The Person You Become | L.A. Paul

The AIs will be able to do things that we have not anticipated. So the presumption with alignment seems to be, well, if we instill the right rules for the AI to follow, then we'll be fine. Okay. Then something comes along that the rules didn't think of, and then the AI goes rogue. Like, why is that such a surprise?

I just don't think you can set up rules or alignment at this point that are gonna give us the kind of fail safe that we need in the future. It just doesn't work that way.

We are living through an unprecedented moment in human history. Neuroscience, the science of consciousness, and artificial intelligence are all convergent, and everything is moving faster than most people even realize. On this show, I sit down with the scientists, philosophers, and technologists working at the frontier, the people whose work is actively deciding what we could become as a species. Too much of that work is happening out of public view. I want to bring the frontier into the open, sort out what's real from what's hype, and what it all means for the future of human potential.

I'm Doctor. Scott Barrett Caulman, and welcome to the Human Potential Lab. Much for chatting with me today.

Thanks for having me.

Really, I've been wanting to talk to you for quite some time. I've really enjoyed following your research. I thought we'd start with the greatest hits and then get deeper and deeper and newer and newer. Let me just start with... Can you just explain to our audience a little bit about about what you do, like how you would describe the work you do?

So I work on a lot of different topics, although I think there's a thread that runs through all of them. Probably the thing that probably gets... That most people engage with is my work on transformative experience. And that's work about big life experiences. And partly, it's work about how we make decisions about big life experiences, but also about how those life experiences affect us.

And I'm super interested in this conceptual structure of these kinds of decisions and how we grapple with them and how they change us. But I also do a lot of work on how we understand causation and how we understand ourselves in time. The nature of the self maybe in computational terms is something that I'm really interested in. These are, again, I think really related topics. But, yeah, I'd say that's...

So I'm usually described as a philosopher of mind, a person who does cognitive science, and a metaphysician.

Oh, I love that. I'm I'm low key I'm low key jealous that you get described as a metaphysician. I wanna be

described as a...

And be taken seriously. Those... Maybe that's

the Well well, I... We we don't wanna assume the 2nd. Sometimes it's like, woah, metaphysics.

Yeah. You

shaped my aura. Know.

I get like a 100 emails a day from some metaphysician in the world telling me about their newest grandiose idea. I'm pretty good.

I'm pretty good. How

do you define a transformative experience? I just wanna start with the most basic foundational question.

Mhmm. Okay. So, I think something that's important is, yeah, I have a particular definition, because there's a sort of ordinary way of thinking about transformative experience, which just means it's like this intense thing that's uplifting and changed your life. And it's not quite the way that I think about it. I mean, that kind of experience could be transformative under my take.

But I think of it as the kind of experience that both is new to you. So it's a kind of experience you've never had before. And this is important because, when it's new to you like this, then you have to experience it, to know what it's gonna be like for you. So the thought is that, this class of experiences aren't really fully captured by what other people can tell you about them, you know, by testimony. And I think of examples like seeing color for the 1st time or maybe this isn't transformative, but tasting, a new kind of food.

Or I think, children as they develop conceptually have transformative experiences. They discover all kinds of new things that, they hadn't known about before and that, you know, other people telling them about them to the extent that they did didn't really prepare them. And I describe that

as

epistemic transformation. So a transformative experience is epistemically or epistemologically transformative. And so what I mean there, again, is that it's a kind of experience you haven't had before such that you have to have it to know what it's like. But the 2nd part of the definition is also really important. There, I would say...

So I describe these experiences also as personally transformative. And a personal transformation is different in certain ways from from the epistemic side of things. The idea is that it changes who you are. And there are lots of questions about, like, well, what, know, what does it mean to change who you are? I think of it as changing something that's kind of really important to you.

So changing what you care about most or something that you care about very deeply, something that's kind of core with respect to your character and your integrity and your commitments. So the thing with the transformative experience is that it's a combination of these 2 things. Right? Think about it. It's like this experience you're gonna have, or maybe you don't know you're gonna have it, but that you do have it.

It's a new kind of experience. You can't be fully prepared for it by what other people tell you, and it's gonna change you really kind of profoundly or dramatically. And often, that means it's gonna change the way that you evaluate things around you or how you understand or see the world, that sort of thing.

I would say that really nicely fits what I intuitively think of when I think the word transformative as well.

Oh, that's that's good. I mean, it fits my intuition, but sometimes people use it in a in a broader way. You know? It has to be positive, for example. And I...

Although Oh, yeah.

We'll talk about Yeah. We should talk about that. Like, I prefer positive transformative experiences. I mean, who wouldn't? But sometimes they're not positive.

They can be Yeah. Extremely difficult. You know?

I definitely wanna discuss that. Philosophers are really good at preemptively thinking through every question that someone could possibly ask someone and answering it before they ask it. So you're a fun a fun guest. You've covered you've covered 10 of my questions already. Well, I've noticed that a lot of your examples of transformative experiences are quite dramatic, like the vampire, the child, having a child.

I was wondering what's smallest experience that can transform a person? Could a book, a conversation, a single sentence in the right moment, do you place the threshold anywhere in particular?

