Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. All of us are faced with difficult decisions in our lives.

Big decisions, we don't know whether to do something or not because the ramifications of doing it or not might just be enormous, right?

Getting married, going to graduate school, getting a new job moving across the country, other sort of life-changing decisions.

But we generally think that even though it might be difficult to make these decisions, the underlying strategy of being rational is not that hard to understand.

We have preferences, right? We might like learning new things, but we might not like working really hard.

So there's something in favor of going to graduate school and something against going to graduate school.

So here's the problem. Imagine that you are considering a kind of life choice that will literally change who you are.

The kind of choice that is so big that the person after the choice is made is a different person than you are now before the choice is made.

These are called transformative experiences, and today's guest, Laurie Paul, is the world's expert.

She's a philosopher at Yale University who's written about transformative experiences, and she has raised the following issue.

You might just say, well, okay, I'm going to make some big change, I'll become a different person, but I can just look at other people who've done that.

Other people who've gone to grad school or gotten married or whatever, I will ask them how they feel about it.

The problem is that how your response is after you've made the change, might not be relevant to your preferences now, because you are a different person.

And you might not know after you've made the change, you might not be able to remember what it was like to be you.

The fanciful example that she uses is becoming a vampire, right? You can ask vampires, how do they like it? And they'll say, sure, we love being vampires.

But the things that they like about it might not be things that are relevant to your preferences right now.

So how do we adapt rationality to the case of transformative experiences when our selves change over time?

And of course, once you open up this Pandora's box, you have very interesting things to ask about what it means to change over time, what it means to have a personal identity, even though you as a person are not the same person now that you were five years ago, or will be five years from now.

So I don't think we find the once and for all answers here, but it's a really fascinating conversation about a set of issues that we all face without kind of even knowing it.

So thanks for supporting the Mindscape podcast. Remember, we have a webpage at preposterousuniverse.com slash podcast and something I always mean to remind people of, but always forget is there's a mailing list.

So probably the podcast just pops up into your podcast listener device, whatever that might be. But if you want, you can get an email every time a new episode comes out.

It's a MailChimp mailing service, but go to the website and you can click on join the mailing list. There's both a regular mailing list for episodes and in principle, there's another mailing list for announcements.

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