Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with L. A. Paul (lapaul.org). Paul 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.
Transcripts may contain a few typos. With many episodes lasting 2+ hours, it can be difficult to catch minor errors. Enjoy!
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Tim Ferriss: So I am very interested in someone by the name of Quentin Smith and the role that he played in your life. How did that connection happen and what was the result of that connection?
L. A. Paul: I was at Antioch College. I had gotten my undergraduate degree, I think, or I was close to finishing. I can’t quite remember exactly when I met him, but I was already thinking I wanted to study philosophy, but wasn’t sure how to go about it, because I don’t have an undergraduate degree in philosophy. In fact, I tried twice to take philosophy classes and each time it was a huge disaster. And I realized about three or four weeks into the class, it just wasn’t working with me, so I dropped out. I never managed to take a single philosophy class when I was in college.
And yet, don’t ask me to explain this, I have no idea, I was convinced that philosophy was probably the thing that would be most meaningful for me to study and explore. I don’t know what to tell you about that other than I can be a reasonably stubborn individual in various ways, as my husband will be happy to elaborate on.
Okay, so I thought, “I really want to study philosophy. I don’t know how to do this or what the best way is,” and there are lots of different kinds of philosophy, I’ll just add. So you can do kind of Western philosophy, Eastern philosophy. These are rough categories, so Eastern might be Buddhism or related sorts of faith-based philosophical views. And then within Western style philosophy, so it’s continental philosophy and analytic-style philosophy, which is what I do.
Anyway, so I didn’t even have a grasp of these distinctions, but I was committed. So I needed to earn some money because that’s why I’d graduated, and I was just sort of hanging out with friends of trying to figure out what my next step would be. And so I worked for the college, driving back and forth to the airport to pick up invited speakers, and Quentin Smith was an invited speaker. So, I drive to the airport and I pick him up. I don’t think I knew anything about him. It wasn’t like I thought, “Oh, a philosopher, I want to meet this person.” It’s just some random invitation. He gets in the car —
Tim Ferriss: A pickup.
L. A. Paul: Yeah, some random pickup. Right, I picked him up, and he gets in the car, and we started talking. It’s a long drive. I think it was like — I don’t remember. I think he came into Cincinnati, so we had like an hour and a half and he asked me about myself, and I asked him about him, and I discovered he’s a philosopher, and then we start talking and I say, “Oh, I really would love philosophy and I really want to do it, but I don’t really know how and I don’t know if the things I’m interested in are really philosophical.” And he said, “Well, tell me about it.” And I said, “Well, I really care about how to understand who we are in the world, and I think a lot about time and I’m trying to make sense of what it’s like to have a point of view.”
And so I started just blabbing basically as I’m — I don’t know how old I was, like 22 or something. And he said as we’re driving, he’s like, “You should study philosophy. You’re exactly the kind of person who would be interested in doing philosophy.” And I said, “Well, what should I study?” And he said, “Well, you should read Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time to start, because that’s all about the nature of the self and time.” And I said, “Okay.” And then we kept going and we kept talking and I said, “Okay, I’m going to read this book.” And then he said, “Well, I think you should read the book.” And then he said, “And I think you also should study with me.” It was after like an hour, because I told him I studied — I studied chemistry, and I really loved problem solving, so I loved organic chemistry. And that’s what I was really into when I was in college, and I was good at it. It was my thing. I could have become a chemist.
I also drove him back from his talk and I thought, “Okay, wow.” So, he goes off to have his visit and I immediately go to the library, dig out Being and Time, and start reading it. And I was like, “This is fantastic.” Confusing, but really interesting. So then I drive him back and I tell him what I’ve gotten out of the first, I don’t know, of 10 pages I had read. It’s very dense. It took me forever to read it, but I managed to get through 10 pages, and he said, “You should study with me. Here are my details. Let’s figure this out,” and so that was how it started. I didn’t know anything about him, but he was so great to talk to and so responsive, and he understood the intellectual problems that I wanted to explore, because he explores those intellectual problems. And I had never met anybody who had any understanding of this weird orientation that I had. I could tell you more, but that’s how it happened. It was completely random.
Tim Ferriss: So I’m going to come back to Quentin Smith, but I want to call back to something that you said a few minutes ago, which was you took some philosophy classes, I’m paraphrasing here, and they were disasters. Why were those classes disasters? What didn’t work?
L. A. Paul: Nothing worked. Okay, so they were a combination of things, and some of it was me, and some of it was certainly the teachers, and also some of it was analytic philosophy can be extremely inaccessible, okay?
It’s a beautiful way of thinking and it involves a very rigorous concepts-oriented approach to thinking about almost anything that you want to pick out in the world around us or how we think and how we make sense of the world, but it’s not very accessible in the sense that it doesn’t feel very natural. And so the first thing was I was both immature, very impressed with myself in the sense of like, “Well, I’ll just do this. I do mathematics, I can do chemistry, I do physics. Well, of course I can do this.” And I think I underestimated things, but also the teaching wasn’t very good. I put myself through college and I started at a big state school and the class was huge and the professor wasn’t really into the teaching and I had some TA, and so she would stand down there.
It was this huge — there must’ve been 300 students in the lecture hall, and she would stand down on this blackboard and scribbled things on the blackboard, and I could barely see it, and I didn’t understand, really, what she was doing. I would do the readings and work really hard to understand the readings. The TA wasn’t especially into his job either. And then there was the first assignment, I worked incredibly hard on it, incredibly hard, and I had taken other classes, like writing classes and stuff like that, and the TA hated it, and I was so angry that I just dropped the class.
I was like, “I’m sorry, but this is bullshit,” so I dropped the class. That was the first time. And part of it was like the class wasn’t really designed — it was designed, “Oh, these are the things you should know if you are going to think about philosophy as like a one-on-one,” and she started out with some history, but no one seemed to really care about how to take these abstract ideas and connect them to things that were meaningful in a certain way.
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. These are deep puzzles for me, and it’s not that analytical philosophy doesn’t address this, but it doesn’t address it in a straightforward way. And so, I didn’t understand why I was supposed to work through some abstract —
It was actually sad. It was Descartes that really she started with, and Descartes talks about the mind-body problem, but she didn’t make any connection to these sorts of questions. It was just like, “Oh, the mind is different from the body and here are these questions, and here’s an analysis of what Descartes was saying and what the problem was,” and so it wasn’t a good experience.
