#796: L.A. Paul — On Becoming a Vampire, Whether or Not to Have Kids, Getting Incredible Mentorship for $250, Transformative Experiences, and More

23:08And how many did you write to to get the three to actually bite. Oh, everybody said yes. Everybody said yes. I have a science background. I was very interested in the nature of time. And I had been working with Quentin on the philosophy of time. So Quentin was a very unusual philosopher in terms of his training and his intellectual discipline and what he worked on a variety of things. He didn't fit into the mainstream philosophy. And that was actually great for me because I didn't fit in either. And he was open to that and he helped me. So I talked to Quentin. He said, well, I needed some kind of degree in philosophy and some kind of paper to apply to PhD programs.

23:43So the thought was, Antioch College had this, basically a degree by mail where you could get an individualized Master of Arts. You pay the university some enormous amount. It wasn't that much, but it seemed like a lot to me. And then you had to kind of do your own thing. And as long as you did your own thing, you would get this Master's degree. Pretty sweet. So I was like, okay, sign me up. Yeah, exactly. I mean, there were a few other things you had to have some, like a professor had to sign off or whatever, but Quentin signed off on everything. So he said, well, okay, you want to do some course equivalents.

24:12Why don't you do something philosophy of time? I have this friend, he does philosophy of time, he'd work with you, he'd be great. And I said, great. So that was straightforward. And then he said, well, how about I want to choose some female philosophers, because there's hardly any, I'd like to work with some women. And so I went to the bookstore and looked at the philosophy section. And I found two books, recent books by female philosophers, one in philosophy of mind and one in philosophy of science. And I said, what about these two? And he said, okay, great. Write to them. And I wrote to another person as well who did logic and I was going to work with her as well, but I did not have the background.

24:46It became clear because I didn't have like logic is requires, she's a very sophisticated logician and she would want me to do something at the graduate level for this. And I'd never even taken basic logic. So that was like kind of a no-go, but it didn't matter. But the other two immediately said yes. And the plan was for me and all of them had recent books. So I just worked through their books chapter by chapter and just worked like crazy. It just strikes me as a very deliberately or accidentally smart way to approach things by going through someone's book, right? I mean, on one hand, you're kind of flattering them by going through it so seriously.

25:21And then secondly, benefiting from getting their clarification, stress testing your own interpretations, and maybe criticisms. Oh, yeah. Oh, I would read a chapter and I'd be like, but what about this? And this seems wrong to me. And I can't understand this. I don't know why you did that. And I don't have any of that material anymore. I'm sure some of it was the kind of like was raw, you know, like kind of dumb question material. But I think some of it was not bad. Like I did think it through really, really carefully. And I'm, you know, reasonably intelligent. And so I think I was able to come up with an interesting kind of challenging 20 page discussion of their chapter.

25:57So they would write back to me these long, and their letters back to me were always very long, like at least 10 pages, sometimes more. It's incredible. What is the role of philosophy in our modern times? I'm just going to use this moment to give a shout out to Agnes Callard, who you should absolutely interview, who has a book on this. Oh, I have questions about her as well. Yeah. And I mean, I think there are lots of roles for philosophy. And the question is like, what is it in general? And then what part of it am I interested in, in particular, in my career? and I mean I think philosophy plays a lot of different roles in particular like its most basic role is really to teach you how to think about things and that involves this is goes back to analytics philosophy's weirdness you can't think about something unless you have some kind of conceptual framework for it you know you got to be able to like provide some structure to your thoughts in order to you know something you're like okay what are you going to take as fundamental What do you take the framework to be here?

26:55What does this apply to? What do my terms mean? And even just doing that can teach you an awful lot about something. So I wanted to think about the nature of time and how the mind embeds itself in the world and how we understand ourselves as selves in time. And to do that in a productive way, I absolutely had to learn a bunch of stuff about what does identity through time mean? What even is time? What do you mean by a point of view? What's so important about the way that we experience ourselves in time? Lots of stuff. And so the primary goal, I think, of philosophy is to kind of teach you how to think about these things.

27:26But there are lots of other important things. I teach a class here at Yale that I think of as sort of like philosophy of mind for computer scientists, cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, as well as philosophy majors. Because it's all about showing how really interesting kinds of philosophical concepts are coming up all the time now with artificial intelligence and all the questions about what it means for a machine. Could a machine be intelligent? Do LLMs have any kind of knowledge? What is chain of thought reasoning? Why is this helpful? All kinds of things that really actually, if it's framed the right way, people see are super relevant to the work that they're doing.

28:01Even engineers who don't tend to be especially philosophically inclined as a group. No shade on engineers. It's just like, you know, people have their preferences. I mean, I think that's the most basic thing. I also think the role of philosophy is to kind of uncover or discover some of the most fundamental truths about both human beings and about the nature of the world. And that's a beautiful thing to be able to study. Like, it's so incredible to be able to spend my time thinking about these things. Vampires. How do vampires fit into your life and why do they fit into your writing? Oh, vampires.

28:33I love vampires. So many ways they fit in. So my favorite thought experiment involves vampires because I like to use it to illustrate the concept of transformative experience. Maybe just because I like vampires so much, I think it's an especially good way to kind of illustrate the concept. And also because it's not a real life, I don't think vampires are real. And the beautiful thing about a thought experiment is you can design it the way that you want to kind of illustrate the structure of a concept. But then I also think that the structure of that concept then fits to real life cases. So my example.

29:03Yeah, let's do it. So the way that I think about this is I imagine, or you imagine, I ask you to imagine, traveling through some part of, you know, on your summer vacations, traveling through some part of Europe, and you decide to explore a castle. You're in Romania, let's say, and you go down to the dungeons and Dracula comes to you. And he says, I want to make you one of my own. I'm going to give you a one-time only chance. You could become one of my followers. It'll be painless. You'll enjoy it, in fact. but this is a one-time only chance and it's irreversible. And then he says, go back to your Airbnb and think about it until midnight.

29:43And if you choose to accept my offer, leave your window open. And if you choose to decline it, leave your window shut and leave and never come back. So I see this as a really interesting possibility because vampires are sexy. They look great in black. They have amazing powers. They probably have different kinds of sense perception. Yeah, virtually. I mean, as long as they stay away from villagers with steaks and things like that. Yeah, exactly. Like there are certain obstacles, but in general, yeah, for all intents and purposes, immortal. And so this seems pretty cool, but they're not human. You'd have to exit the human race.

30:20You have to sleep in a coffin. You can't enjoy the sunshine anymore, and you have to drink blood. And I try to separate out some of the ethical questions. So let's say it's artificial blood or the blood of humanely raised farm animals or something like that. But still, right now as a human, I think there's something— Cough is pretty cozy. It's got some memory foam in it. Yeah, I mean reasonably. I don't know. I mean, I don't know. I'm not— Okay, it's lined with satin, but it still might be a bit hard for my mattress preferences. But the idea is that these things, while they seem interesting, they also seem kind of alien, right?

30:49And I think in particular, not only will you have to drink blood, but you will love the taste of it. Like, you will thirst for it, right? And even ethical vampires have to kind of keep themselves from, like, sucking the blood of their human compatriots. So that's quite alien. And I wanted to kind of bring out how the possibility of becoming another kind of individual can seem incredibly alien. Because obviously, I take it that most of us don't enjoy or thirst after the taste of blood or think about the different varietals like it'd be some kind of fancy wine. But if you became a vampire, you would.

31:24Okay. So the way that I think about it then is I continue the story and it's like, okay, so you rush back to your Airbnb and you start calling people or texting them, telling them about what happened to you. And you find out that a bunch of your friends have already become vampires. So then you immediately want to find out, well, wait, tell me about what it's like. Like, what's it like to be a vampire? Do you like it? Should I do it? And they tell you that they love it and it's fabulous and it's totally incredible. but they also tell you, you can't possibly understand what it's like to be a vampire as a mere human.

