Transformative Experience

Transcription

1 Transformative Experience L.A. Paul April 3rd, 2015 Handout to accompany Author Meets Critics session, Pacific Division APA Meetings, L.A. Paul. Transformative Experience. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2014 A Précis of the Argument As we live our lives, we repeatedly make decisions that shape our future circumstances and affect the sort of person we will be. Some of these decisions are major, life-changing decisions: in such cases, we stand at a personal crossroads and must choose our direction. Transformative Experience raises questions about how we are to rationally and authentically make these sorts of life-changing decisions about our futures. When making major life choices, such as whether to start a family, or what career to pursue, it is natural to assess our options by imaginatively modeling different possible experiences and projecting ourselves forward into different possible future outcomes. But for choices like this, involving dramatically new experiences, we are often confronted by the brute fact that before we undergo the experience, we know very little about what these outcomes will be like from our own first-personal perspective. This has serious implications for our decisions. If we are to make life choices in the way we naturally and intuitively want to by considering what we care about, and what our future selves will be like we only learn what we really need to know after we have already committed ourselves. If we try to escape the dilemma by avoiding the new experience, we have still made a choice. A central idea in the book is the development of the notion of a transformative experience, which is a kind of experience that is both radically new to you and changes you in a deep and fundamental way; experiences such as becoming a parent, discovering a new faith, emigrating to a new country, or fighting in a war. Epistemic and Personal Transformation An epistemically transformative experience is an experience that teaches you something you could not have learned without having that kind of experience. Having that experience gives you new abilities to imagine, recognize, and cognitively model possible future experiences of that kind. A personally transformative experience changes you in some deep and personally fundamental way, for example, by changing your core personal preferences or by changing

2 transformative experience 2 the way you understand your desires, your defining intrinsic properties, or your self-perspective. A transformative experience, then, is an experience that is both epistemically and personally transformative. Transformative choices and transformative decisions are choices and decisions that centrally involve transformative experiences. The philosophical framing for my arguments about making rational, authentic, life-defining choices draws on what we ve learned from debates in philosophy of mind about how an experience, such as seeing red, can be necessary for us to have certain imaginative capacities and abilities. It also draws on debates about color over the intrinsic value of subjective color experience, and on the importance of the first-personal perspective in understanding personal identity and causal and temporal experience. I tie together the value of experience and its role in prospectively assessing our first personal futures with formal tools drawn from decision theory, causal modeling and cognitive science to address questions concerned with first personal decision making and self-construction in contexts of transformative decisionmaking. Transformative Experience and Rational Decisions The main problem with transformative decisions is that our normal decision models break down when we lack epistemic access to the subjective values for the possible outcomes. Metaphorically, you can t see the outcomes in order to knowledgably assess them in the relevant way. As a result, in cases of transformative choice, the rationality of an approach to life where we think of ourselves as authoritatively controlling our choices by projecting ourselves forward and considering possible subjective futures is undermined by our cognitive and epistemic limitations. More specifically, there is an ordinary and plausible assumption that the ideal rational agent acts authentically by taking charge of her own destiny and mapping out her own subjective future by rationally evaluating her options from her personal point of view. Consistent with this, major life choices, understood as personal choices, when made carefully, seem to essentially involve deliberation. An agent deliberates by reflecting upon how she wants to realize her future, and perhaps realize herself as a certain kind of person, before she makes her choice. She does this by assessing the subjective values of different possible outcomes of acts that she is choosing between. By subjective value I mean the cognitive phenomenological value of the outcome, that is, the rich and developed character of the experience.