I mean, I will say that I think that transformation should be thought of as something that can come in degrees. And so I'm usually really interested in these cases where the transformation is significant enough that, again, it counts as a personal transformation. So in a sense, you know, I could interpret what you're saying as well. You know, there can be these little things that change us, like the 1st time you read, you know, I don't know, the opening sentence of an amazing book or, you know, a conversation that you have with someone maybe even on the street corner or whatever.

Or even on this podcast.

Yes. Or on this podcast where you listen to this podcast and, you know, it opens up your world in a whole new way. So let me distinguish between, like, a a small experience, which is maybe just, like, some of those examples we just had, maybe something short lived, something that seems kind of tiny in the grand scheme of things. But a small experience could still be transformative in a huge way depending on how you respond to it and how it affects what you care about. So there, I would have to say, there's no limit on how small the experience can be.

But I would say that there, you know, there's certainly a threshold over which you'd have to be to say that the change in you counts as transformative. Right? Like, just changing, I don't know, like, say, you know, oh, maybe I'm not gonna cut my hair as short this time or something like that. That usually, for most of us, wouldn't count as transformative.

Something I really, really, really, really like about your theory is that it really treats inner experience as valid. And the reason why I bring that up is because in my field in positive psychology, and there's something called post traumatic growth, as a field that's really come under fire because scientists, fellow psychologists are saying, Well, it's not real growth. It's not real transformation, even if it feels that way. Then I have come back and been like, Who are you to say what is real transformation if it feels like it from the inside? This is a real raging debate in the field of post traumatic growth that I'm involved in.

I was wondering if you've kind of thought about that at all in connection to the extent to which we could be transformed after trauma and after real challenges in a positive way.

Okay. So let me just get a sense. So is the thought that... Alright. Obviously, like, empirical disciplines, there's all all these questions about how do you measure things.

Right?

I mean, that's that's a measurement issue. Yes.

Yeah. Yeah. And so is the objection that on certain kinds of standard criteria, you know, on certain ways of measuring growth and change, the kind of thing that you're talking about just isn't showing up as, as creating a significant difference. Is that the right way to put it?

You nailed it, Laurie. You nailed it. So there are various ways in which people documented you can grow from trauma, including increased strength in relationships, greater sense of purpose, greater sense of creativity. And in studies where they've actually been able to do pretest and posttest, kind of before and after, they find on these objective measures of self report that there's not as much changes that matches up with the self perceived scales. And what I've been trying to argue is that self perceived growth is not nothing.

Right. And so that... And so I I just... I feel like you're a hindered spirit in that, and I might be wrong.

Yeah.

But I'm hoping

you are. Well, I mean, you know... Okay. So without having read or engaged with this particular this particular debate, so, you know, I mean... But I know.

I know. All categories aside. Yeah. Just saying because I I... You know?

But I think that experience is really important. I think it's always a challenge. Subjective experience is super hard to measure. I don't even know what we would use. This has been an outstanding problem for the longest time.

And it's definitely something that's difficult when collaborate with psychologists. We have to kinda try to think about, well, how are we gonna try to measure these things? Right? So there's a kind of straightforward large problem about measuring the, like, inner experience already that obviously that you're grappling with. And I also think that, especially in some of these fields where there are treatment metrics and where money is involved, there's, you know, an emphasis then on easily measurable change that maybe, you know, also is not so unrelated to old school thinking about behaviorism, for example.

Or, you know, it'd be interesting to see if there was a a metric that measured... That was, like, had involved involved neuroscience. Because at least there, you know, there was this shift in the mid mid 20th century where people realized, well, look. Behavior isn't good enough. You need to look at what's going on in the brain.

And so, you know, if you find brain changes, then even though there are obviously still lots of questions about what those brain changes actually explain, you at least can, you know, argue that there's a reason to think there's something going on, like, you know, in the head, even if you're not able to measure it with behavior. So all that... What matters is how the person feels. Right? That's what all And so...

Yeah. I mean, the whole point is... But if you have to, I guess, come up with something that you can then present to a a funding body, then I guess there's a temptation to find metrics that are more easily measurable. Right? Like...

So, obviously, like, we look at narratives when we do collaborative work. What do people say about what's happened to them? And I take what people say if they're talking about their own feelings at face value. I mean, obviously, you know, people can be dishonest, but I don't think that's the default approach. I don't think people are confused when they're talking about, their own feelings.

Like, how they feel is actually up up to them to, to be able to kinda characterize and define.

Yeah. It shouldn't be up to any individual going through a significant transformation to have to prove to a jury of cognitive scientists that it's real.

Yeah. Right. No. Exactly. But I think there's a kind of discomfort in relying on what people, are saying that they're feeling.

And so the field just... Or at least certain, I think, certain parts of empirical science of the mind, are they really uncomfortable with with relying on that. So it's probably why you get the kind of pushback that you're getting.

Yeah. And I also... To to be fair to, people on the other side, know, like, do get some of their points as well, of course. You know, the idea that do we wish that we had the trauma so that we can change? No.

And I would be the 1st to acknowledge that's not why, you know, if if there happens to be growth, it's not saying, oh, thank gosh, my father died because now I have increased. Right. No. It's saying, given what has happened, you can't change it. That's right.

You can't change it. Yeah.

I know if this was something that you were thinking about talking about, but, you know, this this gets to something that I think is really interesting and important.

We're jamming.