31:56They say life has meaning. It has a kind of purpose that, you know, is exquisite, but until you become a vampire, you can't possibly understand it. You lack the capacity. So you're like, okay, thanks. So what do I do? Because if you can't possibly understand what it's like to be a vampire, then you either have to do it just because all of your friends do it and they say it's great. And they tell you, they think it would be great for you. But there's no way you can actually kind of conceive of what it would be like to do that. And I'm sure it hasn't escaped your thought. It certainly didn't escape my imaginings that, well, maybe there's something about being a vampire that makes you really happy to be a vampire.

32:32So maybe like when you become this other species, there's some kind of biological evolutionary thing that makes you really glad that you're a vampire. Right. So it's not even clear what their testimony applies. Okay. So that's my example. And my favorite application is to becoming a parent because speaking as someone who wasn't quite clear about whether they wanted to have children, I have two children and I love them very much and I'm very happy, but there's something about becoming a parent that makes you like producing the child that you actually produce that makes you very, I mean, I love my children.

33:03I wouldn't exchange them for anything else in the world. You know, if I'd gotten pregnant a month later, I would have loved that child too, but there's no way that I would exchange my current child for the child I could have had. You just get incredibly attached to these children in a completely legitimate way. And, you know, you would never change what you've done. And that's awfully like the testimony that you get from vampires. Okay, so I think, you know, also you don't get, you know, you stay up a lot at night, right? There are many similarities. Vampires kind of illustrate the possibility of undergoing a transformative experience, like a life-changing, something that's life-changing, but also where you change the kind of mind you have in a certain way or what you care about most in a certain way, that means that you would make yourself into a kind of alien version of yourself, like someone who's alien to you now and who you might not even want to be now, even if once you become that person or that version of yourself, you're super happy.

33:56If I had some kind of modal scope and I could look at my future self, I could have looked at my future self before I decided I wanted to have kids. I got up at 4 a.m. every day for years to write before my children woke up. I mean, no one ever told me that that was something I would want to do. And if they had told me, I would have denied it strenuously because I could barely get up before new when I was a graduate student. And I did it willingly. Something happened. I was clearly a victim of some kind of Stockholm syndrome. So the thought is that when you face a certain kind of transformative experience, and I don't think it's just having a child.

34:30I think like deciding to go to war or maybe moving to an entirely different country, maybe getting some kind of, if you're diagnosed with some kind of disease and getting some kind of like radically experimental treatment, there are lots of things that can count as transformative. But if you don't know what it's going to be like on the other side of that experience, and you know it's going to make you into a version of yourself that right now you find alien, I don't know how we're supposed to make that decision if it's up to us. We can't use the ordinary models that we use for rational decision-making because those assume that you can see through the options to assign them value and model them for yourself and choose in a way that's going to, as we say it in a technical way, maximize your expected value.

35:12And if you can't assign value and you can't really understand what it's like to be this kind of a self, then that procedure just doesn't work. Tell me if I'm off base here, but also fundamentally, even if you're trying to calculate or maximize your expected value and assign these different values, you're doing it from the perspective of your current version of yourself and your current preferences. and after you become a vampire or after you have a kid, you may be a different person with different preferences. So do you make the decision based on the preferences of your current self or the preferences of your expected future self?

35:48There's a way of capturing the puzzle, as you said. So given the fact that these are new kinds of experiences, so a kind of experience you've never had before, and I compare this to like Mary growing up in a black and white room and seeing color for the first time or Thomas Nagel talking about like, you can't understand like for a bat, what it's like for a bat to be a bat. Yeah, exactly. So there are these like new kinds of experiences that are just very different from any kind of experience we've had before. And so that means there's just a sense in which we can't kind of from the inside kind of imagine what they're like, even if someone can describe.

36:21Try to describe to me like what it's like to see red and you see the problem right away. We just don't, like language just kind of gives out if I haven't seen red before. I have no color vision. Okay, so there's a sense in which we kind of can't see through a certain kind of veil. And across that veil, the self that we're going to be, the kind of person that you're going to realize is just like really different. So you can't just assume you're going to be basically the same. This puts us into the situation where you're making a choice for your future self. And that future self might have preferences that are super different from your current self.

36:55And by definition, and this breaks, so now here's a little technical bit. So we talked about the intuitive idea. I find it easy to understand when I think about someone who doesn't, maybe doesn't want to have a child or really is unsure. And they know that if they choose to have a child, they're going to be super happy with that result, but they don't trust the fact that in virtue of like becoming a parent, it's going to kind of rewire them and their preferences in a certain way, right? Sure, I'll be really happy, but I don't know if I want to be that self right now, given who I am now. And I can't understand in a really deep way what it's going to be like to have that child.

37:27So I have to kind of, you know, leap over the abyss or leap into the abyss, I guess, if I want to do it. So if you find yourself in that situation, what you're confronting involves what I describe as a violation of act state independence. Okay. So here's the technical part comes. You've got the intuitive idea. Act state independence involves very roughly a distinction between the act that you're performing and the state that you're in, or that's how I'm going to interpret it here. There are different ways to interpret it, but this is the way to do it here. And so normally when you're confronted with, oh, do I want to do something?

38:03Do I want to try this kind of ice cream or do I want to have this cup of coffee? You don't change in the process of trying it. So after you do it, you can kind of assess, oh, I liked it. Oh, it was good. That's meaningful to you beforehand because you know that you're going to stay constant through the change in your circumstances, like tasting the new kind of ice cream. But in this case, having the experience, let's say tasting the new kind of ice cream was gonna like rework your flavor profile so that you would just like a whole bunch of different things after that. Well, that changes the state that you're in at the same time.

38:35And so your act and your state are not independent. And if you break that, that's an axiom for rational choice theory. That has to be a foundational element of the model to make straightforward inferences. There are all kinds of fancy things you have to do if that breaks. And these cases of transformative experience and decision-making are precisely cases in which that breaks.

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39:57Just go to linkedin.com slash TFS. That's linkedin.com slash TFS. Terms and conditions apply. I want to make a few references and read something here. The first is, I have to say, if this philosophy thing doesn't work out for you, you should be a copywriter for Madison Avenue because the transformative experience grew out of, as I understand it, a working paper titled, What You Can't Expect When You're Expecting. That's pretty clever. I have to give you that. That is very, very clever. And I want to read just a paragraph from Alice Gregory. This is, again, from the New Yorker piece, which I think underscores a lot of angst that sort of modern, well-educated folks have, particularly women, I would think.

40:47And here we go. All right. So this is from the piece. When I approached Paul about the possibility of a profile, it was in the spirit of self-help. I was 31 and obsessed with whether or not I should have a child. The question felt huge and opaque, like one that neither data nor anecdote could solve. I thought about it all the time, though quote-unquote, thinking is probably too precise a verb. It was more like a constant buzz, scoring the background of daily life in a tone that registered somewhere between urgency and tedium. She's a very good writer. The bad parts were easy to picture. Less time, less sleep, less money.

41:17The awesome parts, expelling a new person out of my own body, say, were quite literally inconceivable. The dilemma felt impossible, as if I were attempting to convert dollars into the currency of a country that didn't yet exist. So I think that really does a brilliant job of putting into words what a lot of people feel. So if you can't, as one of my friends, I don't want to name him, but a very, very successful chess competitor said, you can't always calculate to mate. Meaning that you can't make a plan from move one to the end of the game. and then in your opponent's third move, they do something unexpected, this whole calculate to mate doesn't work.