3 transformative experience 3 Subjective values, as I understand them, are experientially grounded values attaching to lived experiences. These values are based on more than merely qualitative or sensory phenomenology, as they may also include values arising from nonsensory phenomenological content. They are intended to include contentful features of rich, developed experiences that embed a range of mental states like beliefs, emotions, and desires. It is subjective values that are involved in transformative decision-making: these are values that we ascribe to our lived experiences, although I describe them as what it s like values to emphasize that they necessarily include phenomenal value. (There are other types of values, of course, such as moral and political values, that also come into play when we make big decisions.) On this approach, you, as the agent, review your options and do a kind of cognitive modeling from the subjective perspective. You imaginatively project different possible futures for yourself, futures that stem from different possible choices you could make. When you are considering your options, roughly, you evaluate each option by running a mental simulation of what the outcome would be like, should you decide to choose that option. After you run each simulation, you assign it a subjective value, and then you compare all the different values when you make your choice. Of course, you also take into account any outside testimony and empirical research that bears on the question of what to do, but in the end, you evaluate the options by weighing the evidence and considering the expected value of each act from your own perspective. This process of simulation or imaginative acquaintance fits with how normative decision theory is supposed to provide a guide for how agents, if they are making rational decisions about their future, should proceed. Now that we have the framing, we can see, very briefly, how the argument runs. Big life choices often involve epistemically transformative experiences, compromising our ability to assign subjective values to radically new outcomes, in turn compromising our ability to use our preferred decision models to make these choices rationally. Again, this is based on the idea that if you can t see the future selves that are the possible outcomes of your choices, you can t model and assess them for their subjective utility. A second issue: because of the personally transformative nature of the epistemically transformative experience, your preferences concerning the new outcomes can also change. If an experience irreversibly changes who you are, choosing to undergo it might make you care about very different things than you care for now. Who you are and what you care about is going to change when you strike out into the unknown. As a result, having the new experience may change how your

4 transformative experience 4 post-experience self values the outcomes, including your valuing of higher-order values, creating a problem for how you are to adjudicate between these different sets of preferences. There is a further, central complication that arises from the conjunction of the first two. If, before you make the choice, the central future changes in yourself are epistemically inaccessible to you, you cannot foresee the ways your future self will change. Thus, you cannot foresee who you ll become or foresee how your high order values may change. This creates a deep problem for a model of rational choice based on maximizing one s expected utility if the goal is to model a choice where one is, in effect, choosing which future self to become. Becoming a Vampire In the book I illustrate the situation with vampires. Imagine that you have a one-time-only 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 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 animal blood (but not human blood) and avoid sunlight. 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 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. It s amazing. But I can t really explain it to you, a mere human you have to become a vampire yourself to know what it is like. So, the question is, would you do it? And the trouble is, how could you possibly make an informed choice? For, after all, you cannot know what it is like to become a vampire until you become one. The experience of becoming a vampire is transformative. That is, it is an experience that is both radically new, such that you have to have it to know what it will be like for you, and moreover, it will change your core personal preferences. You can t possibly know what it would be like before you try it. And you can t possibly know what you d be missing if you didn t. So you can t rationally choose to do it, but nor can you rationally choose to avoid it, if you want to choose based on what you think it would be like to be a vampire. We don t normally have to consider the choice to forgo being human, but the

5 transformative experience 5 philosophical structure of this example generalizes in the way I ve described, and makes trouble for our story about how we should make momentous, life-changing choices for ourselves. The vampire case is structurally parallel to a version of Frank Jackson s case of black and white Mary, but where Mary is an ordinary person like you or me, or maybe an ordinary scientist, rather than someone who knows all of complete science at the end of inquiry. 2 The parallel here is whether Mary knows what she needs to be able to know if she wants to decide whether to leave her black and white room based on what she thinks seeing color will be like. (She should leave her room if color will be like this, but she should not leave it if color will be like that.) In this situation, she cannot perform the relevant simulation or the sort of cognitive modeling that she needs to be able to perform to assign the values of the outcomes for her, and thus to calculate the expected value of leaving her room. She lacks the ability to imaginatively acquaint herself with the future event, what it will be like for her to see color, in a way that can provide a guide for how she should proceed. So we can see, pretty readily, how the puzzle arises in fictional cases like choosing whether to become a vampire or Mary s choice to leave her room. Real life cases of transformative choice involve cases like a congenitally blind adult choosing to have a retinal operation or a person choosing to have her first child. In these cases, you also can t know what it will be like to have the characterizing experience before you have it, and if you choose to have it, it will change you significantly and irreversibly. 2 Frank Jackson. Epiphenomenal qualia. Philosophical Quarterly, 32: , 1982 Choosing to have a Child Let me say a bit more about my personal favorite real-life example, the choice to have one s first child. Having a child often results in the transformative experience of gestating, producing, and becoming attached to your own child. At least in the ordinary case, if you are a woman who has a child, you go through a distinctive and unique experience when growing, carrying and giving birth to the child, and in the process you form a particular, distinctive and unique attachment to the actual newborn you produce. Men can go through a partly similar experience, one without the physical part of gestating and giving birth. For both parents, in the usual case, the attachment is then deepened and developed as you raise your child. I take the experience of having a child to be unique, because physically producing a child of one s own is unlike any other human experience. As a mother, in a normal pregnancy, you grow the child inside yourself, and produce the baby as part of the birth process.