Let's talk let's talk... I mean, so say something terrible happens to somebody. They have a a terrible physical accident, and they experience a lot of pain, and it changes them, like, their ability to function in the wider world in some broader sense. You know? And then at the same time, they will say...

Or they could say, look. I also learned an enormous amount from this. And, you know, I've responded in this way... In in a certain way that has, like, maybe made me a better person or helped me to define my sense of agency differently or something else. And I think when people hear that, there's a kind of...

Which I object very much to this reflexive reaction. There's a sort of reflexive reaction I see some people having where, oh, you're just... This is just cognitive dissonance. Or you are just putting... You know, making the best of something.

You know, nobody would say that you should have, you know, should have this accident, but then you're saying that you had these good results. Right? And so there's this kind of fear that the claim is that have... It was it was good to have that accident because of the effects... The good effects that followed from the bad thing.

That I think is a real... I think that reflexive reaction, oh, there must be some confusion there. There must be some

I don't like that.

Dissonance or, telling oneself some kind of story to, you know, about that behavior. I think that's a mistake.

Isn't that a form of gaslighting?

I mean, I guess it could be, but that's not what I'm trying to get at here. I think that what people are doing are confusing this... They're they're confusing a simple causal pathway with a complex causal pathway. Okay? So I work on, you know, causation, and I work on things like technical work on counterfactuals and stuff like that.

Right? And the thing to remember is, so take a causal process. You have 1 event causing event a causing event b causing event c. Right? Now in most cases, we move straightforwardly from a to c.

Alright? This part about this little part. However, it's also really important to know that the context of what's happening at a and the context of what happening... And the context of what's happening at b and the context of what's happening at c really matters when you try to come up with an explanation of why C happened or what the import of C is. So if you say...

And this is a version of what you were saying at the very beginning. You say, well, look, in a context where B has happened, b is the case Right.

Right.

Then I might say, well, I, you know, I responded or I had... You know, I... I'm I'm very grateful for my response to b, or my response to b brought good into my life. It simply doesn't follow that just because a caused b, right, that that you're glad that a happened or even that you're glad... Or that you would even wanna say that a brought good into your life because that might even...

That that explanation might also fail. Right? And so

I love it.

There's a kind of sloppy thinking is what I'm saying. Yeah.

Well, I agree with you wholeheartedly, and, you know, a is gone. You know? And accepting that... Acceptance is a big part of post traumatic growth, I think. And there's a great quote from the existential philosopher psychotherapist Urvi Alam.

I don't know if you've read any of Urvi Alam's work. He says, sooner or later, you have to give up all hope for a better past.

Mhmm. Right. What else... The... Look.

The past... So I also, you know, I teach these classes on time travel. 1 of the things you have to teach a... Like, when you teach class on time That's

That's so cool.

Yeah. It's, like, it's super fun because time travel... Thinking about how... What would have to be the case for us to be able to travel in time and what we understand ourselves about how we think and about how causation works. Time travel is a great way of making sense of a bunch of ways of thinking about causation and time and people.

And so the... Here's the thing. For a coherent time travel story, you can't change the past. You can go back to the past. You might even be participating in in the...

If you're in some kind of interesting causal loop. But the past is the past. See, what I was talking about was talking about causation involves counterfactuals. Right? And so, ordinarily, you think, well, if b caused c, well, I know that because if b hadn't happened, c wouldn't have happened.

And to understand how causation works, you have to go step by step by step. But that doesn't mean that you should then erase or assume that you can change what happened at a. Just because you understand that b happened because a happened, and if a hadn't happened, b wouldn't have happened. Right? And just because c happened because b happened, and if b hadn't happened, c wouldn't have happened.

It doesn't mean that you should be thinking back to that earlier part and say, wait. Wait. C happened. Oh, it must means that a caused c. Well, it did cause it, but it's not the case that if, say, a hadn't happened, c wouldn't have happened.

Because you might have actually been able to kind of get to that place in some other way, that place of affirmation. The fact that there was a particular causal chain that brought you to that place doesn't mean that you have to value that particular causal path. That might have been a terrible way for it to happen.

I love it. Can I read a quote from rabbi Harold Kushner, who was reflecting on the death of his son? He said, quote, I am a more sensitive person, a more effective pastor, a more sympathetic counselor because of Aaron's life and death than I would ever have been without it, and I would give up all those gains in a 2nd if I could have my son back. If I could choose, I would forgo all the spiritual growth and depth which has come my way because of our experiences, but I cannot choose. I just think it's a really powerful...

Yeah. Celebrating the fact that a a particular causal step along a painful process brought something good does not entail, like, endorsement of the whole thing by by any means. Also, the self that you became as the result of the bad thing. Right? The...

You have a bad accident or there's a death or something. You become... There's a self that you become, and then you make that self better. You can celebrate the fact that you made that damaged self better again without, like, wanting the damage to occur. This is a different way of of of of of saying the same thing.

Yeah. I love that. And, you know, in the whole time travel thing, I'm interested in the extent to which our default mode brain network allows us to imagine the future but also keep us ruminating on the past as well. And in a way, when you keep reliving and experiencing your head over and over in an unproductively, ruminative way, you are what... Just what you said earlier, going...

Keep going back to the past without being able to change it. Mhmm. So, you know, mental time travel is fasting to me as well.

Yeah. And I liked what you said about acceptance because people wanna think about changing the past. They wanna think, well, what if that hadn't happened? You know? And it's not unreasonable to think about to think about that if you're looking at...