41:58Now, there are some situations, perhaps, in which you can do that. You can reverse engineer and plot out step-by-step how you might achieve something and kind of execute to plan. But then you have these transformative experiences. And I suppose I'm wondering, and God, you must get sick of people asking this, but what do you do given the difficulty and the different nature of these types of decisions? How do you approach it? Because in some of the reading I've done, because I don't have kids. I would like to have kids. I would like to hit some prereqs first before I do that. But there are some things, say, moving to a different country, which in most instances are going to be reversible.

42:35So yes, it could be transformative, but you could move back to your country of origin. Having a kid, less so, right? And I'm curious what advice you give to people when they come to you wringing their hands and say, well, how do I do it then? Because you could make the argument that you can ascribe a value to the learning and transformation itself of leaping into the abyss with a transformative experience. But then it strikes me that you would always, you'd be at the risk of always being biased towards action, right? Doing the thing that could potentially be transformative. And then what do you do?

43:12Oh yeah. Well, things are not always good when you're like transformation does not entail. There's a kind of popular conception of transformative experience involving a kind of epiphany and that kind of thing. And that can happen for sure. But the way I'm talking about transformative experience, it's not always like that. Remember that whole thing about like, you suffer. I mean, you kind of don't mind it, but you certainly suffer. This is an aside, but. I specialize in asides, please. I live part of my time in New York and part of my time in New Haven. And in New York, the neighborhood I live in is kind of a funky neighborhood.

43:41And I've toyed with the possibility of like on Sundays, hanging out my shingle and being like, I specialize in transformative experience and big life choices. You know, you could book time with me to discuss your philosophical life choice if you'd like. So I feel like you need a desk in Prospect Park. Exactly. I mean, in the neighborhood I live in, this would not be an unusual type of thing, like Brooklyn, you know? And that's by way of thinking, I thought about it and I thought, well, I'm not going to be able to give people any answers. I'll just be able to sort of talk to them about like the conceptual framework for their choice.

44:13And if that's of interest, not clear to me that would be of interest, then maybe I have a possible side gig. I really what I'm saying is that, all right, I'm much better at raising questions than answering them. I do have a view. I don't think very many people like my view, but I'm going to tell you my view. I still like my view. Well, I don't like my view. I just think it's like I haven't come across anything better, which isn't exactly the space you want to be in. So what I really think is that it's a special class of experiences. It's not like every experience is transformative. I really don't think we could talk about the reason why that's the case.

44:46I think there's a fairly well defined class of certain kinds of life experiences that can count as transformative, not for everyone, but for many people that undergo them. And I think what's really important is to recognize how problematic they are, that they don't fit the ordinary framework. Because people, like Alice talks about, she agonized, I agonized. And for me, I was really annoyed because I agonized and I didn't get anywhere. And then I had a baby and I was like, oh, none of the things I was reading, which is why what you can't expect when you're expecting, you know, is so satisfying because I hated what you could expect when you're expecting.

45:19It was the worst book ever. It answered no questions for me whatsoever. None of it addressed what I wanted to know. And so it was like an insult on top of everything else, right? Okay. I'm sorry. I apologize preemptively to everyone who found that book a wonderful book. It wasn't for me. Alice talked about in the article how there was this moment when I was like starting to go into labor and I was like, oh my God, this enormous thing has to come out of me. How's that going to happen? Like I knew theoretically that that was going to happen, but it's presented to you in a very personal way, in a very intimate way when you go into labor.

45:53And I just discovered the reality of it in a special way. What I'm trying to say is that I want my work to sort of help people realize that this kind of agonizing is actually completely reasonable because there isn't any easy answer, and we don't have a framework. And when there's something kind of almost inconceivable that's happening, then it's a bit like, as I said earlier, like you step off the ledge into the deep and flailing might be the only response. And I also think this is just part of what it is to live a life and to be human. And you can, it's perfectly legitimate to pass on transformative experiences, but part of living a life and being open to possibilities involves choosing some of them, but for most people.

46:36And also things happen to us that are like this, that we don't choose, like terrible accidents, for example. There's a philosopher named Paul Cigar who's been writing a substack on, he was a climber and he had a catastrophic accident. And his writing is beautiful. And he talks about, he's paraplegic now. Now he's quadriplegic. And the life change that that involves is clearly transformative and clearly horrible. And he wouldn't have chosen it. And that makes sense. But he has to now discover this new way of being an agent, basically, because he lacks so much agency in so many fun ways. Okay, so I want people to articulate in the conceptual framework that's involved in diagnosing why this is, there's a kind of incoherence in having to try to make this choice where you're supposed to know what you're doing is part of the solution.

47:20Maybe it's just something that we have to accept. Now, in my book, here's my unpopular solution. My unpopular solution is to say, well, maybe we can reframe the choice so that when we're making a choice, so this presumes that we have enough information to know that there's at least a very high chance that it's going to be at least pretty good, as opposed to a very high chance it's going to be terrible or bad or whatever. We use evidence in all kinds of reasonable ways to know that kind of thing. But when we're confronted with something like, do I want to go to war? Do I want to emigrate to another country?

47:51Or do I want to have a child or pick your favorite case? Do I want my child to have a cochlear implant? You alluded to that earlier. You're not going to be able to know what it's like. And you are going to change who you are. And so then the question is, do you want to discover that new way of living? And if you do, with all the pluses and minuses, all the suffering, because I think transformative experiences almost always involve suffering of some sort, then you go for it. And if you don't, which I think is also perfectly reasonable, then you don't. And because I don't think it's a matter of, like, rationality, so I think when it's just because some people have children and they're super happy that they did, it doesn't mean that that's just true for everyone.

48:32Even if it would be the case that for almost everyone, they would reform themselves so they would be happy with their choice. There's no inference to the best explanation there. Just because many vampires testified to being happy that they've become vampires does not mean that everyone should become a vampire, especially somebody who just finds that way of being alien. In the case of having kids specifically, I remember a friend of mine, he has three kids now, and he's kind of ambivalent, I guess. His wife really wanted kids, and he was in the fortunate position of being able to provide, and they wouldn't have struggles on that level.

49:04But he said, well, look, he said, at some point when you get old enough to have meaning, you have to either find God or have kids. And he's like, having kids is easier. So he had kids. And he said it in jest, but I've thought about the comment because to what extent is the reforming of oneself after kids actually very time-tested and conforming to millennia plus of evolutionary pressure? where it's like the basest of instincts. And in so being, is it, I mean, this is going to sound like a really naive question, but sort of a safer bet with respect to transformative experience than some of the others going to war or otherwise.

49:48I also know people who have had kids and in some cases they were very clear that they did not want kids. They weren't ambivalent and their partner really wanted kids. And that I've not seen always turn out very well. So it's not a But are there different species of transformative experiences within the category of transformative experiences? Do you think about, say, kids differently than you'd think of some of the others? I'm sure there are different species of transformative experiences. So what I heard you asking me, part of that question involved, well, look, maybe we can rely on biology in a certain way.

50:25This is a time-tested solution. So you can pick transformative experience one, transformative experience two, transformative experience three. Behind door one is having a child. Behind door two is traversing, you know, like you're traveling the world, seeing, you know, all the wonders, whatever, exploring, you know, having lots of money to spend on travel and satisfaction, that kind of thing. Behind door three is pursuing your intellectual passion, let's say, you know, to the fullest degree to putting all of your time to that. I could go on, but there's three options there. And I do think that choosing one of those involves trade-offs on the others as much as some people might say, I'll do it all.

51:07I'll have a child and we'll cross the plains of Siberia together, you know, and it very rarely works out that way, right? And if you do cross the plains with the baby, you're slower. So, you might say, well, these are different risky choices. And if you want to maximize your expected utility in some sense, maybe you should choose door one. I actually think that seems kind of reasonable to me in a certain way. If you're truly indifferent between these different options, I think people rarely are indifferent. But the further problem is they're not indifferent. and yet there's a sense in which they don't really know what they're choosing between.

