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

“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. You can hear all about red, but when you see it, you’re like, whoa, wait, there’s something there that’s more. The theory, the words aren’t sufficient to express all of the content.”
— L.A. Paul

L.A. Paul (lapaul.org) is the Millstone Family Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Cognitive Science at Yale University, where she leads the Self and Society Initiative for the Wu Tsai Institute. Her research explores questions about the nature of the self and decision-making and the metaphysics and cognitive science of time, cause, and experience.

She is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Humanities Center, and the Australian National University. She is the author of Transformative Experience and coauthor of Causation: A User’s Guide, which was awarded the American Philosophical Association Sanders Book Prize. Her work on transformative experience has been covered by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, NPR, and the BBC, among others. And in 2024, she was profiled by The New Yorker. 

She is currently working on a book, under contract with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, about self-construction, transformative experience, humility, and fear of mental corruption.

Please enjoy!

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Castbox, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Audible, or on your favorite podcast platform. The transcript of this episode can be found here. Transcripts of all episodes can be found here.

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Want to hear an episode with someone who applies philosophy to his daily life? Listen to my most recent conversation with Derek Sivers, in which we discussed Emirati coffee, cuddly rats, Brian Eno, John Cage, practical applications of simplicity, traveling to inhabit philosophies, and much more.

What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.

SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODE

• Connect with L. A. Paul:

Website

• The transcript of this episode can be found here. Transcripts of all episodes can be found here.

Concepts

• Transformative Experience: A central theme in L. A. Paul’s work, referring to life-changing experiences that fundamentally alter one’s identity and preferences, making it difficult to make rational decisions about them beforehand.
• Analytic Philosophy: A style of philosophy that emphasizes clarity, rigor, and logical analysis, often with close ties to science and mathematics.
• Causation: The relationship between cause and effect, and how we understand the forces that drive the world forward.
• Rational Choice Theory: The framework for understanding how individuals make decisions based on maximizing their expected value.
• Identity: How we understand ourselves and our persistence through time.
• The Mind-Body Problem: A philosophical problem concerning the relationship between thought and consciousness in the human mind and body.
• Epistemology: The theory of knowledge, dealing with questions about how we know what we know and the nature of understanding.
• Logic: The science of the formal principles of reasoning.
• Chain of Thoughts (CoT): In LLMs, chain of thought (CoT) mirrors human reasoning, facilitating systematic problem-solving through a coherent series of logical deductions.
• The Vampire Problem: A thought experiment used by Paul to illustrate transformative experience.
• Stockholm Syndrome: A psychological response that causes survivors of abuse to sympathize with their abuser.
• The Knowledge Argument: Analytic philosopher Frank Jackson’s thought experiment intended to argue against physicalism.
• Act-State Independence: A principle in rational choice theory that assumes the act of making a choice does not change the decision-maker’s preferences.
• Metaphysics: The branch of philosophy that deals with the fundamental nature of reality.
• Gravimetric Analysis: A set of methods used in analytical chemistry for quantitative determination based on mass.
• Counterfactuals: Statements about what could have been, but wasn’t.
• Nihilism: A philosophical viewpoint that suggests life is without objective meaning, purpose, or intrinsic value.
• Quantum Physics: The study of matter and energy at the most fundamental level.
• Time: The nature of time, both as a physical phenomenon and as a subjective experience.
• Free Will: The capacity or ability to choose between different possible courses of action.
• Fatalism: The view that we are powerless to do anything other than what we actually do.
• Existentialism: A family of philosophical views that study existence from the individual’s perspective.
• Continental Philosophy: A tradition of philosophy originating in mainland Europe.
• Phenomenology: A philosophical approach that focuses on the study of subjective experience and consciousness.
• Bioethics: A field of study that examines the ethical implications of advancements in biology and medicine.
• Metaethics: The attempt to understand the presuppositions of moral thought and practice.
• Ineffability: The inability to fully describe or express certain experiences through language.

Books and Recommended Reading

• Transformative Experience by L. A. Paul
• Causation: A User’s Guide by L. A. Paul and Ned Hall
• Being and Time by Martin Heidegger
• What You Can’t Expect When You’re Expecting by L. A. Paul
• The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse
• The Felt Meanings of the World: A Metaphysics of Feeling by Quentin Smith
• Counterfactuals by David K. Lewis
• Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang
• Exhalation by Ted Chiang
• The Garden of Forking Paths by Jorge Luis Borges
• The Aleph by Jorge Luis Borges
• The Autobiography of Charles Darwin: 1809-1882 by Charles Darwin
• Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
• The Oxford Handbook of Epistemology by Paul K. Moser
• The Paradox of Empathy by L. A. Paul
• The View from Nowhere by Thomas Nagel
• Seven Nights by Jorge Luis Borges
• Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life by Agnes Callard
• Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming by Agnes Callard
• Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

