If an experience promises to transform us, it's difficult to decide about it

Should you become a vampire if the opportunity presented itself? More realistically, should you have a child? If you're deaf from birth, should you get a cochlear implant? 

These questions, among others, are raised by philosopher L.A. Paul in her book, Transformative Experience. It's a fascinating look at something I'd never thought much about before: if an experience promises to transform us, it's difficult to decide whether to have the experience.

I'll add a question that came to mind as I read the book. Should you join a religion or other form of spirituality that claims to be able to markedly alter your view of yourself and reality as a whole?

I first heard of L.A. Paul and Transformative Experience through an article in the December 9, 2024 issue of The New Yorker. The online version is titled "The Philosopher L.A. Paul Wants Us to Think About Our Selves: To whom should we have allegiance -- the version of ourself making choices, or the version of ourself who will be affected by them?"

I'll share a PDF file if the link doesn't work for you.
Download The Philosopher L. A. Paul Wants Us to Think About Our Selves | The New Yorker

The article was so interesting, I decided to buy the book. It goes into considerably more detail about transformative experiences, but the basic problem addressed by Paul is appealingly simple.

Usually we make a decision about whether to do something by considering the expected value of either doing, or not doing, that something. Expected value is simple conceptually, though statistically can get pretty complicated. Here's one non-mathematical explanation.

If someone offered you a free beer, but told you there’s a 1% chance it contains poison, you wouldn’t drink it. That’s because the badness of drinking poison far outweighs the goodness of getting a free beer, so even though you’re very unlikely to end up with poison, it’s not worth drinking.

We all make decisions about risk and uncertainty like this in our daily lives. And when trying to do good, we often face even greater uncertainty about the ultimate effects of our actions, especially when we consider all their long-term effects.

In practice, we don’t — and can’t — know for sure what the effects of our actions will be. The best we can do is to consider all of the good and bad things that could result from an action, and weigh them by how likely we think they are to actually happen. So you should think of the possibility of dying in a car crash as twice as concerning if it’s twice as likely.

We call this the ‘expected value’ of our actions, which is the technical term for the sum of all the good and bad potential consequences of an action, weighted by their probability. (You can read more about the technical definition here; it’s why in our definition of social impact, we say what matters is promoting ‘expected wellbeing,’ rather than just ‘wellbeing.’)

For example, if a disaster rescue effort has a 10% chance of saving 100 people, then its expected value is saving 10 lives.

If another effort has a 20% chance of saving 50 lives, then it would also save 10 lives in expectation, and so we could say it has similar expected value.

Of course, it’s rare to be able to have that much precision in your estimate of either the total potential benefits or the likelihood that they occur. But you can sometimes make rough, informed guesses, and it can be better to work with a rough guess than with no idea at all.

Paul, though, points out a complication with transformative experiences such as those I mentioned at the start of this post. If the action you take ends up making you into a different sort of person than you were when you decided to undertake that action, rationally there's no way for you to predict the action's expected value, because the deciding self is different from the experiencing self.

Consider becoming a vampire. That sounds ghastly to me in my current human form. But as Paul says, which fits with what I've learned about (fictional, thankfully) vampires, after someone becomes a vampire, reportedly they love their new blood-sucking self and want to convert others to vampire'ness.

So in my current state of mind, I definitely don't want to become a vampire. However, if an opportunity to become a vampire presented itself and I said "Go ahead, bite me," I'd be thrilled with that decision because I'd have been transformed into a person who is beyond happy with being a vampire.

Deciding whether to have a child is a very different decision, but similarly transformative. I can attest to that, since while I've never become a vampire, I became a parent in 1972 when my daughter Celeste was born.

As Paul notes in both the article and book, it is impossible to know what it's like for you to have a child until you've experienced this. Sure, you can talk to people who have decided to remain childless as well as to people who have decided to have children.

But they're not you, with all of your unique characteristics, values, preferences, and such. And other peoples's children aren't the child you will have should you decide become a parent. You don't know if your child will be perfectly healthy or suffer from some birth defect. You don't know how easy or difficult it will be to care for your child. And you don't know how becoming a parent will change you.

I recall thinking soon after my daughter was born, "I no longer feel like a child of my parents; now I feel like a parent of my child." Big difference. Suddenly my wife and I were responsible for a helpless baby that needed constant care. Becoming a parent was both more satisfying and more difficult than my pre-child self expected. 

Likewise, Paul speaks of how members of the Deaf community (she capitalizes the word) have mixed feelings about cochlear implants that allow deaf people to hear for the first time, albeit imperfectly. Some deaf people feel that the experience of being part of a tight-knit Deaf community outweighs the benefits of being able to hear. Others feel differently.

But until a deaf person has a cochlear implant, they don't know how this transformative experience will affect them. It's different if someone lost their hearing, as they know what it means to be able to hear. Again, it doesn't really help to talk with both people who are congenitally deaf and people able to hear from birth, because anyone considering a cochlear implant is unique and how they will be transformed by the implant experience is impossible to know in advance.

The problem seems unsolvable, and in a way it is. But Paul suggests one way to look at transformative experiences, that makes sense to me. I'll save that for another post, though.

Here's a passage from her book that will give you a feel for her writing style. Clear, yet decidedly philosophical. After all, she's a philosopher.