If you're trying to sort of explain what happened in the right kind of context, But to obsess about it or to, you know, or to think that you... There really was a way to change the past, I think, can be really painful and and, you know, unproductive.

Yeah. Wonderful. I love that. Let's talk a little about negative transformative experiences. Something I am so, so interested in is the gradual, almost imperceptible transformation, ultimately transforming nature from good to evil.

You see it throughout history, you see it like how could ordinary Germans who are good end up supporting Nazis, that's a transformation, right? But just everyday behaviors, I think I'm obsessed with that because I feel like sometimes I'm a hyper moral person where I want to make sure if I'm ever moving in a certain direction, I curb that because I'm terrified of reaching what you just described as a situation where you can't get... Ever go back. You are truly transformed for the worse. So I'm wondering how much you think about the good versus evil transformation thing, and just I wanna riff with you a little bit about that.

What I do think a lot about, which is not exactly what you're asking me, but is related is what's called the sororities paradox and, philosophy, which is that small steps. You can take a small step and another small step and another small step, and each small step does not... You know, it is fine in and of itself. It doesn't make you worse. And yet you add up all those small steps together, and you could go from 1 end of a speck...

Of the spectrum to the other end of the spectrum. Right? You cross a line somewhere that... They're in between, but you don't know where that line is, and you can't detect it small step by steps. Small step.

Right. So philosophy is very interested in these kinds of... These are... The... It was...

It's illustrated in various... There's this old... There's this old example. You've got a heap of... A a pile of sand, and taking away 1 grain of sand doesn't make the heap into a non heap.

And so you take it another way when you still got the heap. And it... You know, there's... You taking away a single grain of sand isn't gonna change a a heap into a non heap. That's just not how it works.

So you take away a grain, but then, obviously, at some point, all the grains of sand are gone or even there's only 1 or 2 left. So you've gone from having heap to a non heap. So where's that line?

A legit phase shift at some point. Yeah. Yeah.

Yes. So the instance presume... The way that you described the worry about going from good to bad sounds like a sororities type of worry. I mean, on my view, I think transformation in some contexts can be... I wouldn't say it's reversible exactly, but people can move back and forth across that line.

So I think of religious transformation as as a case where, say, somebody who's very religious loses their faith, and that could be a trend... That could be transformative for them. And then they either find a different faith or they revert back to their faith that could also be transformative. So different kinds of religious changes are, for me, good examples both of transformation and also of how people can maybe move back and forth from 1 side to the other. I would say that some transformations are permanent.

You know, you have a child. You can't really go back. I mean, there are things you can do if you're not happy being a parent or whatever, but, you know, you can't erase... You know, again, we can't erase the past. So, you're always gonna be the person who had that child.

As someone who studies growth and self actualization, I'm super fascinated by these very issues because, you know, I always want to say that there's always hope, right? Like someone who maybe is in the grips of addiction, drug addiction, there's research showing they self report that they are almost 99% confident there's no going back, that there's no hope, and then what they do is they find that that number gradually decreases over the course of treatment to a point where a lot of them get completely sober and they're like, Wow, I completely, I never thought that was going to happen. I'm just so interested with these kinds of questions as someone who's deeply interested in human growth and the potential for it no matter what the situation. Basically, is what I'm saying is delusional transformation... Or not delusional transformation, the opposite of that.

Delusional, no hope, no going back, maybe is an interesting thing to study as well.

Yeah. I mean, you know, again, my work on transformative experience, there's... You know, 1 of the things I think that's... I don't know. I was gonna say weird about it, but maybe I'll just say distinctive about it, is this...

Is the role for, epistemology, for the epistemic. Right? I mean, I'm drawing on, work in philosophy where, like, for example, Thomas Nagel, has this, you know, example of how we could never know what it's like to be a bat. Or Frank Jackson has this example about, Mary who's never seen color and then seeing red for the 1st time. There are lots of other examples, but those are some of my favorites.

And and I was always fascinated by those examples because I felt like they demonstrated something really important, that experience teaches us things, things that we couldn't know in any other way. And also the way that we experience the world is really defined by, like, the the... In... Our make... Like, our...

The way that, you know, our conceptual lens. Right? The way that our brains work, the way that we understand ourselves and the world around us that also, like, just changes and defines our affect. And so I think part of what you're saying is, actually, I think it's related to the Nagel point. When you're in the throes of addiction, the way that you described it, it's like as though the non...

Like, the the person who's overcome addiction is like the bat. And it's like, there's just no way that you can put yourself, like, in the perspective in those shoes. Right? The difference That's part of

of human who's sober.

Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And, you know, that's what I talk about with transformation. You know, I say, look.

Before you become a... Before you've ever had a child, you just can't put your shoe... Yourself in the shoes of, like, yourself as a parent. It's just not possible. That's not your fault.

It's not that you're not trying hard enough or you haven't done enough reading or you haven't thought about it the right way. No. You just don't have the capacity because experience changes the way that your brain works, the way that you're able to represent things. That's the way it works for us as human thinkers. And that's kind of the point of the Mary example in the black and white room too.

