My conversation with Laurie Paul on love and transformative experience

The full edited transcript

If you’re like me, it might be hard to sit still long enough to watch a video of an exchange, and you’d rather read it, so you can go at your own pace. And since I need to have something special for paid subscribers—of which I currently have one!—I’ve decided to make the written transcript of my conversation with philosopher Laurie Paul available behind a cheeky paywall.

You can read the opening volleys for free. But when it starts to get interesting, that’s when I’ll pull up the drawbridge and demand a tribute. It’s a form of compromise.

Our full 40-minute-or-so conversation is available on YouTube. I used Rev.com to make an AI-generated transcript and then asked Claude to remove all the “ums” and “uhs” and suchlike. I’ve done some further hand-editing for ease of reading, and to cut some asides, but otherwise—barring AI transcription mistakes—it should be pretty much word for word.

Here it is.

---

Brian Earp: Hi.

Laurie Paul: Hi.

Brian Earp: So, you have this very famous paper that everybody has read, which is What You Can't Expect When You're Expecting. And I'm sure you've explained it a thousand and one times and given many, many talks on this topic. So I don't want to have you belabour the main things about it. I'll try to give a very concise summary of how I understand it. And then I have this idea that I've been discussing with my postdoc, Daniel Villager, who I think you must know, or at least you must know his work because he writes on transformative experience.

Laurie Paul: Yeah!

Brian Earp: Okay. So, you use this example of becoming a parent for the first time, which is what the title is a play on, as a potentially transformative experience. Which is something where, unless you've had the experience, you don't know certain things you would need to know to be able to rationally decide whether to have the experience. So there's this kind of catch-22, epistemologically.

And then there's the knowledge bit, which is the epistemically transformative dimension. And then there's the personally transformative dimension, which is that your very value structure and what it's like to be you could change so much that if you're trying to assign a sort of subjective value—how good would something be for you specifically—it’s not just that you don't know what it'll be like, but you don't know how good it will be for you because you might be different on the other end of the experience.

In terms of at least a concise summary, is that a fair account of what you're trying to argue?

Laurie Paul: Yeah, I think. So let me see. On the one hand, it's that for certain kinds of big life changes, like becoming a parent, one of the things that matters a lot—it's not the only thing—is basically what life is gonna be like is for you as a parent. You know, how it's gonna change you. And the subjective value is what I think of as, what is life is gonna be like for you. And it's not just phenomenology. It's about all these other things that you care about. Like, time for things like work or exercise or friends or all these things. Right? So—

Brian Earp: How it all fits together, and the relative weights that you put on all sorts of things in your life, might shift radically.

Laurie Paul: Exactly. Exactly. And I think there's lived experience, and how tired you're gonna be, but also how meaningful you'll find things and all this stuff. So, on the other side—yeah, you put it just right. The thought is like, look, you are trying to decide what you want. And the thing is that the you in the future is different from the you now, so there's no univocal way of determining this. And then you get kind of stuck because of the epistemological catch-22 as you put it. Like, you can't know what it's gonna be like for you until you actually do it. But that's what you wanna find out before you decide to do it.

And it also affects testimony because there's this weird thing about some experiences—and having a kid is definitely one of them—where the process of actually having a child kind of reforms you in a way that often makes the person who results, like, really happy that they did it or committed to doing it. But, it's a little bit weird 'cause if—kind of having a frontal lobotomy in a certain way—like, do you really want to change yourself in a certain way so that the person who results is super happy with the result, but maybe that wasn't who you wanted to be.

Brian Earp: Yeah. And maybe it isn't you.

Laurie Paul: Yeah, it’s not you, in one sense. It's you in a sense, like in a personal identity sense, even if it's a new self.

Brian Earp: Like in a metaphysical-numerical kind of way. Yeah.

Laurie Paul: Yeah. But there's a sense in which it's you and a sense in which it's not you. And, that's complicated then, right? Like, do you really wanna bring this new self into existence even if they'd be really happy that they existed?

Brian Earp: Did you write this paper upon becoming a parent? Or before becoming a parent? Was it related to that?

Laurie Paul: Yeah, so I wrote the paper about three—let me think. Actually quite a ways into being, to becoming a parent. I think I wrote the paper in like 2010. It didn't come out till 2015, and I had my first child in 2004 and my second child in 2007. But what happened was, I had this kind of epiphany moment, if you like, when my daughter was—she's my first child—and she was like three months old, and it was like, oh my! You know, after sort of I recovered from the physical drama of having a kid—this was so intense and so bizarre in this really interesting way. I can't believe that philosophers don't ever talk about it. Yeah. And I thought it's metaphysically interesting, it's epistemologically interesting, it's decision theoretically interesting, all this stuff. And nobody ever talks about any of it. So I was like, okay, I gotta do something about that.