And then the second time I took a more applied class, and this was a philosophy of law class, and I tried this and this also didn’t go well. And there’s another thing, which is that I may have mentioned I was a stubborn person. Well, I have views and I was committed to trying to argue something that was kind of creative. Also with the first paper, actually, I wanted to give my own perspective, and I’m sure that it was raw and not especially good in various ways, but it wasn’t stupid. Do you know what I mean? And I got treated as though I was making a mistake by trying to really engage in a very open and creative way, as opposed to just vomit back what I was being told, okay? Now, I’m not going to mention the schools I was at. I mean, I put myself through school, I had to apply — so it was a mix of things that made it go badly, and blame can be spread all around. Anyway, that’s what happened.
Tim Ferriss: All right, thank you for answering that. Part of the reason I wanted to ask this is that many people listening will not know how philosophy applies to their lives, or they have had similar experiences. They take a philosophy class and it’s an hour and a half of trying to define what is is, and they’re like, “I don’t know how this is relevant to my life. I am out.”
L. A. Paul: Right.
Tim Ferriss: I would like to think of myself as a curious person, but I’ve had these experiences where it’s like, “Okay, I’m interested in the limits of our language and the limits of our world. Let me get into Wittgenstein. And I’m like, “Wow, cool family, but I cannot decipher this guy any which way from Sunday.” And then I’ve had a few experiences though that have brought things home. I won’t make this into a soliloquy, but I remember taking a freshman class when I was undergrad at Princeton with Gideon Rosen, and I believe it was Introduction to Epistemology, something like that, which in and of itself —
L. A. Paul: That sounds right.
Tim Ferriss: — as a course title, none of us knew how to make any sense of, but he was so good at weaving stories together with the concepts that it was very compelling and very, very memorable to the extent that here I am, whatever it is, 25+ years later, and I still remember the impact of that class. And I just want to give credit where credit is due to a lovely Austrian woman who’s now at HBS, Harvard Business School, who gave me a copy of your book, Transformative Experience, and that was my personal experience of reading some of the examples in that, which we’ll get to, whether it be the cochlear implants or some of the other thought experiments that we’ll certainly get into.
I was like, “Okay, I can connect this to some real hypothetical lived experience that I’ve had or might have,” and that made at least all the difference for me. So I wanted to learn about the early failures, because a lot of people listening are going to go, “Oh, God, conversation with a philosopher. This is going to turn into a bunch of intellectual masturbation. I’m not going to know what to do with it,” so anyway.
L. A. Paul: No, completely legit. Yes, you’ll discover that the sentence “Snow is white” is true, and only if snow is white. I mean, come on. I mean, that’s actually very important, but it’s not — no. I’m just going to give you a bit of background. So, I went to Princeton for my PhD. Amazingly, they let me in as this crazy person, and then we can talk about that, but they let me in and I was a TA or teaching fellow for Gideon for that class.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, no kidding? Wow, small world.
L. A. Paul: Yeah, exactly. So I know exactly what you’re talking about. Gideon is an amazing teacher. He’s actually one of the best people to talk to, to get a sense of an idea and get it framed, and you can just see immediately what the main idea is, why it’s important, and what the problems are as well.
Tim Ferriss: Unbelievable teacher. I mean, the lectures were unreal.
L. A. Paul: No, totally fantastic.
Tim Ferriss: Just unbelievably good.
L. A. Paul: And so I think the teaching does really matter, and very few people are lucky enough to be introduced to philosophy by Gideon, but I think it’s also the case, independently of teaching ability or teaching focus, that philosophy is — there’s a sense in which, well, it’s not unfair to call it a kind of intellectual masturbation in certain contexts, or it can seem like that or can descend into that. I’m not going to deny it at all, and I’m not going to deny that I might also fall into that in various kinds of contexts when I’m hanging out with the right sorts of people, but I think it’s also really important — you might have to cut that if I say I’m doing intellectual masturbation!
Tim Ferriss: Masturbation is not always a bad thing.
L. A. Paul: Exactly, it can be very rewarding, okay? Geez. You don’t have to cut it, but I do think that because in a quest for clarity and precision, sometimes if that’s the priority, and I respect that as a priority, it can be easy to leave other things aside, but my approach is different. I mean, I do technical work on causation, I do collaborative work with computational cognitive scientists. There’s plenty of stuff that’s maybe a little bit less accessible than the Transformative Experience work. But with there, because with that book and with the work I’ve been doing subsequently, I was returning to my roots, I was there wanting to do — I wanted to approach the topics that made me go into philosophy and that I find deeply meaningful. And I thought, “Well, I have to pair the search for rigor with accessibility.” And maybe some of it comes from my father, because my father — see, you’re getting personal stuff now. I can’t believe I’m telling you about my father. It’s like you’re my philosophy therapist.
Tim Ferriss: That’s my side hustle.
L. A. Paul: Whatever it takes. He liked to read pop science, and he always felt like it was really important that people learned about the kind of intellectual activities that people did. He was fascinated by astronomy in particular, and the nature of the universe, and physics generally. And so there was a part of me that thought, “Well, I have to pair a search for precision with a way of developing the ideas that would capture the content in an intuitive way.” And partly it’s because when you’re trying to do something new, and I am trying to do something new and I was trying to do something new, you have to be guided by a kind of gut instinct and understanding that it’s right, because I think if you haven’t got that gut instinct, it’s really easy to lose track of things.
So the thought is, “Well, if I’m going to do this, approach this topic, I have to approach it in a way that follows that I deeply, intuitively grasp, and that especially when I’m confused, I can kind of reach back to that. And if it’s really right, I should be able to explain it to somebody without a technical apparatus, but then I should also be able to embed it in that technical apparatus and use that to draw the consequences in an especially precise and interesting and rewarding way, and then take it back to the intuition,” and that is what I have tried to do. I’m happy with my results. I’m not going to promote myself, but I think if that’s been my goal, that is my goal and incredibly hard.
Tim Ferriss: I mean, you are on a podcast.
L. A. Paul: Yeah, exactly. Well, that’s true. I guess that’s what people do. No, but it’s incredibly hard to do that, try to capture these ideas, so that’s the take, and I think I’ve been so happy because people seem to get it. It seems to be —
Tim Ferriss: It resonates.
L. A. Paul: Yeah, it resonates, and I looked at some of my philosophical heroes, which would be Thomas Nagel and Saul Kripke, because these are people in the field who have really managed to develop things, and also never mind my early failure to appreciate Descartes. Later on, Descartes and Hume, all of these philosophers, there’s a way to understand their work using very simple examples that brings out the heart of it. Actually, Gideon was really good at that, like teaching Hume, for example. He just really could bring that out. So I was like, “Okay, this is what I can do. This is what I’m going to do, or at least I’m going to try.”