Movies

• Arrival
• Primer
• La Jetée
• 12 Monkeys
• Back to the Future
• Interstellar
• Tenet

Institutions

• Antioch College
• Harvard Business School
• Princeton University
• Yale University

People

• Quentin Smith
• Martin Heidegger
• Ludwig Wittgenstein
• René Descartes
• Gideon Rosen
• Thomas Nagel
• Saul Kripke
• David Hume
• Agnes Callard
• Count Dracula
• Alice Gregory
• Paul Sagar
• Hermann Hesse
• Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
• Ted Chiang
• David Lewis
• Jorge Luis Borges
• Johann Sebastian Bach
• Charles Darwin
• Lewis Carroll
• Jennifer Nagel
• Marcel Proust
• Michel Foucault
• Jacques Derrida
• Slavoj Žižek
• Bertrand Russell
• Aristotle
• Pandora
• Joseph Conrad

Relevant Resources

• The Philosopher Tarski on Truth | Big Think
• The Philosopher L. A. Paul Wants Us to Think About Our Selves | The New Yorker
• Philosophy and Its Role in Society | American Journal of Interdisciplinary Research and Development
• From Task Structures to World Models: What Do LLMs Know? | Trends in Cognitive Sciences
• The Vampire Problem: A Brilliant Thought Experiment | The Marginalian
• Eleanor Nelsen: Mary’s Room: A Philosophical Thought Experiment | TED-Ed
• What Is It Like to Be a Bat? | The Philosophical Review
• Paul Sagar: Diary of a Punter | Substack
• Is Having a Child a Rational Decision? | NPR
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• If You Don’t Understand Quantum Physics, Try This! | Domain of Science
• Determinism vs. Free Will | Crash Course Philosophy
• L. A. Paul AMA on Transformative Experience | r/Philosophy
• Understanding Ontological Shock | Dian Griesel, Ph.D.
• Psychedelics 101 | Tim Ferriss
• Nine Buddhist Teachers Explain Suffering | Lion’s Roar
• 61 Zen Koans with Commentary | Tricycle

SHOW NOTES

• [00:05:55] The role of Quentin Smith.
• [00:09:56] Early philosophy class disasters.
• [00:13:34] How is philosophy relevant to the average person?
• [00:20:17] A correspondence experiment with philosophers.
• [00:25:29] The role of philosophy in modern times.
• [00:27:50] The vampire problem.
• [00:39:31] What you can’t expect when you’re expecting.
• [00:42:36] When transformative experiences happen without our consent.
• [00:48:12] Choosing between potentially transformative experiences.
• [00:52:09] How Laurie made the choice to have children.
• [00:56:34] What galvanized Laurie’s trajectory from hard sciences to philosophy?
• [01:01:14] Recommended reading for the novice philosopher.
• [01:02:59] An aside defining counterfactuals.
• [01:07:15] What makes understanding analytic philosophy a worthwhile endeavor?
• [01:10:29] What readers can expect of Laurie’s book, Transformative Experience.
• [01:12:30] Epistemology.
• [01:13:15] How to maintain a passion for philosophy.
• [01:17:21] Commonly misrepresented philosophical concepts.
• [01:19:59] Continental philosophy.
• [01:21:48] Philosophy beyond the academic.
• [01:23:46] Laurie vs. Agnes Callard.
• [01:25:34] Aristotle vs. drugs.
• [01:32:01] Thoughts on life’s final transformative experience: death.
• [01:35:48] Forgiving the philosophers and other parting thoughts.

MORE L. A. PAUL QUOTES FROM THE INTERVIEW

“I care very much about the nature of how we live our lives, the kinds of struggles that individual people have. I’m fascinated by the fact that all of us have these internal worlds, and then there’s some way in which we all have these internal worlds, and then these internal worlds have to kind of coexist with the external world, and we have to try to make sense of everything and try to understand other people.”
— L. A. Paul

“Nobody ever argues someone into religious belief or losing it. It’s all about occupying a different conceptual space, and that just foundationally changes the way you understand the world.”
— L. A. Paul

“When we’re walking around being our skin-encapsulated ego, there’s a lot we take for granted.”
— L. A. Paul

“Using the examples of time travel, it can draw out first how we have to think about time in the ordinary sense, because we can contrast it to the possibility of time as having either another dimension or branching, or in some sense, us being able to move against the arrow of time from the past to the future.”
— L. A. Paul

“I think it’s super important to distinguish between our experience of time and time itself. … The easiest way to see the difference is [to] 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.”
— L. A. Paul

“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. You can hear all about red, but when you see it you’re like, whoa, wait, there’s something there that’s more. The theory, the words aren’t sufficient to express all of the content.”
— L. A. Paul