And so I think with addiction... And it may be the case even though someone has gone through this process more than once, because I know actually addicts do go back and forth, right, from being sober and not sober, at least sometimes. In the depths of addiction, it's just like, you know, this other possible way of being is alien to you, and you haven't got the capacity to to put yourself in in those shoes. And it's not your fault.

I love that. Let's let's close close that on that note, that topic. We live in an age of hyperoptimization, something I've criticized a bit that we do optimize every aspect of our lives, and I say no. Every tracking, forecasting, maximizing your way to the best possible life. My close reading of your writing is that you seem to be proposing, in a sense, a rival philosophy: live to find out, choose revelation over results.

Am I reading that right or completely crazy in my reading of your book?

No. No. I mean, I'm definitely saying... Well, the way that I would put it is... And it goes back, you know, to what we were talking about about measurement, which is that some things are just not that easy to measure or should...

Aren't... It's not apt to measure them in the ordinary way. And some things you just have to find out what they're like for yourself, again, because testimony isn't gonna be good enough. Also, I think that we oversimplify. Okay.

So take a context where somebody's trying to figure out if they wanna... 1 of my favorite cases, like I said, is is, like, maybe they... Do they wanna have a baby? Do they wanna become become a parent? Or...

And that might entail that they have to turn down some amazing opportunity, like moving to another part of the world and living there for a couple of years. Like, they've got some fantastic job opportunity that will just kind of change and could lead, obviously, to many different things in their future. That's a super hard choice. I don't think that something like testimony or careful behavioral metrics, you know, assessing the hedons or whatever that, you might, that you might gather on each side of this question, are gonna give you enough information. I...

They might give you some information. I'm certainly a fan of testimony generally. I'm a fan of science. But there's another element to each of these options, which is what it's gonna be like for you to live that option. It's not straightforward to...

I don't know if it even can be measured by anyone other than yourself in that situation, and it's not clear how to compare them. I just don't think we have the ability to compare them in the way that we want to. So in that context, right, in that context, I'm like, well, there's something else. And you have to just simply decide if this is a life that you wanna live. If you wanna find out what this this life is like, the life of a parent, or if you wanna find out, like, what this life was, say, moving to Japan and being able to live in Kyoto for the next 5 years and learning, you know, and learning about Japanese and and about the culture and embedding yourself.

You know? That would be, I think, a transformative experience for many of us, like, living in The US.

I love the way you just phrased that. Yeah. And I didn't even make a strong connection to our earlier conversation as you just did, which makes total sense. Yeah. This is...

We're talking about these different levels of analysis. Mhmm. Yeah. And, you know, so much of life and the point of life is is to experience it, and choosing which experiences you want is perhaps 1 of the most existentially important decisions you can make. I wanna move on to mental corruption.

Some of

you are newer. I had no way to do a segue there. That was sweet.

I think I used an example of of, we could talk about religion and mental corruption. Not that I think being religious is mental... Involves mental corruption, but I... That is, like, when I talk about mental corruption, I sometimes

So that is the case. Right? Category. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Because But you...

You're very creative. You're very create... Sorry. What did you just say?

I said some people think it is. Some people view becoming, like, you know, religious faith as a kind of mental corruption. And I think on the other side, some people view, you know, being an atheist as mental corruption. So I like that case. I like thinking about that.

Well, I think it'd be really important for you to define what you mean by mental corruption before we go any further.

Yes. Yes.

And tell me how it relates at all to the idea of humility.

There's a paper that I wrote, called the paradox of empathy. And what I was interested there is, in the idea that to really try to understand someone else's point of view, you have to try to empathize with them. And I think there's a kind of wholehearted empathizing that you... At least I think in principle, this makes sense, that you should allow yourself to do if you really wanna understand the point of view of the other person. And I was thinking of differences with...

In... About religion. Like, so say... Again, say somebody who believes, like, someone someone who's a Christian or pick your favorite religion and someone who's, you know, who has no religion, who's an atheist and is, like, completely 100% convinced there's no... No religious faith makes sense.

I was thinking of political divides. I was thinking of cases where people are, you know, advanced, like, what some would think of as a conspiracy theory and other people see as the truth that's being covered up, that kind of thing. And, again, without... I don't wanna judge any of this, but I'm trying to talk about these kinds of cases where I think they're, like, they're quite sensitive. And what I explored in that paper was to say, look.

If you think that opening your mind to the perspective of another person is really important to understand them, to morally evaluate them, to be able to think about what their reasons are for their views, and to to provide... To engage them in, you know, respectful, kind of thoughtful reasoning, then you could be in trouble because some of... Like, basically, if you thought that having this worldview was powerful enough that it would change your own worldview. Okay? And I think, again, religion is a good case because...

So take the perspective of the believer who thinks that... I mean, this is a this is a belief about the fundamental nature of reality. Sometimes some of these debates between, say, the believer and the nonbeliever, they don't go anywhere because they have different views about what counts as evidence. So the believer says, look. The...

Like, God's divinity is all around you. Look at the beauty of nature. Look at, you know, these examples of goodness. Like, that's evidence basically of the divine. And the skeptic looks around and sees these good things, but does not understand it as evidence of the divine.

And the believer says, well, that's because your mind is still closed. You haven't fully opened your mind to the possibility that this is actually coming from the divine. And then I... What I'm worried about in that paper is they say, well, look. Maybe the skeptic truly cannot open their mind.

