Transformative Experience

In fact, reality will still resemble the two-tier society in which John Brockman, Jeffrey Epstein, and the attendees of the billionaire's dinner were beneficiaries.

Laurie and Paul's talk at HEDCON14 was entitled The Transformative Experience, and at the time of HEDCON, Paul was a professor of philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, as well as being the professorial fellow in the RK Research Center in the University of St. Andrews.

She studied at Antioch College and Princeton University and at this time was the author of Causation, A User's Guide with Ned Hall and the Transformative Experience.

She is now the professor of philosophy and cognitive science at Yale University.

Like Molly Crockett and many other speakers at the Edge Foundation, Laurie Ann Paul is now involved in planning for AI.

It walks through the concepts, the problems for rational decision making, and key examples.

Some of the critics of Paul's theory say it deliberately conflicts with the orthodox model of rational choice and the common way of thinking about major life decisions.

Paul's theory challenges the ordinary intuitive approach the vast majority of people will take to big personal life changes such as having children, or major medical interventions however paul is correct that the standard model of a science is not fit for purpose the technologies which are being developed today to predict the behavior of seemingly irrational agents are based on falsification which brings us to michael mccullough if you want to read transcripts of laurie paul's headcon 14 seminar on the transformative experience follow the link included so this link here here will lead you to that Michael McCullough, maybe it's philosophical falsificationism.

Um, I think the framework of mystical experiences and, and the, the sort of spiritual context that we've been focusing on here doesn't always give resources for understanding traumatic experiences, which are also life-changing.

And so I just wanna offer another framework that's very complementary with what we've been talking about, and this is my collaborator, Laurie Paul, who's a philosopher and has written a book called Transformative Experience.

And her framework is, uh, a two-pronged framework.

So what she defines as a transformative experience is an experience that is epistemically transformative, which means you learn something new, a new kind of knowledge how, that you couldn't have without the experience.

So in the case of trauma, you can't imagine what it's like to experience trauma without actually going through it.

There are also other things, of course, that are more positive that have this quality as well, but that's the first sort of component of a transformative experience is, is understanding something new, a new, a new kind of knowledge that you get.

The second element she calls personal transformation, and that has to do with a shift in your values, your sense of who you are, um, that's enduring.

And so that's, that's consistent with some of the other frameworks that we've talked about, like James, um, and I think many, many examples of, of trauma shifting dramatically the, the sense of self and priorities and, and behaviors and, and so on.