51:48That's the further complication. So again, going back to what I was saying is it's more like, which life do I want to find out about? Which one feels more appealing to me? I don't know in many of the most salient ways what any of these lives could be like. I don't even know how it's going to fill out because there's so many chancy things about each of those. You know, you could have a child that's disabled. Sure. And that could be a beautiful thing, but it can also be a very time-consuming, very painful thing, right? And I don't know. you could pursue your intellectual passion and it could fall flat or it could just turn into this like amazing opportunity.

52:19So there's just a lot of chance involved in any of these choices. Yeah, I don't think you either have children or find God because I think there's so many other really interesting things people can do with their lives. And I look at the person who, I try to look at the person who I would have become if I had not had children. That person is very different from who I am now along some dimensions and very much the same with who I am. But I can't really get into her head. I don't really know what she would have been like, But I'm also sure she would have lived like a super fun, interesting life. Let me ask if this is, I'm going to turn this into, I'm going to make you the philosophical therapist for a second here, but.

52:53You already were, you already asked me. I know, I know, I know. The toothpaste is out of the toothpaste too, but if you could, and maybe you put it back on, but if you take off the philosophy professor hat for a second and just reflect on your personal experience, two things, like was the decision to have a child hard for you? Did you go back and forth and vacillate or was it pretty straightforward? And then secondly, if there was some back and forth, how much of that was having or not having a child and what that experience would be like versus, for instance, for me, I feel very confident that I would enjoy being a parent and that I'd be pretty good at it.

53:31I'm sure I'd fuck up every which way you can imagine, but like above average, I think I'd have a pretty good go of it. But then the concern for me has always been, well, if things don't work out with the partner, what does that look like? It's more of like a possible separation after having kids that has been the concern for me, not so much the parenting, which has a bunch of embedded assumptions, right? But what was that decision like for you personally? It was complicated because on the one hand, it's funny, when I was younger, I never wanted children. And then when I hit my 20s, I think I thought, oh, that's a real possibility.

54:10Like, I would love to be happily married and have a family. But it seemed a bit remote, too. Like, I liked, I thought, that seems like an option for me. And it would be a good option. But I also really want to, you know, study philosophy and spend as much of my time as possible doing philosophy. This is the kid, I guess I was still a kid then, you know, reading people's books and writing like, you know, basically 60 to 70 pages of material over every two weeks. This took a lot of time because I had to read it, I didn't have any training, and I would write all this stuff, and I was just obsessed.

54:44I was also doing other things at the same time, like I was still reading Being in Time. So I spent all of my time doing philosophy, and I didn't want to change that. So on the one hand, I had a desire to have children. Some people just feel like their life wouldn't have meaning with that. I never felt that way. I just thought this would be one interesting, good way to live one's life. But then I had this desire to spend my time doing philosophy. And also, philosophy is a male-dominated field, and it certainly was back in the 90s. And there was definitely a professional cost to having a child. And I think there still is.

55:15It's not as bad as it used to be. But I don't think people think you're less serious now, although I think they used to think that. But you still have less time, and you have less money. There are clearly professional implications, maybe for women in particular, but I think everybody. you're not solely devoted to your projects anymore. Somebody else is more important. So there was a kind of ambivalence. And so I thought, well, being a rational thinker, I'm going to evaluate it, right? I'm going to think about what it's going to be like. I'm going to make my choices. And that was where it all fell apart, right?

55:47That was where I was betrayed by what you could expect, what you're expecting. And so many other parenting things that I looked for. I mean, I tried to do it. I couldn't do it. But I didn't know I couldn't do it until I actually had the children. And then I was like, oh, this is nothing like what I was going to expect. And then that was when I had this moment before my son was born when I was like, wait a minute. Actually, my daughter was only very young. I was like, wait, this actually was really when after I'd recovered from giving birth and started getting enough sleep so I could think clearly again.

56:17I was like, wait, this was an utterly bizarre, strange metaphysical experience. And I mean metaphysics not in the aura-shaping way, but like metaphysics like I do. Like the nature of reality seemed to change for me in certain ways. And also epistemologically, you know, it changed so much about how I experience and represent the world. This is just so foundational. But philosophers never talk about this. No philosophers talked about this, at least not in my tradition. And I thought, I have to talk about this. Which, by the way, I think Alice talked about this, was very scary because I built up this reputation as being a serious philosopher, talking about the nature of causation and time.

56:54and then I was going to talk about babies. I had to steal myself. So yeah, so to answer your question, there was a lot of ambivalence, but then my husband at the time wanted to have children. So that sort of tipped the balance. I'm not sure what I would have done if he had been equally ambivalent. So many different directions that we can go. I want to ask you, and I know you said earlier, don't ask me to explain it or that you'd have trouble explaining it, but I'm still curious about this move from chemistry and the so-called hard sciences to philosophy and that you knew you wanted to do that.

57:32Now, you jokingly said you may not want to drop acid and explore some of these other questions. I'm just wondering what what precipitated this itch that you had to scratch with philosophy? There's got to be something. I mean, I can't imagine there's nothing as far as inputs that affected that. I mean, I honestly don't know where I formed the idea that this was going to be the thing for me. I love to read. And when I was in high school, I read Herman Hesse, like the glass bead game. I read other kinds of interesting books. I remember I read, I liked Alexander Solzhenitsyn's work. And these are like philosophical texts and maybe not classic, you know, not analytic philosophy, but there's a lot of philosophy in there.

58:15And so I do think that this reading and other things I read led me to realize that a certain kind of quasi-philosophical take on the world was congenial to me. When I say quasi-philosophical, It was truly philosophical, but at the time, I wasn't able to kind of recognize it as such. I just knew I had this yearning to try to understand things, and philosophy seemed like the right way to go. I really can't really give you more than that. My parents really wanted me to be a doctor. I went on med school visits. I took the MCAT. I did everything. You know, I failed out of philosophy. I didn't fail out of philosophy classes.

58:51I just failed to progress in philosophy classes. Like, all the signs were pointing away from philosophy, and I still did it. There's no explanation. I'm going to push a little bit. I'm going to push that because I would just say maybe there were one way to frame it would be what drew you to philosophy. Another one, another angle would be what didn't satisfy you of the explorations of chemistry, et cetera, et cetera. So maybe you could take a stab at the latter. Here comes some further naivete. I was extremely good at the theoretical side of chemistry and extremely terrible at the lab side of chemistry.

59:32So I thought, well, maybe I want to be a chemist. I loved solving problems in organic chemistry. I loved it. And part of my major, I had to take a class called gravimetric analysis, I think it was called. And this consists of an entire semester doing incredibly minute measurements and cooking. There were little clay pots we had to cook at high temperatures that were filled with the compound that we were analyzing. And we were supposed to, like, you could cook it and you would measure these tiny things. And you spent the entire semester on one project. And it was the kind of thing where like, you know, if you touched it, oil from your finger would get onto the clay pot and would destroy all of your work.

1:00:07So what happened after a semester, probably the last three weeks of hours and hours in the lab. And then I brush because I'm like physically just, I brush the side of the pot and it's gone. All of my work. I was devastated. Now we're getting somewhere. Yeah. Okay. So I went into an existential crisis, basically. And I was like, I cannot do chemistry. I can't do it. And so, you know, no, it's not for me. Now, if I were more sophisticated, I would have learned, oh, no, you can run the lab and like other people do that part of if you're physically inept in certain ways. But I didn't know that. And I didn't realize how many more options there would be.