Because if they believe that there's no such thing as divinity, then opening their mind to the possibility, if that would, like, corrupt their mind so that they saw these good things as divine, then they're violating their own scruples. So I thought there was a really interesting tension there. And I actually think that's partly why people are afraid sometimes of empathizing. Like, if you're engaging with someone who believes a theory that you think is a conspiracy theory, I mean, what happens is you open your mind to the possibility that they're right, and then you go down a rabbit hole and boom, there you are. You are a believer.

But, you know, and and and the problem is that there's no way to determine what the truth is. Like, that's also, I think, the case for these questions about religiously. There's no observer independent way to determine the truth of the existence or nonexistence of God. They're just... It just isn't available to us.

And what I mean by mental corruption is that from your point of view, you're gonna open your mind to a possibility that that would change that point of view. Yes. Fear of mental corruption. You're viewing it as mental corruption because you're committed to a view that, I don't know, there is no god or that god exists. And truly allowing yourself to consider the other possibility is exactly what could undermine that view.

So there are rational reasons to avoid that. Yeah.

It makes sense. Is the antidote humility?

Well... Right. And so what I also think is that recognizing that it might not be possible for you to empathize in that way without threatening your own commitments is super important. Because then instead of saying, oh, I can't empathize, and therefore, that shows that that that person's perspective is illegitimate somehow or immoral or wrong, you say, no. I can't empathize because that's inconsistent with the the epistemological framework that my beliefs rest on.

So you you... I think that sometimes people misattribute... I think I'm going back to some other things, you know, they misattribute their respond... They... I think they correctly say, okay.

There's a way I can't open my mind to you because I view your, you know, that your worldview could change my worldview. And if I'm committed to my worldview, I mean, if I really believe I'm right, then how can I allow myself to drink the Kool Aid as it were? Right?

Yeah.

And I think being honest about that means that, okay. So there's a way in which I cannot understand your view. And if I can't let myself try to understand it, so I have to find some other way to be respectful.

I think everyone should just be super intellectually curious with everyone's ideas, but maybe I'm being naive. Yeah.

I mean, it's hard. I mean, it's... And it's scary. I know. It's it's...

You know? I mean, I also agree to that. Then when but then when confronted with something that's deeply threatening to who you are

Strictly proud. Something

Yeah. Yeah. It gets very hard.

Well, I can't wait to read your further writings on, mental corruption and make it... It's really important for our time.

Thanks. Yeah. Yeah. Am working on this book. It's taking me, it's taking me a long time to finish it, but, I'm close to getting done now and, sort of explore, a lot of these ideas and, even a bit of time travel in there as well, actually.

So I'm excited. I'm excited. I'm... We already kind of touched on the idea of unchosen transformations. That's basically what we were talking about in the beginning of, you know, with post traumatic growth and why I think maybe some of that discussion will let you up a little bit because you have written about unchosen transformations like cognitive decline.

I'm just wondering, studying things like dementia, what has it taught you about the nature of transformation in a way that maybe parenthood hasn't?

I'm still in the process of of thinking and and studying that, but what I'd... I think what it's taught me I would put it like this. I was actually reading a lecture by Borges about blindness. And he said... I think his...

I think if I recall correctly, he said that his grandmother and father had had went blind and he looked to them because his his blindness was, I think, at least partly genetic. He looked to them to to see how to understand this, and he said that they approached it with bravery. You know? And he said, courage is not genetic even if the blindness is. And I think courage comes from understanding that living involves pain just as much as it involves kind of joyousness.

You know? That, like, the texture of of experience. I think life involves... You have to embrace the texture of experience. You have to experience it, understand it, allow yourself to feel in certain ways, and to know that that often involves a certain amount of pain, sometimes a lot of pain, and a lot of discomfort and a lot of uncertainty.

And Alzheimer's in particular, I think is something where people feel a deep kind of uncertainty because their old way of living in the world is lost to them, and they still want to live in the way that they've always lived. You know, maybe the person who always knew the answer to, you know, the crossword puzzle or was financially astute or was, you know, the the the mom who had everything kind of organized and together and folk... And was super focused and efficient. There's lots of different examples. But...

Or, you know, say myself, like, a philosopher, like, fascinated with ordinary things and analyzing them in ways that I think, you know, that can give us maybe insight into something that seems kind of ordinary and commonplace and turns out not to be. You know, you lose those things in cognitive decay, and they're part of how you defined yourself often. And so I think you have to be... Find a way if you can to be brave and to be... To redefine yourself, to say, okay.

You know, you know, I'm not able to do that anymore, but then there's another way that I can embrace what I was describing as, like, the texture of lived experience and to celebrate that. And I'm not saying that's easy, but I think that's really the only way to approach these these kinds of life changes. That's where I'm at right now.

Amazing. That really closes the the thread on that. For the remainder of our conversation today, I wanna talk about AI in the future of humanity. No big deal. Transformation that maybe we're all going through right now that we don't know we're going through.

Right? So building advanced AI looks like humanity making a transformative choice as a species. We can't know what a world with minds beyond ours is like until we're in it, and we can't report back. Is your vampire problem now civilization's problem, And does your framework say anything about how a species should choose?

Yeah. That's interesting. I mean, the vampire problem is, I think, related to this problem of, like, basically, you know, the machines. Right? So, in a couple of different ways.

