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Whatsapp It's impossible to know how transformative choices will affect you.

Having a baby, taking that job, getting married, moving country, becoming a vampire: when faced with life’s big choices what do you do? You might seek counsel, weigh up the facts, find further evidence, or just sleep on it, but does all this really help? Joe Gelonesi meets a sceptical philosopher whose theory presents a challenge to the idea that we’re in charge of our own destiny.

L.A. Paul is curious about what she terms ‘transformative experiences’—those looming forks in the road which call for a decisive turn. The sign most feared is the one that proclaims ‘no turning back’. These experiences are transformative precisely because there’s no going back; what you know after the experience cannot be erased, and to a degree you become a different person because of that knowledge.

You just don’t know what it’s like to become a vampire. If you refuse to become one on the basis that you can’t imagine not being human anymore, then you also shouldn’t fool yourself—you have no idea what you are missing.

Paul has been thinking about the importance of experience ever since she started her graduate studies, but now, as a professor of philosophy at the University of North Carolina, her theoretical musings have turned into a concentrated intellectual task. She leads a major project on the topic of transformative experience. Supported by the John Templeton Foundation, the Experience Project draws on theology, religion, psychology, and philosophy.

It took a personal threshold moment to focus Paul’s mind on the topic, though: ‘I had my first child in Canberra and I remember sitting with her thinking to myself, wow this is an amazing experience, why haven’t philosophers talked about this part of life?

‘I mean people, have talked about it, but not from the analytic, metaphysical, epistemological perspective that I’m trained in. How come there isn’t more of a discussion on this? ’

The threshold experience calls into play questions of free will, identity, rational choice theory, and modal realism where counterfactuals rule. But for Paul, a serious tilt at building a satisfying account of how we make such decisions has been curiously absent; former US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s concept of ‘unknown unknowns’ was ready for some serious analytical road testing.

The question of what to expect when you’re expecting seemed a good place to start. Paul, reflecting on her own experiences, began to think about how people actually go about choosing to have a child. She noted that the most rational path involves trying to imagine what it might be like to have one, or not to have one. The decision making procedure often involves asking friends and relatives about their experiences, and of the pros and cons of either path.

‘It follows the cultural norms of our society where couples are encouraged to think carefully and clearly about what they want before deciding that they want to start up a family,’ says Paul.

Research and information gathering is seen as the most viable and logical process, but when it comes to a personal matter like choosing to have children, it’s no surprise that in the end the decision is often based on a subjective, imaginative leap.

The personal standpoint changes the game; the decision swings from external empirical analysis to a deeply subjective stance—a phenomenal approach where past experience is overlaid on future schemes. Prospective parents might make an imaginative leap by association between happy coupledom and a satisfied threesome, but the trouble is—it doesn’t always turn out that way.

The mental calculus employed in these transformative cases works by weighing up the expected value of each possible outcome. That is—we assign higher utility to some expected outcomes than others, and that’s based on a subjective reading of what we think the outcome will be like.

Arriving at approximate expected value is not straightforward, however. There is no calculator to compute ‘what it will be like’.

In a landmark 1974 essay on phenomenal experience esteemed American philosopher Thomas Nagel deftly pointed out that it’s not possible to understand what it is like to be a bat—the very experience of being the bat is not available to us. Somewhat tracing Nagel’s insights, Paul sets up a thought experiment around the idea of the ‘before and after’ person.

To make the point stick she uses a novel approach that invokes the undead: ‘Imagine 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.

‘Suppose that all your friends have already decided to become vampires. All of them tell you that they love it. They say that they’d never go back. Life has a meaning and a sense of purpose that they never had when they were human. You also know that if you pass up the opportunity you will never have another chance. Would you do it?’

Sounds enticing, and perhaps merits some hypothetical consideration, but how does it relate to the everyday, real-world example of having a baby?

‘If, in the end, you choose to become a vampire based on the exciting possibilities you shouldn’t fool yourself—you have no idea what you’re getting into,’ says Paul.

‘You just don’t know what it’s like to become a vampire. If you refuse to become one on the basis that you can’t imagine not being human anymore, then you also shouldn’t fool yourself—you have no idea what you are missing.’

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Whatsapp Having a baby is a decision not to be taken lightly

Many a prospective parent knows this tortured trot around the mental circuit.

‘Having a child is not just a radically new experience,’ says Paul. ‘For many it is a life changing experience. It might be wonderful, or joyous, or happy—or it might not. But however it is, it is usually very intense and people find themselves with very different perspectives after the child is born. For most people it is epistemically transformative: when we confront these life-changing decisions we can’t know what it will be like.’

Therein lies the experiential rub. It comes down to what Paul sees as the epistemic transformation: you will know something after the event that you do not know now, and can’t know now, so there is no point trying to assign a value to that knowledge from this side of the epistemic wall.

What Paul is moving towards is a radical rethink of how rational choice theory operates, especially when it comes to life’s thresholds.

Paul’s view has brooked some disagreement. Psychologist Paul Bloom, for one, doesn’t buy the idea that you can’t seek salient information from friends and relatives who have already been there.

In a recent online exchange with Paul, Bloom argued that one can indeed rationally proceed on a big decision using ‘data from other people’. For Paul, however, that’s an inauthentic response which ultimately gives away one’s autonomy to make a decision for oneself. It’s a price, she says, we should not be willing to pay, ‘if the decision really matters to us’.

For the future-driven, self-made, autonomous agents of the 21st century, this may not be a welcome analysis. It seems it doesn’t matter how much you research a choice (and in the age of the internet this can go on for some sleepless nights) the reality of your future self cannot be known or even glimpsed before you get there. It’s time for a touch of epistemic humility, argues Paul.

There is an upside. Paul’s theory is a chance to rethink our relationship to our possible selves; instead of trying to control the uncontrollable, we can sit back, take a deep breath, relax and enjoy the process. As Paul sees it, the very act of becoming can be the objective in its own right.

‘There are philosophical and practical implications for the way we live our lives ... resolving the problems raised by transformative experience involves valuing experience for its own sake—that is, for the revelation it brings.’

Crossing the threshold Listen to the full episode of The Philosopher's Zone to hear more about choice, big decisions and their effects.

The simplest questions often have the most complex answers. The Philosopher's Zone is your guide through the strange thickets of logic, metaphysics and ethics.