Tim Ferriss: So I promised I would come back to Quentin, and I feel like this is a decent enough place as any to try to figure out how you have landed where you are, and also how you think about different decisions. So, I’m going to read something from the New Yorker profile, and then I want to unpack it a little bit, so this won’t take too, too long. It’s just a few lines.
“Smith suggested that Paul read widely and reach out to philosophers whose work intrigued her. Perhaps, he said, they would agree to correspond with her for a modest sum. A letter writing campaign resulted in a sort of pedagogical supervision by mail with three of them. Paul offered to each a $250 personal check and asked if they would reply to letters about her work, as well as comment on a paper of her own. They agreed to correspond with her. She now suspects, ‘Not quite knowing what they were signing up for.’ Every two weeks, for many months, Paul mailed at least 20 typewritten pages to each philosopher attempting to dissect their arguments one by one.” They responded to all of your letters, and by the end of the experiment, you felt more sure of yourself. I’m paraphrasing the last few lines. There’s so much here in this paragraph.
I’ll throw these out and then you can answer them in any particular order you’d like. One is, did they actually take your check or did you make the offer and then they not take the check, but correspond with you? The second is, how did you choose the people you reached out to? What drove the selection?
L. A. Paul: I offered to pay them, and they all said yes. And then at the end I said, “Okay, I’m going to send you the check,” and only one person took it, and I don’t want to out that person.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, of course.
L. A. Paul: Because that person was also very supportive to me in my later career, and they earned their $250.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it’s also a deal is a deal. There’s nothing wrong with taking it.
L. A. Paul: Yeah, I had no problem with it. I was surprised that the other two didn’t.
Tim Ferriss: Like their per hour labor on that one was probably pretty low.
L. A. Paul: I know, exactly. I mean, and I took out student loans to do all this, and I had earmarked that money. It was all fine. I didn’t object. I paid Antioch College much more, or Antioch University at the time, much more than that amount simply for the privilege of — that degree was like, I just basically — I paid them money so that it was official, but the people who really did the work didn’t make —
Tim Ferriss: How did you choose those particular people to write to, and how many did you write to get the three to actually bite?
L. A. Paul: Oh, everybody said yes.
Tim Ferriss: Everybody said yes?
L. A. Paul: 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 primarily was a very unusual philosopher in terms of his training and his intellectual discipline. He worked on a variety of things. He definitely did not fit into the mainstream philosophy. And that was actually great for me, because I didn’t fit in either, but he was open to that and he helped me. And then I got to Princeton and there’s definitely stuff to say there, but — where was I?
Tim Ferriss: The different folks you selected.
L. A. Paul: Okay, that’s right. So I talked to Quentin, he said, “Well…” The idea was to get — I needed some kind of degree in philosophy and some kind of paper to apply to PhD programs. So 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 a lot to me, and then you had to do your own thing, and as long as you did your own thing, you would get this master’s degree.
Tim Ferriss: Pretty sweet business model.
L. A. Paul: Okay, sign me up. Yeah, exactly. I mean, there were a few other things. 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? Why 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 I said, “Well, I want to choose some female philosophers, 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 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.
It became clear, because logic requires — she was 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 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.
Tim Ferriss: It just strikes me as a very deliberately or accidentally smart way to approach things by going through someone’s book. I mean, on one hand you’re kind of flattering them by going through it so seriously, and then secondly, benefiting from getting their clarification, stress testing your own interpretations, and maybe criticisms.
L. A. Paul: Oh, yeah. Well, 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, and I don’t know why you did that.” And I’m not sure, I mean, I don’t have any of that material anymore, I’m sure some of it was kind of was raw, kind of dumb question material, but I think some of it was not bad. I mean, I did think it through really, really carefully, and I’m reasonably intelligent. And so I think I was able to come up with an interesting kind of challenging 20-page discussion of their chapter. So they would write back to me, and their letters back to me were always very long, at least 10 pages, sometimes more.
Tim Ferriss: It’s incredible.
L. A. Paul: They were great.
Tim Ferriss: What is the role of philosophy in our modern times?
L. A. Paul: I’m just going to use this moment to do the shout-out to Agnes Callard, who you should absolutely interview, who has a new book on this.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, I have questions about her as well. Yeah.
L. A. Paul: I mean, I think there are lots of roles for philosophy, and the question is what is it in general, and then what part of it am I interested in particular in my career? I mean, I think philosophy plays a lot of different roles. In particular, Its most basic role is really to teach you how to think about things. And that involves, this goes back to analytics philosophy’s weirdness. You can’t think about something unless you have some conceptual framework for it. You’ve got to be able to provide some structure to your thoughts in order to — okay, what are you going to take as fundamental? What do you take the framework to be here? What 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 teach you how to think about these things. But there are lots of other important things, like I teach a class here at Yale that I think of as, it’s sort of philosophy of mind for computer scientists, cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, as well as philosophy majors. Because it’s all about showing how really interesting philosophical concepts are coming up all the time now with artificial intelligence and all the questions about what it means for a — could a machine be intelligent? Do LLMs have any 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. Even engineers who don’t tend to be especially philosophically inclined as a group. No shade on engineers. It’s just like, people have their preferences. I mean, I think that’s the most basic thing. I also think the role of philosophy is to 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. It’s so incredible to be able to spend my time thinking about these things.
Tim Ferriss: Vampires. How do vampires fit into your life, and why do they fit into your writing?
L. A. Paul: Oh, vampires. I 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 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 illustrate the structure of a concept. But then I also think that the structure of that concept then fits to real life cases. Right. So my example, I’m just going to tell you.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, let’s do it.
L. A. Paul: All right. Right. So the way that I think about this is I imagine, or you imagine, I ask you to imagine traveling through some part of — on your summer vacation, 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, right? 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. And 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.
Tim Ferriss: Immortal.
L. A. Paul: They probably have different kinds of sense perception. Yeah. Well, virtually. I mean, as long as they stay away from villagers with stakes and things like that.
Tim Ferriss: Virtually, virtually. They have some things they have to check off. Yeah.
L. A. Paul: Yeah, exactly. There’s certain obstacles, but in general, 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. You have to sleep in a coffin. You can’t enjoy the sunshine anymore, and you have to drink blood, right? 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, still right now as a human I think it’s something —
Tim Ferriss: Coffin, it’s pretty cozy. It’s got some memory foam in it.
L. A. Paul: Yeah. I mean, reasonable, I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know. 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 alien, right? And I think in particular, not only will you have to drink blood, but you’ll love the taste of it, like you will thirst for it, right? And even ethical vampires have to keep themselves from sucking the blood of their human compatriots. So that’s quite alien.