6 As a father, you contribute your genetic material and watch the child grow inside your partner. When a newborn is produced, both parents experience dramatic hormonal changes and enter other new physiological states, all of which help to create the physical realizer for the intensely emotional phenomenology associated with the birth. These experiences contribute to the forming and strengthening of the attachment relation, and further characteristics of the nature of the attachment manifested between you and your child are determined by the particular properties of the actual child you produce. All of this generates the unique experience associated with having one s first child. This unique experience often transforms people in the personal sense, and in the process, changes one s preferences. If I am right that the salient details of the nature of the transformative experience of producing and becoming cognitively and emotionally attached to your first child are epistemically inaccessible to you before you undergo the experience, then you cannot, from your first personal perspective, forecast the first-personal nature of the preference changes you may undergo, at least not in a sufficiently detailed way. If so, then the choice to have a child asks you to make a decision where you must choose between earlier and later selves at different times, with different sets of preferences, but where the earlier self lacks crucial information about the preferences of the possible later selves. Once you see how epistemic and personal transformation work, it becomes apparent that many of life s biggest decisions seem to involve choices to have experiences that teach us things we cannot know about from any other source but the experience itself. With many big life choices, we only learn what we need to know after we ve done it, and we change in the process of doing it. The lesson I draw is that a rational approach to life may involve a certain sort of epistemic humility: life may be more about discovery, and coming to terms with who we ve made ourselves into via our choices, than about carefully executing a plan for self-realization. transformative experience 6

7 transformative experience 7 Replies to Critics Branden Fitelson Branden 3 develops two perspectives on decision making, one in terms of a subjective decision frame, and one in terms of an objective decision frame, and asks me how we should understand the problem that transformative decision making raises for decision theory. Reply: The distinctive problem that transformative decision making raises is for normative decision theory, and concerns the match between the subjective framing of an important decision and the objective framing of that decision. If we want our decision theory to provide a good guide for successful action, we want it to be inprinciple possible to approximately match subjective expected utilities with objective expected utilities for the important decisions we are modeling. Call this the matching problem. So the substantive problem I am raising, understood from the perspective of Branden s discussion, is that there is an in-principle defect in the way we want to subjectively frame cases of transformative decisions, one which rules out the possibility of a match between our subjective expected utilities and our objective expected utilities. This is a problem for a normative decision theory, if we understand one of the goals for such a theory to be to provide agents with action-guiding principles and procedures. 3 In this toy case, Tom has subjective reason to prefer A1 over A2 ; but, Tom has objective reason to prefer A 2 over A 1. Note: Tom s problem is not that his utilities are defective. Nor is Tom s problem that his credences are defective. Tom s problem is that his framing of the decision problem is defective. More precisely, Tom neglected to include some objectively relevant factors in his specification of the states. More generally, there are four possible sources of deviations between SEU and OEU (wrt two acts A 1 and A 2 ). Bad States: Deviations between S i and S i. Bad Utilities: Deviations between u and u. Bad Credences: Deviations between b and Pr. Other: (e.g., mis-calculations of SEU). With this toy model/framework in hand, let s use it to think about choices involving transformative experience. Fitelson, slide 7. Jane Friedman Jane asks: must transformative decisions be irrational? Reply: No. Transformative decisions need not be subjectively irrational. But I do argue that certain ways we try to make these important ordinary decisions involve a type of subjective framing that is deeply problematic. We can put the point as a failure to match, as I did to Branden, or we can say, as I do in the book, that we can t make such a decision rationally when we frame our decision model in certain very natural and ordinary ways. This is because the intended model fails. The thought in the book was that the label rational just doesn t apply in such a case, because we haven t got a workable decision model. However, if we think that there is a useful, minimalist notion of subjective decision making where more or less anything can go on with respect to the subjective side of things, then the problem might be better understood as the matching problem. Jane asks: what are informed preferences? Reply: In the cases of interest, having informed preferences in-