Brian Earp: There are a lot of things that are like that. I mean, I remember reading a paper by [Bryan Weaver and] Fiona Woollard on the philosophy and the ethics of monogamy, which is this hugely central part of the culture that philosophers haven't really philosophised about. Another thing I've been talking to some people about is menopause, which can also be radically—probably can be—a transformative experience, I suppose. I don't know. Have you ever used that example in your theorising?

Laurie Paul: I haven't, but I think it’s wildly variable. I mean, I went through menopause already and it wasn't a big deal for me, so it's kind of harder for me to have something—

Brian Earp: To tap into, for your own example, mm-hmm.

Laurie Paul: But divorce is definitely transformative, I would say so. And marriage can be so.

Brian Earp: Right. Right. Well, another example which maybe we'll talk about, that I guess you were thinking about recently because there was a whole conference on this, is that for some people, psychedelic experiences can be transformative. They don't know what it's like until they go through it. And it might be unlike anything they've experienced before, something they couldn't even really imagine themselves into before it happens. And it can change their sense of self and what they care about and the relative priority they place on things.

And so this is where maybe where I'll make a bridge from the paper—the famous paper that we talked about. And this maybe new idea, which I don't know whether it has any legs, and maybe you can help me see if it does. So, in the case of becoming a parent, what I think is paradigmatic is that that's the decision that's made with someone.

It's not always, I mean, sometimes somebody becomes a parent unwillingly or by surprise or whatever, but you know, when you're talking about rationally making the decision whether to become a parent in that paper, which I went and reread somewhat recently, it's really striking that it's—you mention that there could be another person involved, but for the most part it's like, do I want to become a parent, as this kind of rational decision that a person makes for themselves?

In the case of psychedelics, I've been writing for some years now about the possibility of couples undergoing psychedelic-assisted marital therapy or couples therapy of some kind. And there's a sort of medical ethics—relatively philosophically uninteresting—question about what it means for two people to give consent to a medical treatment or something that might be medicalised.

I mean, there might be drug-assisted therapies that are available outside of the medical context, but either way, two people are making a decision. And at least it makes things more complicated because you might have coercion within the relationship. You might have one partner who wants to drag the other person to it, and you have to decide whether both of them are really willingly participating or whatever.

But now suppose that two people are making a decision about whether to undergo a potentially transformative experience, as it were, together.

Laurie Paul: Mm-hmm.

Brian Earp: Now, it’s true in many cases of “shall we become parents” that it’s not just each of you might change, but kind of who you are together might change.

Laurie Paul: Mm-hmm.

Brian Earp: It's possible that the relationship might change. Now, you have questions about whether this is an ontologically discrete unit. Like, is the relationship greater than the sum of its parts? Is it just two individuals, one plus one equals two? Or you have these old religious ideas like, the two become one. There's almost this metaphysical transformation that, when you get married, you meld into to each other in some way. So I don't know, the—

Laurie Paul: You could also just say, when you've got a whole, you've got two halves, and so each part is different from the whole. And when you have a whole—a whole is something, you know. It doesn't have to be more than its parts. It's just a new thing. Like there's A and B and you put 'em together and you've got the AB whole.

Brian Earp: And you could even introduce a further thing here, which is you could talk about the love that exists between people as sort of an entity unto itself.

Laurie Paul: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Brian Earp: You know, that can change. The quality of it can change. There might be a question of whether it could numerically change. It could also come in and out of existence. I mean, you might have people who think that they love each other, and then they have an MDMA-assisted couples therapy session, and maybe they find that they don't really love each other. Maybe they come to learn what it really is like to love each other, and then they sort of foster that kind of thing.

So it seems like love can come in and out of existence, and it can change qualitatively. The couple—like you're talking about, the “whole” of “halves,” although I think many people feel like they want to be, you know, two wholes coming together to create a super-whole or something like that, rather than—

Laurie Paul: You know, yeah.

Brian Earp: The “other half” kind story. But, so, I raised this with my postdoc Daniel. I said, has anybody written about transformative shared experiences? And he knows the literature better than I do, and his impression was that people hadn't written about this. And so then I said, well, let's talk about it and see if there's something to write about. Maybe nobody's written about it because there's not really anything philosophically interesting to say.

Laurie Paul: Mm-hmm.

Brian Earp: So, the first draft of this paper, we were trying to think whether there was anything decision-theoretically interesting about it, because I'd say most of the literature on transformative experience and people commenting on you has been about this idea of whether you can make a rational decision according to classical decision theory, which has to do with assigning subjective value to future alternatives, and then looking at the expected value and picking the one with bigger value.

That would be a rational decision on this kind of classical view. And Daniel is very strongly of the view that there are no interesting implications for decision theory. And as best as I understand, as clarified in some recent emails, the reason why he thinks there's nothing interesting is that decision theory has to do with assigning subjective value. And subjective value requires consciousness—what it's like—and maybe some sort of sentience. This is where things can be pleasurable or painful or better or worse for you in some way (although that might not require subjective feeling). And so the thought is, the couple doesn't have consciousness. Like there's no seat of consciousness that—

Laurie Paul: So, right. For there to be a decision theoretic implication for a couple to make the decision, there would have to be some kind of “unified mind” that could assign a unified subjective—that's what he thinks. Interesting.