And I wanted to bring out how the possibility of becoming another 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 fancy wine. But if you became a vampire, you would, okay? 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. 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. They say life has meaning. It has a purpose that is exquisite. But until you become a vampire, you can’t possibly understand it, right? You just don’t. 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 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,” right? So maybe when you become this other species, there’s some biological evolutionary thing that makes you really glad that you’re a vampire.
Tim Ferriss: Correct.
L. A. Paul: So, it’s not even clear where 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 producing the child that you actually produce that makes you very — I love my children. I wouldn’t exchange them for anything else in the world. If I’d gotten pregnant a month later, I would’ve 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 wouldn’t do anything — you would never change what you’ve done. And that’s awfully like the testimony that you get from vampires.
Okay, so I think vampires also, you stay up a lot at night, right? There are many similarities. Vampires illustrate the possibility of undergoing a transformative experience, something that’s life-changing, but also where you change the 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 an 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. If I had some 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 4:00 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’ve denied it strenuously because I could barely get up before noon when I was a graduate student. And I did it willingly. Something happened, I was clearly the victim of some kind of Stockholm syndrome. So the thought is that when you face a certain experience, and I don’t think it’s just having a child, I think deciding to go to war or maybe moving to an entirely different country, or if you’re diagnosed with some disease and getting some 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 think that there’s a clear — 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, in a technical way, maximize your expected value. And 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.
Tim Ferriss: 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?
L. A. Paul: So there’s a way of capturing the puzzle, just as you said. So given the fact that certain kinds of very foundational, these are new kinds of experiences, so a kind of experience you’ve never had before and I compare this to Mary growing up in a black and white room and seeing color for the first time or Thomas Nagel talking about how foreign it would be, you can’t understand for a bat what it’s like for a bat to be a bat.
Tim Ferriss: Be a bat.
L. A. Paul: Yeah, exactly. So there are these new kinds of experiences that are just very different from any kind of experience you’ve had before. And so that means there’s just a sense in which we can’t, from the inside, kind of imagine what they’re like even if someone can describe, try to describe to me what it’s like to see red and you see the problem right away. We just don’t, language just kind of gives up if I haven’t seen red before, if 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 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 and by definition, and this breaks, so now here’s a little technical bit. So we talked about the intuitive idea and again, I find it easy to understand when I think about someone who 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 becoming a parent, it’s going to kind of rewire them in their preferences in a certain way. So they’re 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 know I can’t understand in a really deep way what it’s going to be like to have that child. So I have to 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 where 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, do 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.” And that’s meaningful to you beforehand because you know that you are 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 going to rework your preference profile, 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, and so your act and your state are not independent. And if you break that, that’s actually a foundational, 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.
Tim Ferriss: So 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 modern, well-educated folks have, particularly women, I would think, but men also.
And here we go. All right, 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. ‘Thinking’ is probably too precise a verb. It was more like a constant buzz scoring the background of daily life and a tone that registered somewhere between urgency and tedium.”
She’s a very good writer.
L. A. Paul: Yeah, she’s really good.
Tim Ferriss: “The bad parts were easy to picture, less time, less sleep, less money. The 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 —
L. A. Paul: That’s right. That’s right.
Tim Ferriss: You try to make a plan —
L. A. Paul: Yeah, no, I get it. You can’t —
Tim Ferriss: You try to make a plan from move one, yeah —
L. A. Paul: That’s right. That’s right.
Tim Ferriss: — 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. Now 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. 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 pre-reqs first before I do that —
L. A. Paul: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: But there are some things, say moving to a different country, which in most instances are going to be reversible. So yes, it could be transformative, but you could move back to your country of origin. Having a kid, less so. And I am 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, doing the thing that could potentially be transformative and then what do you do?
L. A. Paul: Oh, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
L. A. Paul: Well, things are not always good when 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, you kind of don’t mind it, but you certainly suffer.
Okay, this is an aside. So —
Tim Ferriss: I specialize in asides. Please.
L. A. Paul: I live partly, 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 and I’ve toyed with the possibility of on Sundays hanging out my shingle and being like, “I specialize in transformative experiences, big life choices. You could book time with me to discuss your philosophical life choice if you’d like.” Maybe not the copy —
Tim Ferriss: I feel like you need a desk —
L. A. Paul: — give the copy of your —
Tim Ferriss: — in Prospect Park.
L. A. Paul: Exactly. In the neighborhood I live in, this would not be an unusual type of thing, Brooklyn, you know. And that’s by way of thinking and 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 talk to them about the conceptual framework for their choice.” And if that’s of interest, not clear to me that would be of interest, then maybe I have a possible side gig. So 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. I 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’ was so satisfying” because I hated What [to] Expect When You’re Expecting. It 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.
Okay. I’m sorry. I apologize preemptively to everyone who found that book a wonderful book. It wasn’t for me, but it was like — yeah, Alice talked about in the article how there was this moment when I was 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?” 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. And I just discovered the reality of it in a special way. So what I’m trying to say is that I want my work to 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 almost inconceivable that’s happening, then it’s a bit like, as I said earlier, you step off the ledge into the deep and flailing might be the only response.
And I also think this is part of what is to live a life and to be human. And 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 for most people. And 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 Sagar 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, no 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 ways.
I articulate in the conceptual framework that’s involved and diagnosing why 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. Maybe 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 immigrate to another country, or do I want to have a child, or pick your favorite case, do I want my child to have a cochlear implant, we talked about, 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 rationality, so I think 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 even if it would be the case that for almost everyone, they would reform themselves so they would be happy with their choice. That is not, there’s no inference to the best explanation there, just because many people, many vampires testify 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.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. In the case of having kids specifically, I remember a friend of mine, he has three kids now and he was 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. But 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 I said, “Yeah, 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 basis of instincts. And in so being, 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.
Now, I 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 guarantee, but are there different species of transformative experiences within the category of transformative experience? Do you think about, say, kids, differently than you’d think of some of the others?
L. A. Paul: Well, that’s interesting. So 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. This 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, traveling the world, seeing all the wonders, whatever, exploring, 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, to the fullest degree, devoting 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, I’ll have a child and we’ll cross the plains of Siberia together,” and it very rarely works out that way. And if you do cross the plains with the baby, you’re slower. So when the wolves follow you, all right, I won’t go there. 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 because people say that’s — and I may 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. That’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. I don’t even know how it’s going to fill out because there’s so many chance-y things about each of those. You could have a child that’s disabled —
Tim Ferriss: Sure.