1:00:45And I was destroyed, but it wasn't just that, but I never enjoyed lab. I wasn't good at it. It wasn't my thing. And I felt that natural science, it does require a certain, you know, you run a lab, even if you're doing highly theoretical work. And so I needed something a little bit more pure. that combined with like I said like being drawn to some of these you know like literature and art that had this conceptual dimension that involved the role of experience again and understanding like who you are when I moved out of my parents house and moved to Chicago I found myself immersed in like art and literature and my friend like I was working at a bar and And a lot of the people working at the bar were doing theater or were artists.

1:01:29And it was just a whole new way of being that I loved. And so I knew there was something out there that my natural science education wasn't connecting with. Yeah. Okay. That makes perfect sense to me. Thank you for doing the digging. I appreciate it. Love that story. Oh, the finger oil in the lab. Even now. Oh, the pain. Sorry. Brutal. You mentioned, I think, semi-philosophical works, and you mentioned Hermann Hesse. And my next question is, for someone who is on some deep level interested in the types of questions that attracted you to philosophy, but they have had some trepidation or maybe mild allergic reaction around philosophy as such when they've tried to dig into it, to it.

1:02:21Maybe they went to a philosophy section of a bookstore and picked up three books and they're like, wow, I'm too dumb to understand this. Or this is just too impenetrable. I don't know what to do with this. What entry points might you suggest if you wanted to get, if you had a hundred undergrads, fresh blank slates and you're like, okay, I want to have the highest kind of conversion rate as possible. Meaning I want to get as many of these people deeply interested in any aspect of philosophy, are there certain books that you might recommend? They don't have to be philosophical texts as such, if that makes sense.

1:02:59Quentin Smith wrote this very weird book called The Felt Meanings of the World, which I always loved. It's weird. The Felt Meanings of the World? Yeah, The Felt Meanings of the World. It captures something for me, even when I was just trying to approach philosophy. So I think a lot of fiction can be very philosophical. I would read Ted Chiang. He's really, really good. Oh, so good. So good. Everybody should read Ted Chiang. Everybody should. And a lot of his work is just like deeply philosophical and explicitly so. Like, I mean, he's interested in counterfactuals and in metaphysics in particular in these really beautiful ways, right?

1:03:35In the nature of time. Could you, just because that term has come up a few times, could you just take a sidebar and define counterfactuals? Yes. So counterfactuals involve, even the word tells you like counter to fact things. So if I say, if I had wings, I would fly across my office. Now, I don't have wings, so I can't fly across my office. But if I did have wings, I certainly would, because that would be super cool. And we can understand counterfactuals in terms of other possible worlds. So in a world where I have wings, I would fly across the room. Or what if the Third Reich dominated the world after World War II?

1:04:10Exactly, exactly. It turns out counterfactuals can be, you need what's called a preferred semantics for them, like a rule book for understanding how to interpret them. And my supervisor, David Lewis at Princeton was like the person who developed the primary rule book for that, which is what the foundation of much of his work involved. But they play a role like in natural science. So when people are doing tests, let's say, of some new kind of treatment, you want to find out whether or not a new drug will, you know, cure a disease or something like that, right? So what you want to do is you want to treat a population and see what happens.

1:04:44And then you compare it to the counterfactual, but what if they hadn't been treated? Now, the complication is in these kinds of contexts, you can't move to a possible world, but you can establish a control group, which is basically supposed to be matched to that treatment population. And then you see how the control group evolves without the treatment and compare it to the treated population who gets the medicine. So the role of a counterfactual can sometimes be to sort of identify ways the world could be, and also like ways the world could have been if you hadn't changed it, something like that.

1:05:16Ted Chiang is good at weaving counterfactual scenarios. Exactly. He's good at exploring other possible worlds in some ways. And when I start talking about other possible worlds, the way that it relates to my work is I think about like other possible selves, right? So if I had chosen differently and not chosen to have a child, well, there's another possible world out there where I don't have any children. And so then the question is, well, how do I make sense of that other possible world. And one thing I can't do, as I said to you before, because the real world involved me transforming myself into a parent, means there's a kind of lack of understanding across that barrier.

1:05:50I can't really understand who I would have become. And Chang exploits that kind of notion all the time. Like, well, what if, you know, time were different? Or what if aliens, you know, like came to us and we had to kind of interpret what they were saying and the process of interpreting what they were saying changed our conception of how time worked and what we People want a light lift. And it is different from the short story upon which it's based. But watch the movie Arrival. And as a linguistics nerd also, my God, that really is an unbelievably good movie. I think it's 95 plus percent on Rotten Tomatoes.

1:06:25And then he has collections of short stories. It's always hard for me to remember the first one. It's like stories of our lives and other short stories, something like that. Yep, that's right. And then his second collection came out, Exhalation. and I was like, ah, there's no way it can match the first collection. And lo and behold, I was like, okay, you win, Ticheng. He's so good. All right. Any other fiction that comes to mind? Borges, also. I just love Borges. I mean, I just feel like he's always exploring. Borges is amazing. Yes, yes. Where would you suggest people start with Jorge Luis Borges?

1:06:59Any favorites? The Garden of Forking Paths is an excellent one. If we're talking about possibilities, The Garden of Forking Paths is like, it's a beautiful one. The Aleph, I would suggest. I don't know. I mean, I just, I actually think the Garden of Forking Paths and I think it's the Aleph are two really excellent things to read. These are incredibly philosophical texts, okay? And what I love about them is you can get the intuitive idea without having to go through all the philosophy. But to extract it precisely, you get it. It's beautiful with the way they express these ideas. But if you want to extract it with precision in a way that you can then take the idea and use it in other ways, you need the analytic philosophy to do that, in my view.

1:07:42Literature just doesn't lend itself to getting some kind of precise thing extracted from it in a straightforward way. That's just not what it's for. To develop the chops with analytic philosophy seems to require a lot. It doesn't seem to be a light lift. For somebody who's listening who doesn't have any exposure to it, is the juice worth the squeeze? And if so, what is the juice that makes it worth the squeeze? I mean, well, look, I devoted my life to it. So obviously I think the juice is worth the squeeze. But just like if you're going to study material science to develop new surgical techniques as an orthopedic surgeon, doing that deep dive could very well be worth it for that person.

1:08:23But if someone has done medical school, maybe not. So I'm just curious to what extent you'd recommend a lay listener try to develop the toolkit of analytic philosophy? I think for some people, they're fine with like literature, sci-fi, or reading, or I think you can get a lot of philosophy through kind of like listening to Bach or, you know, reading Darwin's biography or doing mathematics. So I think the first question is, if you engage with the philosophical ideas in a non-technical way, if that satisfies you, then you're good. But if it leaves you wanting more, if you start asking questions, well, wait a minute, how does this work?

1:09:03Or, you know, you watch a time travel film. I recommend Primer or La Jetée or 12 Monkeys. I'm going to write these down. Oh, 12 Monkeys is a great one. Okay. Primer. Yeah. Something in French that I didn't catch. If you love 12 Monkeys, dude, you need to watch La Jetée because 12 Monkeys just plagiarize La Jetée. Oh, okay. Well, then I'll read or watch the original. It's like 35 minutes long. It means the jetty in French, L-A, la, and then jetty, J-E-T-E-E. Okay. And so, you can watch it online. It's a beautiful film. It's actually, it's a kind of artwork film and it's very artsy and the story that it tells was retold by 12 Monkeys.

1:09:44It's the same thing. Wait, it's French and artsy? I'm kidding. Oh, what do you mean? Yeah, how could it be? Yeah, exactly. But what's great about it is it's entirely consistent. And Primer is consistent, except until the end, they got a little carried away. I forgive them the last five or 10 minutes of the film. And Primer is a beautiful, super cool film, kind of cult classic type of movie. Anyway, if you watch these things, and you're like, well, wait a minute. Or if you watch Back to the Future, and you're like, well, wait a minute. How can you change the past? Seems like that might be, there's some kind of logical problem there.