I mean, some people think that we're gonna just sort of upload ourselves and become machines. Others think that the machines will take over. It's certainly the case that AI is gonna change the way... Is is changing and will be changing and is permanently changing the way we live our lives and how we relate to other people, you know, the economic scene and lots... You know, and all kinds of all kinds of small and and and and big things.

So let's go back to exploring things, like, for the sake of discovering, like, what they're like. So I never thought that you just explore anything to find out what it's like, especially because if there's a very high chance that there would be negative results, then I would adopt what some economists sometimes call the precautionary principle. Right? So a precautionary principle is 1 where you try to kinda minimize bad results. So you act with precaution knowing that there's a whole lot that you don't know.

That is contrasted to an exploratory principle where you think there's a much larger distribution of positive outcomes. Then the right thing to do is explore. And in my book on transformative experience, basically, was saying, look. In certain contexts where we have lots of testimony from people that, for example, they're satisfied as parents or they find meaning or things like that, then it can make sense to be exploratory, right, or moving to another country because the evidence points to a high chance of something good happening even if bad things can happen. Now it's not the case that that's true for anything like...

You know, starting a war, I would say we should have a precautionary principle. Right? Like, there aren't, like, a lot of good things that come out of wars. Climate change is another place where, we should adopt precautionary principles. Rapid technological change that, you know, could unleash destructive destructive forces of civilization.

Maybe we should be adopting a precautionary principle.

Do you think we should?

Yeah. I sure do. I sure do. Maybe we should as in, like, yes. We absolutely should.

And, I mean, the problem is obviously that, 1st, people don't people don't know what's gonna happen. There's, and there's so much money involved and power. So So some people just see it as good, and I think that they have a different view of, what the what the landscape looks like in terms of the chances of good things and bad happening. So they see it more as like, wow. It's like, you know, having a baby or, you know, moving to Japan for 5 years.

Like, so there are different... So 1 problem involves just trying to assess what the lay of the land might look like even if there are, like, all these unknown unknowns and known unknowns. But another thing that's complicated here is that some people have a vested interest. There's so much power and money involved. And then there are some people who are just so excited about, discovering, this new possibility because it is super interesting, obviously, that I think they just care about that more than these other kinds of consequences.

And so we have to navigate that problem as well.

You know, I talk to a lot of people on this podcast from the AI alignment world and which which they want to... AI to be aligned with human values. But the interesting thing when I think about your work is that your work shows that human values are exactly what transformation rewrites.

Yes.

You know, the parent doesn't keep the pre child values, and humanity post AI won't keep its pre AI values, right? So can you even align a system to a moving target that the system itself is moving?

No. That's right. So there's this... It's... I I actually think that the alignment work, like, basically, there's a kind of fundamental misconception with a lot of that a lot of that work.

And you see it. It's already happening. I mean, you know, everybody's talking about OpenAI and breaking out of the sandbox. I mean, it's like... It's just...

You know, I sit there and you... It's, like, so obvious. I don't know. You know, our, yeah, our values are changing. And, also, if we've learned nothing from history, we should know that new things come our way.

So there will be new pot... The AIs will be able to do things that we have not anticipated. So the presumption with alignment seems to be, well, if we instill the right rules for the AI to follow, then we'll be fine. Okay. Then something comes along that doesn't, like, doesn't...

Like, know, the the rules didn't think of, and then the AI goes rogue. Like, why is that such a surprise? Or then then there's a move. Well, if we install the right kind of character you want... Might wanna say, which is supposed to give a certain kind of judgment.

But even then, just as you as you pointed out, like, there can be causal impacts. That's what experience is. It's a causal impact on on a cognitive system that can change character, and it happens all all the time. You know, if you have a reasonable amount of flexibility with respect to kind of responding to new situations, then you have to be able to develop new sorts of character responses to new situations. By definition, these are unknown unknowns.

And so I just don't think you can set up rules or alignment at this point that are gonna that are gonna give us the kind of fail safe that we need in the future. It just doesn't work that way.

Yeah. A lot of these AI alignment researchers are computer scientists. No offense, but I'm saying they're not psychologists, so they're not philosophers, right? So I think there needs to be great collaboration among all these different researchers. All right, I thought this would be a fun question.

Can AI have a transform... A truly transformative experience? A model's weights can be updated overnight. Everything it was was revised without anything in it consented to. So is that transformation?

And what's the... Or death? You know? What... Or neither?

What's the fine line between death and transformation?

Well, in that question... I mean... So, you know, my work is about individuals having experiences, and I don't think AIs are having experiences. So let's just say if machines could be conscious, let's say they become conscious or sentient or something like that, then they certainly could have transformative experiences by my lights, I would say. But that 1st part is, I think, where where the questions arise.

I would say, like, for a person, that's right. If you, like, you know, if you if you replace their their weights, you might say, you know, then, yeah, you're transforming them in the in the sense that you're changing their preferences, right, in in a fundamental way. So

But you've done some really interesting work, correct me if I'm wrong, with AI Labs and what a self even is and shown that AI agents can't reliably answer the question, which 1 is me? Why is that so hard for machines? Is it because you don't think they have consciousness? Is that the the reason why?

No. So there, basically, what we were saying is that there are these interesting puzzles where there's a certain kind of metacognitive task that needs to be performed. You have to kind of locate yourself basically in different possibilities.