L. A. Paul: — and that could be a beautiful thing, but it could also be a very time-consuming, very painful thing. I don’t know, you could pursue your intellectual passion and it could fall flat or it could just turn into this amazing opportunity. So there’s just a lot of chance involved in any of these choices. 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 try to look at the person who I would’ve been or 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 know, I don’t really know what she would’ve been like, but I’m also sure she would’ve lived a super fun, interesting life.
Tim Ferriss: So let me ask if, I’m going to turn this into, I’m going to make you the philosophical therapist for a second here.
L. A. Paul: You already were. You already asked me!
Tim Ferriss: I know, I know, I know. The toothpaste is out of the toothpaste tube, 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. 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, 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. I’m sure I’d fuck up every which way you can imagine, but 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? So it’s more of 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. But what was that decision like for you personally?
L. A. Paul: 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 twenties, I think I thought, “Oh, yeah, that’s a real possibility. I would love to be happily married and have a family.” But it seemed a bit remote too. I thought that seems like an option for me and it would be a good option. But then I thought, but I also really want to 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, reading people’s books and writing basically 60 to 70 pages of material over every two weeks and sending it. This took a lot of time. I had to read it. I didn’t have any training and I would write all this stuff and I was just obsessed. I was also doing other things at the same time like I was still reading Being and 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, not a — some people just feel like their life wouldn’t have meaning without, 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, it’s not as bad as it used to be, but sometimes I don’t think people think you’re less serious now, although they think they used to think that, but you still have less time and you have less money. And 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 the kind of ambivalence.
And so I thought, well, being a rational thinker, I’m going to evaluate it. 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. That was where I was betrayed by What to Expect When You’re Expecting and so many other parenting things that I looked for. I didn’t immediately, 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 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. I was like, “Wait. This was an utterly bizarre, strange metaphysical experience.”
And I mean metaphysics not in the aura shaping way, but metaphysics like I do, the nature of reality seemed to change for me in certain ways and also epistemologically change 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, and I think Alice talked about this, was very scary because I’d built up this reputation as being a serious philosopher talking about the nature of causation and time. And then I was going to talk about babies, so I had to steel 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’ve done if he had been equally ambivalent.
Tim Ferriss: 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 this maybe the so-called hard sciences to philosophy and that you knew you wanted to do that. Now you jokingly said you may not want to drop acid and explore some of these other questions. I’m just wondering what precipitated this itch that you had to scratch with philosophy? There’s got to be something. It didn’t just — I can’t imagine there’s nothing as far as inputs that affected that.
L. A. Paul: Okay. 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 Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game. I read other kinds of interesting books. I remember I read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s work, and these are philosophical texts in maybe not classic, not analytic philosophy, but there’s a lot of philosophy in there. And so I do think that I must have done, I think 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 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. But 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. I didn’t fail out of philosophy classes, I just failed to progress in philosophy classes. All the signs were pointing away from philosophy and I still did it —
Tim Ferriss: Well, I guess —
L. A. Paul: — I’ve just no explanation.
Tim Ferriss: You know —
L. A. Paul: Well, okay, you don’t believe me, I know —
Tim Ferriss: — I need to push a little. No, I’m going to push a little bit, I’m going to push. No, 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 —
L. A. Paul: That’s fair.
Tim Ferriss: — the explorations of chemistry, et cetera, et cetera.
L. A. Paul: That’s right. Yeah, yeah.
Tim Ferriss: So maybe you could take a stab at the latter.
L. A. Paul: Well, first of all, okay, so here it comes for the naivete. I was extremely good at the theoretical side of chemistry and extremely terrible at the lab side of chemistry. So I thought well, maybe I want to be a chemist, I loved solving problems in organic chemistry. I loved it. But then we had to take, 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, 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 if you touched it, oil from your finger would get onto the clay pot and would destroy all of your work.
So what happened after a semester, towards the end, it was probably the last three weeks of hours and hours in the lab, and then I brushed, because I’m physically just, I brushed the side of the pot and it’s gone, all of my work. I was —
Tim Ferriss: Now we’re getting somewhere. Okay.
L. A. Paul: Okay. So I went into an existential crisis basically and I was like, “I cannot do chemistry. I can’t do it. So, no, it’s not for me.”
Now, if I were more sophisticated, I would have learned, oh, no, you can run the lab, and other people do that part, 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, and 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 run a lab even if you’re doing highly theoretical work, and so that side — I needed something a little bit more pure. I think that combined with, like I said, being drawn to some of these literature and art that had this conceptual dimension that involved the role of experience, again, and understanding who you are.
When I moved out of my parents’ house and moved to Chicago, just I found myself immersed in art and literature. And my friend — I was working at a bar, and a lot of the people working at the bar were doing theater or were artists. It was just a whole new way of being that I loved. So I knew there was something out there, yeah, that my natural science education wasn’t connecting with.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Okay. That makes perfect sense to me. Thank you for doing the digging. I appreciate it. I love that story. Oh, the finger oil in the lab.
L. A. Paul: I couldn’t even now. Oh, the pain. Sorry.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, brutal. You mentioned, I think, semi-philosophical works, and you mentioned Herman Hesse. 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 — maybe they went to a philosophy section at 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 100 undergrads, fresh blank slates, and you’re like, “Okay, I want to have the highest 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?
L. A. Paul: What —
Tim Ferriss: They don’t have to be philosophical texts as such, if that makes sense.
L. A. Paul: I have to think about this for a second. I will say one. Quentin Smith wrote this very weird book called The Felt Meanings of the World, which I always loved. It’s weird, but it’s written in a way that I think —
Tim Ferriss: The Felt Meanings of the World?
L. A. Paul: Yeah, The Felt Meanings of the World. It captures something for me, even when I was just trying to approach philosophy. I have to think for a second.
Tim Ferriss: Take your time. We have all the time in the world.
L. A. Paul: I would say, so I think a lot of fiction can be very philosophical. I read Ted Chiang. He’s really, really good.
Tim Ferriss: Ah, so good, so good. Everybody should read Ted Chiang.
L. A. Paul: Everybody should. I mean, a lot of his work is just deeply philosophical, and explicitly so. I mean, he’s interested in counterfactuals and in metaphysics in particular, in these really beautiful ways. And the nature of time.
Tim Ferriss: Just because that term has come up a few times, could you just take a sidebar and —
L. A. Paul: Define it? Yes.
Tim Ferriss: — define counterfactuals?
L. A. Paul: Yes. Counterfactuals involve, so even the word tells you, counter to fact things. 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 them. You can understand counterfactuals in terms of other possible worlds. So, in a world where I have wings, I would fly across the room. And counterfactuals play a role like —
Tim Ferriss: What if the Third Reich dominated the world after World War II?