1:10:15Well, then, my friend, you are a philosopher at heart in various ways. and you should put the time in. It's worth it. If you really work out some of these questions, you can use them for other things. And if nothing else, forcing yourself to kind of work through some of these puzzles, I think kind of just sharpens your reasoning capacities generally. I'm not saying it's easy. Remember that bit about suffering, right? There's definitely some suffering, but it can pay off. And the joy of like, there's a kind of joy just in problem solving or puzzle solving that I feel like I get out of thinking through these things.

1:10:47Lewis Carroll, another excellent thing to read. Oh, yeah. Lewis Carroll. What a master. I have some collector's editions of old copies of Alice in Wonderland. Not exactly that title, but Lewis Carroll, man. Also, just the bio on that guy was wild. Okay, so if somebody was willing, they watch whatever it might be, Primer or another Back to the future, they start asking questions. You're like, hey, you might be a philosopher. And they say, okay. Given that, I want to pick up the ABCs of analytic philosophy, but in terms of suffering, I don't want my face ripped off, more like a mild sunburn. Where would you suggest they start?

1:11:38I started with being in time, which isn't really what normal people would start with. You're like, I like hiking when we start with Everest. Yeah, exactly. I mean, well, you can read my book. There you go. That's the podcast. That's fine. Yeah, yeah. The book Transformative Experience was not written for non-philosophers. And so I go over arguments more than once, right? I mean, so I am picking it apart in a way that because I was aiming the book towards professional philosophers. But the first hundred pages of the book is not technical. And then the first chapter is only four pages long. And I wrote the first chapter thinking, look, people might put it down, but maybe if they just read the first four pages, they'll at least see what the idea is.

1:12:18So, yeah, you could look at my book and read the first four pages and see what you think. Yeah. And then if you're like, wow, you know, I can digest more technical aspects, then you can dig into the footnotes too, especially after the first hundred pages. Exactly. The second half of the book switches into much more technical argumentation. And then a great resource. It's written for other professional philosophers, but also really good for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. It's online, it's free. All the entries are written by professional philosophers. It's not written to be accessible to non-philosophers, but it's absolutely fantastic.

1:12:55You can get a sense of it. Take an entry, run it through ChatGPT for the highlights, whatever, and get a sense of things. Can you translate this from the Latin of the high priesthood into something I can understand, please? Exactly. Yeah, write it for a 12-year-old's perspective. And I would think you would get something interesting. There are also various epistemology, a very short introduction. I think Jennifer Nagel wrote that. Could you define that term also for folks, epistemology? Oh, epistemology is the theory of knowledge. So if I use the word epistemic, like an epistemic transformation, what I mean is it's changing what you know or how you kind of conceptualize or make sense of the world.

1:13:31Okay. So I interrupted your train of thought that you were saying for epistemology, you might start with? There's a series of very short introductions. It's Oxford. They're written by experts in the field. They're just really nicely done. Again, they're not written to be entertaining, but they're written to be clear and accessible. So if you're willing to put in a little bit of work, you'll get something out of it for sure. Let's just say you're advising a student, could be undergrad, grad, they come to you. This is within the context of philosophy department. They're feeling kind of lost, maybe a little apathetic, nihilistic, although nihilism we could probably define more precisely, but in the modern sort of pop culture sense.

1:14:07Are there any recommendations for reading or self-inquiry or anything like that that you would recommend to them? It could also just be general life advice, but I'm curious how you might tackle a situation like that. first read interviews with Borges where he goes through this kind of process, especially he has a book where he talks about going blind. And see, it's not like I wasn't that kid, okay? The problem is, the reason why I'm not coming up with things for you is because I was that kid in lots of ways, and I'm fascinated by philosophy, and I knew there were questions that I wanted to ask, but I wasn't finding anything in the literature.

1:14:49The reason why I started out with causation as a graduate student was partly because I found an intellectual, like a deep, close intellectual friend in David Lewis. We just really kind of hit it off intellectually. We could talk to each other in ways that were, I mean, always metaphysics, but, you know, we just kind of understood each other's minds in a way that I didn't connect with that really anyone else when I was doing my PhD. And I felt that the tools of philosophy were beautiful tools. I could see that in the history, that what little I knew of the history of philosophy, deep basic questions had been asked but they were solved in very different ways especially because often god played a role and like in you know at that time and that really wasn't for me i'm not a religious person although i find religious belief really interesting and kind of fascinating in various kinds of contexts i have this paper called the paradox of empathy where i talk about um the kind of divide between the atheist and the believer because there's this kind of fear like if you really open your mind to the other person that it's going to convert you in a way that you don't want to be converted it's going to change you into that alien self i think the atheist feels that way.

1:15:49And I think the believer feels that way. And so I argue like it's actually perfectly reasonable to be, nobody ever argues someone into like religious belief or losing it. It's all about like kind of occupying a different kind of conceptual space. And that just foundationally changes the way you understand the world. So I knew that philosophy had these tools and I thought that they were excellent tools. I'm still, you know, I loved solving problems. Remember in this really rigorous way in organic chemistry, exploring mechanisms, that's what all the exams are always about. My goal in college was to set the curve, but I wasn't finding what I wanted.

1:16:21I just, I couldn't find the kinds of text I wanted to address these questions. So I don't really have a lot for you. I mean, I think Thomas Nagel's work is really, really great. The View from Nowhere is a beautiful book that might be a place to go. I just did a little searching on the Borges piece. So it looks like Jorge Luis Borges wrote and spoke about his experience with blindness in a number of different contexts. One was Seven Nights, Siete Noches, a collection of lectures that he gave in Buenos Aires in 1977 covering nightmares, Buddhism, poetry, and his own progressive blindness. So that might be another place to start.

1:16:58Yes, I think so. Reading Proust is also good, but these are not easy reads, and they're not going to train you in philosophy, but they will put you into contact with the ideas that I think are beautiful and worth studying. And then you have to sweat through the training of your mind to get there. It's not like you start reading and you're going to get sucked in. No, it's more like training for a marathon. You have to kind of slowly agonize when you're completely unfit. And it sucks, okay? It's not like it's just going to, you just run a little bit and it feels great. And then you run a little bit more and it feels great.

1:17:28Then somehow you get to 26, you know, no, it doesn't work that way. So I do think there's more work out there where people are starting to address these questions, but I'm finding myself at a little bit of a loss because it was my dissatisfaction with what I was finding that led me to start working on this topic, even though I felt like it was kind of deeply risky. Yeah, I mean, it makes me wonder also if the, I don't want to say solutions, but maybe if the life rafts for someone who's feeling those things might fall outside of philosophy. I don't know. Are there any particular philosophical ideas or philosophies that you find consistently misrepresented or mistranslated in modern media or by self-help, broadly speaking, things that get co-opted.

1:18:14I mean, I'm sure physicists could have a field day answering this, right? Because their stuff gets grabbed by every kind of woo-woo self-help book that tends to come along. Okay. So first thing is it's super important to distinguish between our experience of time and time itself. So some people might not think there is any such thing as time, but it's just really important to like, think about it this way. The easiest way to see the difference is imagine you're in a really boring lecture and you're just sitting there like, oh, this is lasting forever. And you look at the clock and you realize you're only 15 minutes in.