Yeah.

Yeah. And so what what what we were arguing was that the current structure of how some of these machines are made doesn't doesn't include the kind of metacognitive element that would be necessary to self identify in new in new situations. So we were arguing, look, if you want to to give a machine the capacity to make certain kinds of decisions or to, like, fix itself when, you know, when it's when it's become broken in certain ways, it's gotta have a certain kind of metacognitive ability to identify itself as itself.

Does it also need a 1st person point of view as a necessary condition for that?

I think, again, a 1st person point of view is something about consciousness and experience, the way that I would put it. You could have something analogous to that. We do think that, 1 of the crucial things involves, 1 might say, like, having a perspective from the inside as well as having a perspective from the outside. Now perspective is a term that could either mean an experience or just like some kind of information feed. And so, you know, we think, yeah, you've gotta have contrasting.

It's like saying, well... So we talk about, like, you know, with a map. Right? You've gotta have... You gotta know...

You can have the whole map and look at the whole map, and that's the kind of, you know, 3rd person or view from above perspective. But she's also gotta know where you are on the map. Right? And that's like having a located perspective.

I would argue that it's... There are so many interesting examples of self transcendent experiences where we've lost our sense of where we are on the map and we still function in a beautiful way. I've been studying that from a neuroscience perspective, which is really interesting because under certain spiritual practices or under the use of psilocybin, you know, psychedelics, the parietal cortex, certain portions change where our sense of self in relation to the world completely changes, completely radically reconfigures, and there's a sense of oneness, and we don't fall apart. You know? We are...

Actually, we're we're strengthened by that experience.

I mean, I agree with that. I think, again, the work that you were that you were asking me about earlier was just was just saying that for certain kinds of, like, really kind of basic tasks, we rely on seeing ourselves from the inside and seeing ourselves from the outside, basically. Like, not that 1 was more important than the other or that you... You know, in fact, though we always had to pay attention to to both sides of conceptualizing ourselves. I think psychedelics, I'm super interested in as well, actually, because I think they can also be transformative.

Yeah. Yeah. I think many psychedelic experiences can count as transformative, at least maybe the 1st time people take something like, psilocybin or LSD.

Isn't it interesting how, like, some of the most transformative experience in our lives, the ones that do something to our sense of self, like, really changes, even just makes it disappear?

Yeah. It changes, like, our sense of of ourselves. I mean, I... You see, I would say this idea of saying that the self disappears. I think what disappears is the boundary between self and other, but I still think the 1st person perspective is still there.

And so I think of a self as like being the 1st person perspective. The way that I'm thinking about it, think, is not so different from some, for example, Buddhist traditions, which think of, like, when people talk about, like, the no self viewer erasing the self, it doesn't mean that you're losing your inner perspective. It means that you no longer see this, sharp divide between yourself and, like, the rest of the world or other intelligences, something like that.

I love that. You can kind of get a little more flexible in the boundaries, between... And you're not so rigid, I guess. Maybe that's, like, the idea of openness to experience.

Yeah. That's an interesting way to put it. Yeah. Maybe.

I mean, suppose an AI could simulate my post choice self with high accuracy and tell me whether I'd be glad I had the child or made the move. Does that dissolve transformative ignorance, or is that exactly the knowledge that can't be transferred no matter how accurate the model?

So think about it this way. Maybe there's something about going through that process that changes who you are. So who you are on the other end, maybe you're happy that you're that self on the other end. That doesn't change the fact that you have to decide whether you wanna become that self.

Only you can make that decision.

Yeah. And it isn't straightforwardly like, yeah, you're happy, but, you know, maybe you'd be happy if you didn't make that change also. That's true.

Alright. Let me leave you today with 1 open ended question just about the transform... Where... The transformation of humanity. How are you feeling these days?

Are you optimistic about this? Are you, do you think we're having a positive transformation or a negative 1? I'm leaving that open ended.

Yeah. I mean, things are stressful, but, and obviously, I mean, it's just... It's, but I don't know. It's it's hard because there's obviously this kind of huge narrative about both, how much change is happening, and a lot of it's, like, super negative. And I'm pretty sympathetic to a lot of the worries that people are raising.

I mean, just as I was saying before. But I also I also wonder how much of all of this is a kinda collective, kind of anxiety freak out. You know? We have so much more information available to us than we ever did before. I think there were a lot of dramatic things that happened, in the past that if we'd known about them, we also would have freaked out about.

So I'm not trying to minimize the danger I think that we're in, but it's also... I'm also a little perplexed about how we as individual thinkers are supposed to respond to that and and manage that. And how much of what we're experiencing today is just kind of more knowledge about what's happening as opposed to how much of what we're experiencing is really kind of because we're confronting, a kind of sea change that's unlike any other sea change that, we confronted, like, with the industrial revolution or, with World War 2 or, you know, pick your favorite dramatic change. I just don't know. So I I I kind of think about...

Try to grapple with that to try to understand the kind of contemporary context.

I don't know either, for what it's worth. But it certainly feels it certainly feels like we're at a real exponential point.

Yeah. And I'm inclined to think that we are too. I'm just... I just like to kind of question my own kind of immediate responses to these things.

Love it. Thank you so much for your time today, Elar. You gave me so much food for thought.

Oh, great. Thanks. I enjoyed the conversation very much. Thank you.