L. A. Paul: Exactly.
Tim Ferriss: Something like that.
L. A. Paul: Exactly. Exactly.
It turns out, like 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 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 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 cure a disease or something like that. So what you want to do is you want to treat a population and see what happens, and then you compare it to the counterfactual, well, 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 identify ways the world could be, and also ways the world could have been if you hadn’t changed it, something like that.
Tim Ferriss: Ted Chiang is good at weaving counterfactual scenarios.
L. A. Paul: 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 other possible selves. 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.
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, it means there’s a lack of understanding across that barrier. I can’t really understand who I would have become.
And Chiang exploits that kind of notion all the time, like, “Well, what if time were different?” or, “What if aliens came to us, and we had to interpret what they were saying, and the process of interpreting what they were saying changed our conception of how time worked and what we could understand?”
Tim Ferriss: Ah, so good.
L. A. Paul: Super cool, all kinds of stuff.
Tim Ferriss: If people want a light lift, and it is different from the short story upon which it’s based, but watch the movie Arrival.
L. A. Paul: Exactly.
Tim Ferriss: 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. And then he has collections of short stories. It’s always hard for me to remember the first one. It’s like Stories of [Your Life] and Other[s] —
L. A. Paul: Yes, that’s right.
Tim Ferriss: Something like that.
L. A. Paul: Yep, that’s right.
Tim Ferriss: 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, Ted Chiang.”
L. A. Paul: Yep, yep.
Tim Ferriss: So good. All right, any other fiction that comes to mind? I mean —
L. A. Paul: Borges, also. Yeah, I just love Borges. I mean, I just feel like he’s always exploring.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, Borges is amazing. Yeah.
L. A. Paul: Yes, yes. So, reading, I mean, I think —
Tim Ferriss: Where would you suggest people start with Jorge Luis Borges? Any favorites? What’s the name?
L. A. Paul: Yeah, Forking, I mean —
Tim Ferriss: Short story where he meets his self on a park bench, what is that short story?
L. A. Paul: Oh, on a short — I can’t remember. Hang on, just to think. The Garden of Forking Paths is an excellent one. If we’re talking about possibilities, The Garden of Forking Paths, it’s a beautiful one. The Aleph, I would suggest. Those are ones that — I don’t know. 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.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
L. A. Paul: 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 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, that’s what you — you need the analytic philosophy to do that, in my view. It’s just literature, it doesn’t lend itself to getting some precise thing extracted from it in a straightforward way. That’s just not what it’s for.
Tim Ferriss: This is going to sound like a dumb question. Maybe it is a dumb question. But to develop the chops with analytic philosophy seems to require a lot, right?
L. A. Paul: Mm-hmm.
Tim Ferriss: It doesn’t seem to be a light lift.
L. A. Paul: No.
Tim Ferriss: 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?
L. A. Paul: I mean, well, look, I devoted my life to it, so obviously I think the juice is worth the squeeze.
Tim Ferriss: No, I know. It’s —
L. A. Paul: But yeah, no, no, I mean —
Tim Ferriss: Well, 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. But if someone hasn’t —
L. A. Paul: For sure.
Tim Ferriss: — gone to medical school, maybe not. Right?
L. A. Paul: Right.
Tim Ferriss: I’m just curious to what extent you’d recommend a lay listener try to develop the toolkit of analytic philosophy.
L. A. Paul: I think, for some people, they’re fine with literature, a sci-fi or reading, or I think you can get a lot of philosophy through listening to Bach, or 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?” or you watch a time travel film, I recommend Primer or La Jetée or 12 Monkeys.
Tim Ferriss: Ooh, hold on. I’m going to write these down.
L. A. Paul: Okay. All right.
Tim Ferriss: Ooh, 12 Monkeys is a great one. Okay, Primer —
L. A. Paul: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, wait.
Tim Ferriss: — something in —
L. A. Paul: Okay.
Tim Ferriss: — French that I didn’t catch.
L. A. Paul: Oh, if you love 12 Monkeys, dude, you need to watch La Jetée because 12 Monkeys just plagiarized La Jetée.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, okay. Well, then I’ll watch the original.
L. A. Paul: Oh, it’s like 35 minutes long.
Tim Ferriss: How do you spell this?
L. A. Paul: You could — it means “The Jetty” in French, L-A, la-
Tim Ferriss: L —
L. A. Paul: — and then jetee, J-E-T-E-E.
Tim Ferriss: Okay. All right.
L. A. Paul: You can watch it online. There’s a YouTube — it’s a beautiful film. Actually, it’s a kind of artwork film. It’s very artsy, and the story that it tells was retold by 12 Monkeys. It’s the same.
Tim Ferriss: Wait.
L. A. Paul: It’s the same thing.
Tim Ferriss: It’s French and artsy? No, I’m kidding.
L. A. Paul: Oh, what do you mean?
Tim Ferriss: Gee.
L. A. Paul: Yeah, how could it be?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
L. A. Paul: 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 at this — I forgive them the last five or 10 minutes of the film. And Primer is a beautiful, super cool film, cult classic type of movie.
Anyway, if you watch these things, and you feel 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.” Well, then, my friend, you are a philosopher at heart in various ways, and you should put the time in to learn more. 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 work through some of these puzzles, I think, just sharpens your reasoning capacities, generally.
I’m not saying it’s easy. Remember that bit about suffering. There’s definitely some suffering, but it can pay off. 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. Lewis Carroll, another excellent thing to read.
Tim Ferriss: 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.
L. A. Paul: Yeah. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Okay. So, if somebody was willing — they watch, well, whatever it might be, Primer or another, I mean, 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?
L. A. Paul: Oh. Yeah, good question. I mean, I’m struggling with this part because I started with Being and Time, which isn’t really what normal people would start with.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. You’re like, “I like hiking. Let me start with Everest.” Yeah.
L. A. Paul: Yeah, exactly. I mean, well, you can read my book. There you go. That’s —
Tim Ferriss: Sure.
L. A. Paul: This is the podcast thing.
Tim Ferriss: That’s fine. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
L. A. Paul: The book, Transformative Experience, was not written for non-philosophers. I go over arguments more than once. I mean, so I am picking it apart in a way 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.” So, yeah, you could look at my book.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, mission accomplished.
L. A. Paul: And read the first four pages and see what you think. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And then if you’re like, “Wow, I can digest more technical aspects,” then you can dig into the footnotes too, especially after the first hundred pages.