8 transformative experience 8 volves knowing what the relevant experiences are like. Once you know what the relevant experiences are like, you can use imaginative forecasting or projective cognitive modeling to assess their value. The idea is that we often first-personally prefigure various possible situations our future selves could be in as the result of our act, and assign these outcomes values. 4 A way to put my conclusions about the problems for decisionmaking, given our inability to imagine, grasp or model transformative changes, is to say that certain kinds of personal insight concerning our future selves, insight that is often tied to our imaginative capacities concerning our future points of view, are central to the process of deliberately and authentically choosing who we want to become. Having informed preferences in this sense involves having a grasp on the nature of these sorts of first-personal possibilities. It s not how they are formed, but what kind of information, broadly subjective and phenomenal information, they involve. This is also the kind of information we want for the sort of authenticity I m after, because it s what we need to prefigure our future selves. Jane asks: do we need exact phenomenal information to assess the outcomes? Reply: What we need is experience of the right kind. The assumption, drawn from Lewis s discussion of the taste of Vegemite versus the taste of Marmite, is that we learn something new from having the experience when we haven t already had similar experiences of the relevant sort. 5 Moreover, the unknown kind of experience can be the centrally relevant kind of experience for making the value assessment, the nature of which swamps the overall character of a complex outcome. 6 Alison Gopnik Alison says the real problem is not epistemic, it is the change in identity that comes with attachment. Reply: I agree with Alison that the change in identity with attachment is the really deep problem. My thought is that the change in identity combined with the epistemic inaccessibility of the change, that is, combined with our inability to foresee how the personal change will go, makes the problem especially troubling. The philosophical reason underlying the value of introspection is the idea that we want to make sure we truly know our own preferences when we decide. But we also want to choose in concert with who we really are and especially with whom we want to be. We want to knowledgably choose who we are making ourselves into. In the context of identity change through attachment, when we 4 Toy example: imagine choosing between architectural plans to renovate the philosophy department. A usual way to assess such plans involves imagining what various possibilities would look like, and what it would be like to work in a department like this or to work in a department like that. Being able to cognitively model the different options is important for making an informed choice between the plans. 5 David Lewis. What experience teaches. Proceedings of the Russellian Society, 13: 29 57, Toy example: Before tasting the new kind of ice cream, Zoolander, I might have had ice cream before, so I know it will be sweet, cold, and have a certain mouth-feel depending on its fat content. But maybe I ve never had any flavor of ice cream except strawberry, nor have I ever had Oreo cookies or anything like them. If that s all I know, I don t have informed preferences regarding the taste of Zoolander, and when I taste the Zoolander I ll discover the centrally relevant kind of experience that is tied to my assessment of what that sort of ice cream namely Oreo cookie ice cream tastes like.

9 transformative experience 9 cannot occupy the shoes of our possible future selves, how should we think about the decisions we make about who to become? How are we to prospectively think our new selves will be any better than our current selves? After all, the old selves, if they were still around, might find the new ones intolerable. And I worry about relying on testimony after the fact, because rationalization, confirmation bias, and the desire to avoid regret over irreversible actions all make people very willing to throw their past selves under the bus. Ultimately, when you face a transformative choice, even if psychology can tell you what the self who results from your choice will think, you still face an existential problem: will you really be happier after the transformative change or will you just be fundamentally different? References Frank Jackson. Epiphenomenal qualia. Philosophical Quarterly, 32: , David Lewis. What experience teaches. Proceedings of the Russellian Society, 13:29 57, L.A. Paul. Transformative Experience. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2014.