A couple having a mind-meld. Made with ChatGPT.

Brian Earp: Yeah. Now, maybe this is just different sensibilities that Daniel and I have. He's like, there are two people with different minds, each of whom has subjective value and each of whom could make a decision. So, for them, there's the traditional decision theoretic problem that you've talked about a bunch. It's just that each of them is having it. And in making that decision, they'll of course take into account the welfare needs and the likely identity of their partner and so forth. That will be part of what factors into whether they think this is a rational decision or not. But there's no couple-level decision that has subjective value. A couple rather than two partners to the couple.

Laurie Paul: Okay. So, first, think about collective decision making.

Brian Earp: Yeah, exactly.

Laurie Paul: Right. There's lots of work about collective decision-making in groups.

Brian Earp: Making a decision. Yeah, exactly.

Laurie Paul: Exactly. And, you can talk about a collective experience, right? So think about, like, Molly Crockett's really interesting work on—

Brian Earp: Mm-hmm. Burning Man.

Laurie Paul: Exactly, exactly. Collective experiences. So, I think the question is, I see what Daniel was saying. And like, the way that I formulated the problem, it was definitely just for individuals, but I think you could …

So, Jeff Sebo and I wrote a paper, talking about effective altruism, and at the very end we talked about collective transformative experiences very, very briefly. That’s really one of the only places where—and also, I think, the pandemic. It was a collective transformative experience, I think. Political revolutions and elections can be collectively transformative.

So the question is: What is this collective transformative experience? One model might be, well, it's just a bunch of individuals having their own little, each having their own little transformative experience, kind of somehow all at once or in some kind of related way.

Brian Earp: Mm-hmm.

Laurie Paul: But if you think that there is a sense in which there can be a collective group experience—doesn't necessarily require a shared mind, but where my relationship with the other person affects my experience and their relationship with me affects their experience. Then there's a kind of relational structure there that means you could have a collective experience that only requires individual consciousness, but the experience is different in virtue of the network of relations that you're embedded in.

So when you and I are friends or whatever, or you have your partner, your spouse or whatever, you could have dinner together—or whatever experience that you have together, right. You know, engaging in something that’s a loving event. There's the question of, is there some collective event that requires like mind-melding? Well, no, but if you wanna say, we do something together, you get married or whatever. And my sense of that other person's feelings and also just all of these other things … that I empathise, and think I know about them, affects how I am.

Brian Earp: Very much so. I mean—

Laurie Paul: Next, value is gonna be affected by them. Sorry, go on.

Brian Earp: Well, no, exactly. So that’s the kind of line I've been trying to push, and I'll tell you Daniel's response to it, but first it's like, you know, I think a lot about relationships—a lot of the stuff that I work on is relationships—and close relationships are … your sense of self changes. And now, do you meld consciousnesses with someone? Does it become a shared subjective point of view, so to speak? I don't think so—

Laurie Paul: But I don't think—you know, my metaphysics doesn't stretch that far, but an identity changes, like who you are changes and also I would say the experience of making decisions changes.

Brian Earp: And I haven't been able to articulate exactly this experience of making a joint decision that's different from making an individual decision that takes into consideration the needs and interests of the other person. For some reason, they feel different to me. And maybe it's just two descriptions of the same thing and I haven't teased it apart yet, but Daniel seems to think that in order for the decision-theoretic thing to be philosophically interesting, there would have to be a shared seat of consciousness, or shared point of view. And I mean, we even do metaphorically talk about that. We talk about having a shared point of view. But he means literally, you know, seeing out the same eyes—like conjoined twins or something with one brain and overlapping neural architecture or something.

Laurie Paul: I don't see that because I think collective decision making is perfectly possible, and I don't think you have to understand subjective value, in a way that—like, if I'm affected by you and you're affected by me, when we collectively make a decision, then our subjective value is affected by the collective task that we're performing. And then the other thing I would say is, I think it's also really true who I am is partly defined—it’s not that all of my properties like this, but some of my properties are relational properties, like—

Brian Earp: Yeah, absolutely.

Laurie Paul: Spouse, I'm a parent. I'm an academic. And these are relational properties. I'm an academic in virtue of being a professor at Yale and teaching and doing all the things, being hired by the institution. I'm a wife, or a spouse, by being married to my husband. I'm a mother by having a certain relationship to the child that I produced. These are relations. And in virtue of this, I have relational properties.

Like, I'm a metaphysician. And I think about these things in a fairly—I’m very clear on what my metaphysics is with all of this.

Brian Earp: Yeah.

Laurie Paul: So there's a sense in which you can change who you are by changing your relational properties. That's exactly what I'm talking about. When you become a parent—