L. A. Paul: Exactly. The second half of the book switches into much more technical argumentation. And then a great resource, also, it’s written for other professional philosophers, but also really good for — it’s 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. You can get a sense of it. Take an entry, run it through ChatGPT for the highlights, whatever, and get a sense of things.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Can you translate this from the Latin of the high priesthood into something I can understand, please?
L. A. Paul: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, write it for — tell me this from a twelve-year-old’s perspective. I think you would get something interesting. There are also various epistemology, a very short introduction. I think Jennifer Nagel wrote that really like —
Tim Ferriss: Could you define that term, also, for folks?
L. A. Paul: Oh.
Tim Ferriss: Epistemology.
L. A. Paul: 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 conceptualize or make sense of the world.
Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm. Okay. So, I interrupted your train of thought —
L. A. Paul: Yes,
Tim Ferriss: — that you were saying, for epistemology, you might start with —
L. A. Paul: Oh. There’s a series of very short introductions. It’s Oxford. And 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. Mm-hmm.
Tim Ferriss: 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 pop culture sense. Are 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.
L. A. Paul: First, read interviews with Borges where he goes through this kind of process, especially, he has a book where he talks about going blind.
You 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.
The reason why I started out with causation, as a graduate student, was partly because I found a deep close intellectual friend in David Lewis. We just really hit it off intellectually. We could talk to each other in ways that were talking about the — I mean, always metaphysics, but we just understood each other’s minds in a way that I didn’t connect with really anyone else when I was doing my Ph.D.
But I felt that the tools of philosophy were beautiful tools. I could see that in the history, the 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 at that time, and that really wasn’t for me. I’m not a religious person, although I find religious belief really interesting and fascinating in various kinds of contexts.
And this paper, called “The Paradox of Empathy,” where I talk about the divide between the atheist and the believer because there’s this kind of fear if you really open your mind to the other person, that it’s going to convert you a way that you don’t want to be converted. It’s going to change you into that alien self. Right?
Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm.
L. A. Paul: It’s like, I think the atheist feels that way, and I think the believer feels that way. So I argue it’s actually perfectly reasonable to be — 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. Okay.
Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm.
L. A. Paul: So I knew that philosophy had these tools, and I thought that they were excellent tools. I’m still — I love solving problems, remember, in this really rigorous way in organic chemistry, exploring mechanisms. That’s what all of the exams were always about.
My goal in college was to set the curve, but I wasn’t finding what I wanted. 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.
Tim Ferriss: I just did a little searching on the Borges piece. 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 —
L. A. Paul: Yep, that just —
Tim Ferriss: — nightmares, Buddhism, poetry, and his own progressive blindness.
L. A. Paul: Yep. Yes, exactly.
Tim Ferriss: So that might be another place to start.
L. A. Paul: Yes, 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 slowly agonize and when you’re completely unfit, and you have to — and it sucks, okay. It’s not like you just run a little bit, and it feels great. And then you run a little bit more, and it feels great. Then somehow you get to a 26 — no, it doesn’t work that way. And anyway. 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 deeply risky.
Tim Ferriss: 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? I mean, I’m sure quantum physicists could have a field day answering this, right? Because their stuff gets grabbed by every woo-woo self-help book that tends to come along.
L. A. Paul: 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 —
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. Okay. Right there your experience of time’s passing has departed from the objective measurement of time as measured by the clock. So there’s just two different things, 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 talking about time, but it’s important.
Or sometimes people talk about when they have 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. It’s like I was I was fine, 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 and I went around and around on Lake Shore Drive. It’s got four lanes going each way. And I was like, whoa. But it was 3 o’clock in the morning and no one else was there. So just in slow motion I watched myself go around and around and around. And I was like, well, this is bad. Oh, but there’s no one else here. Then I was able to correct the car, come out of the spin. But it felt like it happened over two, three minutes and it was probably like 10 seconds, 20 seconds, something like that. And there it’s a very common phenomenon, the way that we perceive time just changes. It comes apart from the passing of time.
Second thing, free will, just kill me now. Every non-philosophist —
Tim Ferriss: This is a big one.
L. A. Paul: It’s a big one. And people were really fascinated with it, and I totally get it. It’s not my own favorite topic, but I think you should distrust various — it’s just a favorite topic of particular neuroscientists, and they’re all going to solve free will. And often it’s just —
I mean, I respect and engage 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 is like they don’t know what they don’t know. So that’s a killer.
Related to free will is fatalism, like thinking everything’s determined. Slightly different from free will. I love existentialism as a topic, and I love continental philosophy and phenomenology, but I think that often —
Tim Ferriss: I recognize phenomenology because I’m involved with a lot of scientific research. And 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.
L. A. Paul: So it’s a disputed phrase. So I also described what I do with analytic philosophy. And there’s this rough, it’s hard, it’s not really a very good way of describing things, but it’s the best one I have. So traditions, like say, Heidegger and Foucault and Derrida come from that kind of — I think Zizek might count as this. There’s a style of philosophy that originated, at least arguably, on the European continent and is very different from the class you took with Gideon Rosen at Princeton, which is classic analytic philosophy, which originated in the U.K., arguably with people like Bertrand Russell and Wittgenstein and people like that. And also, I think with the positivists who came over to the US particularly around trying to escape the Nazis in World War II.
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. 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 liked the approach. But I love the topics, and it’s pretty hard to talk about the very deep things that philosophers talk about, like the nature of being, or who we are in some fundamental sense, or how do we understand time using analytic techniques, but that’s what I try to do.
Tim Ferriss: 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?
L. A. Paul: I happen to think there’s value in just — when I went back before and I said when the work on Transformative Experience that I am 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, let’s say I’m diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s, confronting that and making sense of that. So I think thinking philosophically is a really good tool for living one’s life. And that’s what Agnes talks about, by the way. 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, important applications in bioethics, important applications with artificial intelligence in particular. Thinking about ethics questions and value alignment with machines, trying to design machines that if they don’t have human values, respect human values, and how we’re going to really be able to do that in the context of actually undergoing these scientific and conceptual revolutions where we don’t know what’s coming down the pike. Transformative in my view. I think there’s lots of application also just with the policies, and thinking about, for example, precision, in terms of how, for example, we want say, certain policies to affect people. There’s a lot of work in political philosophy and philosophy of law and ethics I think that matters. That’s not just bioethics. Bioethics is its own kind of thing, which I think their philosophers have made and should be making and continue to make really important contributions.
Tim Ferriss: 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. And 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?
L. A. Paul: 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. She thinks, oh, well, you can just aspire to be someone different and just train yourself up into being that way. I’m simplifying radically. And I think there’s an incoherence in that, because if I find somebody being a parent or being an opera singer or something 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 that our rationality model is broken. So I don’t mind if there’s a kind of incoherence in my view.” We’re just really different in that way, in the way that we approach these questions.
