more popular than philosophy?
Apparently.
The encouraging part is that I’m not making up this marketing problem.
Philosophy performs poorly among the general public. I would like to know why.
One of my own transformative experiences occurred in college, sitting in my first philosophy course, when I suddenly realized in a new way what philosophy was about, and that it presented me with a fulfilling career option I could pursue.
Everything changed after that.
But part of being on the other side of that initial experience has included a series of further experiences that continually signal one thing to me: the things I’m most interested in are the kinds of things most people are least interested in.
It’s difficult to express accurately what that’s like.
It’s a vibe.
But the point here is not to try and make everyone care about philosophy. The point is to find and cultivate a community (including you) where everyone genuinely cares about big questions, wisdom, critical thinking, the quality of claims and arguments, etc.
And I hope it becomes less rare to see philosophers talk about family life and values. I’m excited to release podcast episodes where I talk more about the relationship between family and the academic life.
That topic almost never gets discussed, but I talked about it a bit in my conversation with Dr. Marcus Arvan, and in a few weeks you can hear a conversation where I talk with a wife and mom who is also a professional philosopher. She makes the case that in academic circles we need to end the stigma surrounding kids.
The significance and value of transformative experiences involving the family should be discussed far more.
I'd like to do something about that.
Until next time.
Jared
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* The podcast episode with L.A. Paul was prompted in part by a recent profile of Paul in The New Yorker. It was personally a little crazy to read the piece, because it starts out describing an invite-only philosophy event that Paul puts on in Arizona that includes two former professors of mine: Ram Neta of UNC and José Bermúdez of Texas A&M.
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