1:18:47Okay. Right there, your experience of time's passing has departed from like the objective measurement of time as measured by the clock. Okay. So there's just two different things. And And I think this gets conflated all over the place. And it gets really hard and really complex to think about these two different ways of kind of talking about time. But it's important. Or like sometimes people talk about, you know, when they have a car accident. This happened to me actually. I had a car accident. And I remember everything seemed to be going in slow motion. I didn't actually have a car accident. My car spun out of control late one night when I was driving on Michigan Avenue because I hit a patch of ice.

1:19:21And I went around and around. And like on Lakeshore Drive, like it's got like four lanes going each way. And I was like, whoa, but it was like three o 'clock in the morning and no one else was there. So I just like in slow motion, I watched myself go around and around. And I was like, well, this is bad. Oh, but there's no one else here. And then I was able to kind of correct the car, come out of the spin. But it felt like it happened over like two, three minutes. And it was probably like 10 seconds, right? 20 seconds, something like that. And there, it's just, it's a very common phenomenon. The way that we perceive time just changes, comes apart from like the passing of time.

1:19:55Second thing, free will. Just kill me now. Every non-philosophic. It's a big one. And people are really fascinated with it. And I totally get it. It's not my own favorite topic, but I think you should distrust. It's just a favorite topic of particular like neuroscientists. And they're all going to solve free will. And I respect an engaged discussion of free will from a scientist if they've read some of the philosophy. But a lot of times they haven't read the philosophy. And it's like they don't know what they don't know. So that's a killer. Related to free will is like fatalism. like thinking everything's determined, slightly different from free will.

1:20:30And I love existentialism as a topic, and I love continental philosophy and phenomenology. I recognize the phenomenology because I'm involved with a lot of scientific research with, say, psychedelic compounds. The term phenomenology comes up a lot. What is continental philosophy? Is that anything to do with continental breakfasts? I don't know. I don't have any idea. Yeah, actually, sort of. So, okay. So it's a sort of disputed phrase. So I also describe what I do as like analytic philosophy. And there's this rough, it's not really a very good way of describing things, but it's the best one I have.

1:21:03Traditions like, say, Heidegger and Foucault and Derrida come from like that kind of, I think Zizek might count as this. Like, there's a kind of a style of philosophy that kind of originated, at least arguably, on the European continent. And it's very different from the kind of class you took with Gideon Rosen at Princeton, which is like, you know, classic, like, analytic philosophy, which kind of originated in the UK, arguably with people like Bertrand Russell and Wittgenstein and people like that. And also, I think, with the positivists who kind of came over to the US in particular around trying to escape the Nazis in World War II.

1:21:41And so continental philosophy also can have strong connections with psychoanalysis, whereas analytic philosophy has many more connections to contemporary science or very empirically grounded psychology, that kind of thing. And I like both traditions a lot. I don't super like the methods of continental philosophy. I was trained as a natural scientist, at least early on, and I really like the approach, but I love the topics. and it's pretty hard to talk about the very deep things that kind of philosophers talk about, like the nature of being or who we are in some fundamental sense, or, you know, how do we understand time using analytic techniques?

1:22:23But that's what I try to do. What are some of the ways that you think philosophers will be most important in the broader world outside of academics, outside of the journals and so on? Where do you think these philosophical explorations and toolkits will most intersect with applications in the broader world, whether it's related to certain technologies or otherwise. When I went back before and I said, like, when the work on transformative experience that I'm doing tries to address this kind of situation we find ourselves at certain foundational shifts that we undergo and certain life choice points, whether we choose them or not, actually, like, you know, let's say I'm diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's, you know, confronting that and making sense of that.

1:23:09So I think thinking philosophically is a really good tool for living one's life. And that's what Agnes talks about by the Agnes Callard in her new book. I think it's called Open Socrates. And so I do think that philosophy has a role there, but I also think it has applications, for example, like important applications in bioethics, important applications with artificial intelligence, in particular, thinking about ethics questions and value alignment with machines, like trying to design machines that, you know, kind of, if they don't have human values, kind of respect human values and how we're going to really be able to do that in the context of actually undergoing these kinds of scientific and conceptual revolutions where we don't know what's coming down the pike.

1:23:53Transformative, in my view. I think there's lots of application also just with the kind of policies and thinking about, for example, like precision in terms of how, for example, we want, like say certain kinds of policies to affect people. There's a lot of work like in political philosophy and philosophy of law and ethics. I think that that matters. That's not just bioethics, you know, and bioethics is its own kind of thing, which I think philosophers have made and should be making and continue to make like really important contributions. So I wanted to give Agnes a shout out here. So Agnes Callard's newest book is Open Socrates, subtitled The Case for a Philosophical Life, which just recently came out, January 14th, 2025.

1:24:38And you've invoked her name a number of times. She also wrote Aspiration, the Agency of Becoming in 2018, where would you say your positions or thinking most differ? You and Agnes. Agnes has this view that if we want to change ourselves, we can aspire to change in various ways. The new book is more about living a philosophical life, and it's written for non-philosophers, so it's very accessible. So I was thinking it was something that people could try. The other book, Aspiration, is a technical book. And she thinks, oh, well, you can just aspire to be someone different. And that's how you just train yourself up into kind of being that way.

1:25:19I'm simplifying radically. And I think there's a kind of incoherence in that. Because if I find somebody like being a parent or being an opera singer or something like just fundamentally alien to who I am, there's no coherent way for me to aspire to do that. So our big difference is that, and I've said this to her, and she's like, yeah, but I just think like that our rationality model is broken so that, you know, I don't mind if there's a kind of incoherence in my view. And we're just really different in that way, in the way that we approach these questions. Agnes does the history of philosophy.

1:25:49She works on the classics and work in maybe meta-ethics. And I approach things very much from a kind of philosophy science, kind of metaphysics, epistemology, more mathematical view. So we come from different perspectives that way too. All right. So we'll link to Agnes' Open Socrates book in the show notes as well for everybody. You have written on Reddit, this was not sure exactly when this was, but you find Aristotle's work especially inspirational. Now, I can't believe everything you read on the internet, so please feel free to fact check that. But if that is a true statement, why is that the case?

1:26:28I said that about Aristotle? that's what I have here it's attributed to you this is why this is why I'm saying this is the Reddit ask me anything right yes exactly I can't remember I I have no idea I love that AMA it was so fun I thought you were going to ask me about drugs because that was that ended up being half the conversation oh okay well let's go to drugs let's talk about that I'd rather talk about drugs than Aristotle I'm afraid yeah I know more about I know more about drugs than I do about Aristotle So let's go into drugs. All right. So one of the cool things is that I've given a couple of talks on this.

1:27:04The framework that I was articulating is useful when we're thinking about things like psychedelics, because the conceptual framework of a transformative experience, which changed, like opens your mind in a certain way because you have a new kind of experience. And then at least in some contexts, that epistemic shift is so profound that it changes like how you understand yourself in the world. Yeah. Ontological shock is something they use in the literature framework. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Exactly. And I mean, that applies to becoming a parent, I think, or a terrible thing like becoming quadriplegic.

1:27:34But it also can happen when you have, when you take psychedelics for the first time. So the idea being, the way that I think about it is, whatever neurological changes that taking your preferred type of psychedelics induces, it changes the nature of our perceptions. and this is super interesting because in particular perceptual experience or sensory experience is already like not amenable to description like when i said hey if you're colorblind and i tell you oh i'm going to describe what it's like to see red you just haven't got enough to go on and that's something about the way that we can't use testimony to communicate certain types of experiences okay and psychedelics change the way that we experience the world through changing the character of our perceptions.

1:28:22And I'm fascinated by this. I'm not sure exactly how I want to make sense of this philosophically, but I think it teaches something about how our minds connect with the world. We learn somehow that actually the world is in some sense a world of representation because we can now discover a different way of representing the world. And we realize, oh, when we go back to our old selves, just how much the brain was doing to contribute to everything that we're seeing. I think that that's one of the lessons that people can get when they take psychedelics. Let's put it this way. That's the lesson that I drew from it.

