Rationally Speaking #183 - L. A. Paul on "Transformative Experiences"

Rationally Speaking Podcast

New York City Skeptics

Society & Culture, Skepticism, Science, Philosophy

4.6 • 787 Ratings

🗓️ 30 April 2017

⏱️ 53 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What if you had the opportunity to become a vampire, irreversibly -- and everyone you knew who had become one said "It's utterly indescribable." Would you take the leap, not knowing what it would feel like, or how it would change your personality and values? That's an example of what philosopher L. A. Paul calls a "transformative experience," one that's especially hard to choose (or forgo) rationally, because of how unknowable it is and how it changes your very preferences. In this episode, she and Julia discuss real life examples of transformative experiences -- such as having children -- and debate how to deal with them.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Today's episode of Rationally Speaking is sponsored by Givewell, a nonprofit dedicated to finding outstanding charities and publishing their full analysis to help donors decide where to give.
0:09.2	They do rigorous research to quantify how much good a given charity does, how many lives does it save, or how much does it reduce poverty per dollar donated.
0:17.4	You can read all about their research or just check out their short list of top recommended evidence-based charities to maximize the amount of good that your donations can do. It's free and available to everyone online. Check them out at give well.org. I also want to let you all know about this year's Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism, being held in New City, June 29th through July 2nd.
0:38.3	I'll be there taping a live podcast, and there will be lots of other great guests, including
0:42.4	the skeptics guide to the universe, my former co-host, Massimo Piliucci, the amazing James
0:47.4	Randy, and keynote speaker Mike Massimino, former NASA astronaut.
0:51.8	Get your tickets at nexus.org, n-E-C-S-S-S-org.
1:09.6	Welcome to Rationally-S-S-S-W. Welcome to Rationally Speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense.
1:15.5	I'm your host, Julia Galef, and with me is today's guest, L.A. Paul.
1:20.3	She is a professor of philosophy at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.
1:25.2	One of her areas of focus is what she calls transformative
1:28.7	experiences, which is a topic I've been interested in for a long time, although I didn't
1:32.7	have this excellent handle to describe it. Choices about transformative experiences are especially
1:37.3	difficult to think about conceptually, philosophically, for reasons we'll get into, and they also
1:42.3	include some of the most important decisions we have
1:44.5	to make in our lives. So with that introduction, Lori, welcome to rationally speaking. Thank you.
1:49.9	Thanks for inviting me to have the conversation. So, Lori, you're a philosopher, and so hopefully you
1:56.5	won't mind if I ask you to kick things off by precisely defining your terms.
2:03.2	What is a transformative experience?
2:13.5	Okay, so the way that I like to characterize transformative experiences are experiences that have both an epistemic and a personal component.
2:19.8	A transformative experience is something that changes you epistemically. That's a sort of technical philosophical term, but you can think of it as it changes your conceptual framework or it
2:24.2	changes your mind. It changes your understanding of the nature of reality. And a personal
	...

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