What you care about, when making a decision about your own personal future, is not the third person descriptive knowledge that you will have certain properties in the future, but your experience-based first personal knowledge of what it will be like for you to have these properties.

In other words, you care about what it will be like for you to experience your future, because you want to determine your preferences in terms of your expected subjective values. For example, maximizing your expected subjective value of becomes a species-typical hearer is what you care about when you make the decision to get a cochlear implant.

When we confront the decision to become a vampire, or to have a child, or to become a violinist, and so on, from our first personal perspective, a third-personal way of assessing and modeling the experiential outcomes is often insubstantial and unhelpful, because it merely involves describing the experiences, not determining their subjective values.

The special, first personal sense in which you know what it will be like to experience the likely results of your choice is the sense that fits with our centered perspective on the world and is reflected in our subjective values.

...Transformative experiences, then, confront you with the basic unknowability of your subjective future in a context where new and dramatic changes are occurring, and transformative decision-making draws out the consequences of that epistemic fact.

In an important sense, when facing a transformative choice, you lack the knowledge you need in order to have authority and control over who you will become when you choose how to act... Instead, you grope forward in deep ignorance of what your future conscious life will be like.

Comments

[Spence Tepper]

No one chooses painful experiences unless they understand the long term benefits. But more often than not we are more than happy to justify eating poison, simply because it is pleasurable, for the moment. And we are quite insulted by any suggestion that what we are doing is actually harmful. People are generally very defensive about their addictions, specially the intellectual addictions.

We should be happy to embrace life as it happens, taking care where needed, acknowldging where we have fallen short but always open to renewed efforts, accepting what we don't really know yet and happy not to know it all. We are only a tiny fragment of an incredible whole. But the intellectual mind can't accept that place. It wants to own the whole, and claim the territory, and make every effort to discredit the existence of anyone else's views, rather than just be happy to participate as a divine fragment with everyone.

[sant64]

This applies to popular ideas about life after death. The only existence we can relate to is an embodied, human experience, replete with senses and the enjoyment we derive therefrom. Even the ascetic has his own sensory satisfactions, finding a kind of pleasure in suffering. But if heaven is a state where there's no body, no senses, just disembodied awareness (somehow), we have to be honest: We can't honestly say we can imagine such a state to be in any way satisfactory. Indeed, it would be hell, a fate no one would choose.

I was thinking yesterday about the Buddhist teacher Ajahn Chah. In his early 60s, he developed acute diabetes and spent his last 10 years in a locked-in, vegetative state. Conscious, but not able to use his body at all. One person who saw him said they caught a glimpse of his eyes and witnessed extreme desperation. Really a horrible fate for the poor fellow.

Even the advanced meditating monks who've mastered entering sublime states of jhana get up from the cushion when they hear the dinner bell. It's impossible for humans to enjoy even the most pleasurable states of meditation indefinitely. And therefore, it's impossible for anyone to say they know that a disembodied existence in an eternal heaven afterlife would be something they would honestly want.

[Appreciative Reader]

"Should you join a religion or other form of spirituality that claims to be able to markedly alter your view of yourself and reality as a whole?"

Questions like these leave me bemused. They seem to point to a faculty that some others have that I lack: their apparent ability to "choose* what they should believe in.

Which is the fundamental premise --- IMV the fallacious premise, at least as far as my own person, but, I don't know, maybe not for everyone, I don't know --- on which Pascal's Wager is formulated.

As far as I am concerned, and as best as I can read myself: What view of myself and of the broader reality I'll subscribe to, is a function of one thing, and one thing only. That is: Which view best comports with reality?

So that that question, quoted above, resolves directly to whether or not that view, about oneself and the world, comports with reality. And, of course, to the additional and related question about how one might best figure *that* out.

[Appreciative Reader]

Thinking through further on my comment above:

Say you get a chance to join a program, whether religious or otherwise, that promises to "transform" your worldview and selfview.

Now, I take Paul's point that a weighted expected value approach might help us decide whether we want to do it. I also take her point that, given the different selfviews and worldviews before and after, one might be hard put to decide whose POV to consider in making thr decision: the present, pre-transformation self, or the post-transformation self: given that these two might well see and evaluate the transformation process differently.

Now all of that is perfectly fine: except, in one sense, it is all moot. Because the fundamental question here is: well, TWO fundamental questions, which would be:
1. Which of these worldviews actually comports with reality?
2. How do you answer question #1 above? That is, how do you decide which worldview and selfview best comports with reality?

...To me, the above two questions are fundamental. (And, I would imagine, to all reasonable, reality-favoring, rationality-favoring folks.). So that Paul's questions, above, are rendered moot.

...Because to undertake to "transform" one's (or another's) selfview and worldview, via a process, religious or otherwise, that incorporates instruction, and/or specific study, and/or behavioral therapy/exercises, and/or drugs : well, that is like the very definition of brainwashing!

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Yeah, like I was saying. This "choosing" what one "should" believe in ---- which is what deciding whether or not to embark on a transformation process that promises to transform one's worldview and selfview amounts to --- simply does not make sense to me. To me that resolves to this one more fundamental question: Which selfview and worldview actually comports with reality, as best as we can ascertain at this point in time? (And this additional important question: How exactly do you decide what comports with reality?)

[777]

Deaf & Blind. ;.;.;;