1:28:53And I do think that people can draw this in more or less technical ways. But the other thing that this kind of, you know, experience can do is can kind of shift us epistemologically so that we can change how we kind of understand ourselves as beings in the world. I think it does this partly like neurochemically, obviously the kind of neuroscientific, I guess, way of explaining this is to think, well, maybe for some reason there are certain different pathways that are activated in the brain, at least for a few weeks after taking various kinds of psychedelics that can especially help people with like clinical depression or facing terminal illness.

1:29:28But I think it's not just like that. I think it's actually like you get this enriched sense of how here we are human beings, like taking into our senses and responding and constructing a world. And it gives you a kind of clearer understanding of how we build ourselves. And I feel like this makes us kind of attend more than to the relationship we have, like with the world in general and the relationships we have with other people. And the transformative experience stuff kind of really fits that. So it's kind of cool. And I definitely tried psychedelics before I ever wrote about transformative experience, but it wasn't what I was thinking about.

1:29:59I think you were asking me leading questions earlier when I mentioned like dropping acid and not thinking about certain kinds of logical puzzles, but it wasn't what led me to the stuff I transformed experience. It was really having babies. That was really shocking. Oh, I wasn't implying that the acid led to the book on transformative experience. When you kept saying, I really can't explain how I got into philosophy, I was like, you just made a passing comment related to acid. And there's a non-zero chance that that could have opened Pandora's box of all sorts of questions. I guess it could have.

1:30:37I think it was more like, I definitely had a lot of these experiences in college. I was like, wow, I really like kind of thinking these different kinds of thoughts. But, you know, reading literature also did that. Sure. Yeah, they're not mutually exclusive. But the experiences with, they don't need to be with psychedelics, but in altered states, sort of non-ordinary states of consciousness, can, as you said very well, illustrate in a very felt first-person way how much of our reality and how much of our conception of the self is constructed. And then when you come out of it, you're like, huh, okay.

1:31:16Just like metaphysics is examining in some cases, these underlying assumptions that maybe physicists take for granted. When we're walking around being our skin encapsulated ego, there's a lot we take for granted. And then when suddenly you're like, hmm, I had this complete dissolution of the self and yet there was still a felt experience, but there was no I. What the fuck does that mean? Right? Exactly. The thing is, you can read all the theory in the world, but when you experience it, it gives you a different way of understanding. And that's what I'm saying. Just like seeing red for the first time.

1:31:48You can hear all about red, but when you see it, you're like, whoa, wait, there's something there that's more or that just wasn't the theory, the words aren't sufficient to express all of the content. It's just how human minds are. Yeah. Well, it's like one of the cornerstones of mystical experience, at least according to the assessments from, say, Johns Hopkins and so on, is ineffability, which makes it very hard to describe someone else. Yeah, exactly. It's a problem. It's like, oh, well, it's ineffable. Well, that's not helpful, you know? Yeah. But again, go back to like, this is what I was trying to capture with like the vampires.

1:32:23When they say, look, life has meaning and a sense of purpose that you can't possibly understand as a human. One of the interesting things about human minds is that we can discover new kinds of experience. And before we know about those new kinds of experience, they're just ineffable. There's just a conceptual problem there. You have, I believe, a quote in your book from Conrad's Heart of Darkness. And the quote I'm going to read, and you can, again, fact check me as needed, but watching a coast as it slips by the ship is like thinking about an enigma. there it is before you smiling frowning inviting grand mean insipid or savage and always mute with the air whispering come and find out we ultimately need to ask we're willing to plunge into the jungle of the new self as you put it so before we go are there any transformative experiences that you are sort of looking forward to with trepidation with fear or excitement or decisions that you'll need to make, or it could just be broadly experiences like you've mentioned, for instance, cognitive decline and so on.

1:33:25I'm not saying you'd look forward to that. Actually, no, no, that's the one. So basically, I think that, I mean, all of us face death, okay? And you don't know how it's going to come. And frankly, I'd be perfectly happy to like have a heart attack in the middle of great sex. Like that's obviously the best way to go. But most likely, it's going to be pretty physically healthy. It's going to be a long, slow decline. Alzheimer's is extremely common or some other kind of dementia. And as an academic, especially someone who's like, I mean, I love my intellectual project and losing my abilities is something that I certainly fear and I need to come to grips with that.

1:34:07I think it is a transformative experience. And I think like becoming quadriplegic, it needs to be grappled with. and the solution to the extent that I have one, it relates to the Buddhist point about suffering, namely a certain kind of attachment is what causes suffering. I've been thinking about it a lot actually and I guess I hope when the time comes and I don't expect it to be for a while, but you never know, kind of hoping I've got a pretty good chunk of time, but you have to reset yourself. You have to change who you are in a certain way and enjoy, find other sources of enjoyment And I don't mean something like sour grapes or adaptive reasoning.

1:34:47I think you actually have to reconfigure what you care about. And that is, in a sense, what the Buddhist teaching suggests. In other words, you detach yourself from some of the kind of passions of regular life. And in virtue of detaching yourself, then you truly actually change your preference structure. It's not that you secretly still want them, and if you could get them, you would, right? That's adaptive in various ways. It's rather that you reconfigure what you care about. And I hope if and when I experience cognitive decline that I will learn how to make sure I retain the things that I like, the most basic things that I value, like joy in art and in music, like being a consumer of music and art and really good food.

1:35:28And I want to try to treat that, as you see how I'm describing it, as permission to like let go of things that I value but cause me stress. Like, you know, what causes stress and anxiety? Obligations, things that I need to do, accomplishments I want to kind of get to. When that's inaccessible, like permanently gone, I want to be able to return to other basic sources of happiness and pleasure, loving my children and, you know, having friends, even if there's just everybody else in the assisted living facility or whatever. I think it was a big senior dorm, like back in college, only a bunch of people who in their 80s and 90s.

1:36:04And I want to be able to like understand how to reconfigure myself to enjoy that. I've decided that is my task. I'm not sure I'm there yet, but that's how I'm thinking about it. And I think I want to write about this a little bit, but I don't see people approaching the issue in this way at all. Yeah, I think it would be incredibly valuable for a lot of people for you to write about that and to explore that. Laurie, thank you so much for the time. People can find you and all things L.A. Paul at lapaw.org. And certainly we'll link to all of the books and everything else in the show notes. Is there anything else you would like to say to my audience, anywhere else you would like to point them?

1:36:40Anything at all that you'd like to add before we land the plane? Well, two things. One is, I do have a book. It's coming out. It's going to be ages. It's going to be like two more years. But a lot of the themes that we've been talking about are going to come back, and it's going to be written for non-philosophers. So I hope it'll be the kind of thing that people would turn to if they want to get a sense of some of these discussions. and I understand that philosophers are weird and that we do weird things and we can be kind of annoying back to you know and maybe I just want people to like forgive us for that we're sometimes not very good at representing ourselves but I think in general it's a worthwhile activity for people who have a taste for it and even if you don't it's kind of worthwhile to think about some of these questions sometimes and so maybe I'm asking for a little bit of indulgence and patience.

1:37:25Yeah and curiosity folks I mean there are toolkits And even if you can't get into really definitive, satisfying answers, there are a lot of good questions worth asking also. And in and of themselves, maybe like a koan, they can lead interesting places. So Laurie, thank you for the time and thank you for your work. Really, really appreciate it. And for everybody listening, we will put everything in the show notes as per usual at Tim.blogs slash podcast. And until next time, be just a bit nicer than is necessary to others, but also to yourself. Thanks for tuning in. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off.

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