Agnes does the history of philosophy. She works on the classics and work in maybe metaethics, and I approach things very much from a philosophy science, kind of metaphysics epistemology, a more mathematical view, so we come from different perspectives that way too.
Tim Ferriss: 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, I’m not sure exactly when this was, but that you find Aristotle’s work especially inspirational. Now, you 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?
L. A. Paul: I said that about Aristotle?
Tim Ferriss: I mean, that’s what I have here. It’s attributed to you. This is why I’m saying —
L. A. Paul: This is the Reddit Ask Me Anything, right?
Tim Ferriss: Yes, exactly.
L. A. Paul: I have no idea. I love that AMA, it was so fun. I thought you were going to ask me about drugs because that ended up being half the conversation.
Tim Ferriss: Oh. Okay, Well, let’s go to drugs.
L. A. Paul: Let’s talk about that. I’d rather talk about drugs than Aristotle, I’m afraid. I have more expertise in there.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I know more about drugs than I do about Aristotle, so let’s go to drugs.
L. A. Paul: Yeah. Okay. All right.
So one of the cool things is that, I’ve given a couple talks on this, the framework that I was articulating is useful when we’re thinking about things like psychedelics because the conceptual framework of a transformative experience, which 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 how you understand yourself in the world. And that applies —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Ontological shock is something they use in the literature a fair amount.
L. A. Paul: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And, I mean, that applies to becoming a parent, I think, or a terrible thing, like becoming quadriplegic, but it also can happen 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 not amenable to description. When I said, “Hey,” if you’re color blind 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.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
L. A. Paul: And that’s something about the way that we can’t use testimony to communicate certain types of experiences. And psychedelics change the way that we experience the world through changing the character of our perceptions. And I’m fascinated by this, because I think 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, and I do think that people can draw this in more or less technical ways.
But the other thing that this kind of experience can do is shift us epistemologically so that we change how we understand ourselves as beings in the world, I think. And it does this partly 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 clinical depression or facing terminal illness.
But I think it’s not just like that. I think it’s actually you get this enriched sense of how here we are human beings taking in through our senses and responding and constructing a world, and it gives you a clearer understanding of how we build ourselves. And I feel like this makes us attend more to the relationship we have with the world in general, and the relationships we have with other people. And the transformative experience stuff 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. I think you were asking me leading questions earlier when I mentioned dropping acid and not thinking about certain kinds of logical puzzles. But it wasn’t what led me to the stuff I transformed with experience. It was really having babies that was really shocking.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, I wasn’t implying that —
L. A. Paul: You weren’t suggesting that? Oh, okay.
Tim Ferriss: 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 is a non-zero chance that that could have opened Pandora’s box of all sorts of questions.
L. A. Paul: I guess it could have. I think it was more like I definitely had a lot of these experiences in college. I was like, wow, I really like thinking these different kinds of thoughts. But reading literature also did that so it didn’t feel, it wasn’t like — yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Sure. Yeah. They’re not mutually exclusive.
L. A. Paul: Right.
Tim Ferriss: The experiences with, and 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.
L. A. Paul: Exactly. That’s right.
Tim Ferriss: Then you come out of it, you’re like, “Huh. Okay.”
L. A. Paul: Right.
Tim Ferriss: Just like metaphysics is examining, in some cases, these underlying assumptions that maybe physicists take for granted.
L. A. Paul: Yes.
Tim Ferriss: When we’re walking around being our skin-encapsulated ego, there’s a lot we take for granted.
L. A. Paul: Exactly.
Tim Ferriss: 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?
L. A. Paul: Exactly. And 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. 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. It’s just how human ones are.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Well, it’s like one of the cornerstones of mystical experience, at least according to the assessments from St. Johns Hopkins and so on, is ineffability, which makes it very hard to describe to someone else.
L. A. Paul: Yeah, exactly. That’s a problem. It’s like, oh, well, it’s inevitable. Well, that’s not helpful.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
L. A. Paul: But again, go back. This is what I was trying to capture with the vampires. When I say look, life has meaning and a sense of purpose that you can’t possibly understand as a human. I’m sorry to say that there are certain — 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.
Tim Ferriss: So 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.
“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 an air of whispering, ‘Come and find out.’”
“We ultimately need to ask if 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 looking forward to with trepidation, with fear or excitement, or decisions that you’ll need to make? It could just be broadly experiences like you’ve mentioned, for instance cognitive decline and so on. I’m not saying you’d look forward to that, but —
L. A. Paul: Actually no, no, that’s the one.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
L. A. Paul: That’s the one. So I don’t look forward, but I mean, basically I think that all of us face death and you don’t know how it’s going to come. And frankly, I’d be perfectly happy to have a heart attack in the middle of great sex. That’s obviously the best way to go. But most likely it’s going to be, I’m 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. And I 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. And what 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 find other sources of enjoyment. And I don’t mean something like sour grapes or adaptive reasoning, I 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 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 that if and when I experience cognitive decline, that I’ll learn how to make sure I retain the most basic things that I value, like joy in art and in music. Just being a consumer of music, and art, and really good food.
And I want to try to treat that as you see how I’m describing it as permission to let go of things that I value but cause me stress. What causes stress and anxiety? Obligations, things that I need to do, accomplishments I want to get to. When that’s inaccessible, like permanently gone, I want to be able to return to other basic sources of happiness and pleasure and love, like loving my children and having friends, even if they’re just everybody else in the assisted living facility or whatever. I think of it as a big senior dorm back in college, only a bunch of people who are in the 80s and 90s. And I want to be able to 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.
Tim Ferriss: 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 lapaul.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? Anything at all that you’d like to add before we land the plane?
L. A. Paul: 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 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 that it’ll be the kind of thing that people would turn to if they want to get a sense of some of these discussions.
No, just, I understand that philosophers are weird and that we do weird things and we can be kind of annoying, back to — and maybe I just want people to forgive us for that. Sometimes we’re 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 worthwhile to think about some of these questions sometimes. So maybe I’m asking for a little bit of indulgence and patience.
Tim Ferriss: And curiosity, folks. I mean, there are toolkits. And even if you can’t get to really definitive satisfying answers, there are a lot of good questions worth asking also.
L. A. Paul: Exactly. Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And in and of themselves, maybe like a koan, they can lead to interesting places.
L. A. Paul: Exactly.
Tim Ferriss: 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.blog/podcast. And until next time, be just a bit nicer than is necessary to others, but also to yourself. Thanks for tuning in.
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