#5 - Transformative Experience

by L. A. Paul

We often find ourselves in situations where we need to take decisions that will not only change our life but will also change the very essence of who we are. This is the basic thesis of transformative experiences. However, the key premise of transformative experiences is not that such experiences will change our future, but that we have no idea how this change will alter our personal values and perspectives. In fact, to truly understand the epistemic significance of transformative experiences is quite disturbing to say the least.

Consider for example how the experience of becoming a vampire will change your life. Surely you will reject the idea of becoming a vampire simply because you can’t imagine enjoying living in the dark and drinking human blood? But what if you consider the fact that everyone who ever chose to become a vampire describes it as the best decision of their life. Not only are you immortal, but human blood suddenly tastes like liquid cocaine, every moment spent in the moonlight feels like radiating bliss that transforms every cell in your body into a nuclear reactor that bursts with energy and vibrance, and every single moment feels like pure unmitigated power and majesty. You truly feel like a God – unrestricted, fearless, and immortal. You can’t even possibly imagine how it feels like being a vampire - how then will you even start to evaluate the option of becoming one?

However, surely you can’t take such an important decision purely based on third party reports? This is the problem with transformative experiences – you truly can’t know how it will change you until you have had a transformative experience. It’s almost like deciding to marry your romantic partner, having a child, or taking a shot of heroin – you truly don’t know how these experiences will change you or your future. Heroin addicts wouldn’t commit to abusing heroin if that first shot of heroin didn’t change who they are – turning them into people who enjoy heroin so much that they are willing to sacrifice everyone and everything they have for another heroin trip. Similarly, you will never know how your future will look like or how you will change as a person until you marry your romantic partner – there are simply too many variables, too many unknown unknowns, all you can do is to hold hands and jump into the abyss.

This dilemma is further exasperated by the fact that simply asking your friends and family for advice is insufficient within the context of transformative experiences. Your friend might confess that becoming a Buddhist Monk was the best decision of their life, but their perspective is simply irrelevant to your personal context and subjective preferences. In the end, we often only have our own judgement regarding transformative experiences, and when that day comes where you need to take a life-altering decision, you better pray that your norms and values are properly aligned and true. Moreover, just like you can’t adequately rely on third party judgements regarding transformative experiences, you also can’t rely on your own moral judgements regarding transformative experiences because the experience won’t be like any other experience that you ever had before. This means that if a personally transformative experience is a radically new experience for you, that many important features of your future self – the self that results from the personal transformation, are conceptually and epistemically inaccessible to your current self.

One possible solution is to apply normative standards to the subjective values of the transformative experience. It’s reasonable to imagine that the outcomes of such experiences can be mediated by subjective values and personality traits such as trait openness to experience. People who are high in trait openness to experience might place a higher value on the very act of participating in transformative experiences and would even consider participating in such experiences out of pure curiosity and disregard for possible negative consequences. On the other hand, people who are low in trait openness to experiences, or people who are high in trait neuroticism might reject transformative experiences simply due to risk aversion, regardless of possible positive consequences. Normative standards as mediated by personal indexing therefore provides us with profound insight into the level at which our personal values shape and transform our phenomenological experiences and perspectives – you literally experience the world through the lens of your values. However, although the appeal to normative standards and personal indexing might prove useful to mediate the decision-making paradigms related to transformative experiences, even these standards are subjective to say the least and don’t provide any rational empirical insights into the possible epistemic transformations that accrue during these experiences. This position further exasperates the difficult problem of transformative experiences because you are being asked to consider the possibility of an outcome where you, as the human being making the decision, cannot even construct a rationally defensible evaluation of what it would be like to live your life in this way. From a cognitive science perspective, participation in a transformational experience therefore changes the agent, the arena, and the agent-arena-relationship – it is metaphysically speaking almost an entirely different universe. The man before committing a murder, and the man after committing a murder, are not only two completely different people, they live in two different universes.

Statements such as: “I understand what you are going through” suddenly takes on a much deeper and darker epistemic architecture.

However, it’s important to qualify the parameters of transformative experiences in this instance. The lesson here is not that the decision of participating in transformative experiences such as having a child or committing a murder can never be made rationally. The lesson is that, if you’ve never had a child before or never committed a murder before, that it is impossible to make an informed, rational decision by imagining outcomes based on what it would be like to have a child or what it would be like to commit a murder, assigning subjective normative values to these outcomes, and then modelling your preferences onto these hypothetical insights.

This position however begs the question if our preferences regarding the participation in transformative experiences can ever be modelled whatsoever? Surely, we can’t deconstruct the argument into an infinite regression - that would be absurd.

The way we act in the world provides some interesting insights into how we solve this problem. Considering the fact that we are as humans often think of ourselves as agents within a salience landscape in a particular point in time and space, with a conscious, centered point of view that looks out from that point to the rest of the world. From this first person perspective, we simulate the subjective values of various acts we might perform in the arena by reflecting on our past, consulting our present, and mapping our possible paths into the future. At each experienced moment, we generate a continuously updating map of possible futures for ourselves, a map that evolves over time, as we move from the present into the future, in response to input from our perceptions and decisions. The function of memory is therefore not to remember the past, but to codify our lived experience and then to use it as a map that can be used to simulate the future.

However, as explained before, rationality in itself – even within the parameters of our lived experience is insufficient for providing a conclusive model with outcomes for transformative experiences - otherwise it wouldn’t be transformative at all. Rationality therefore must be supplemented by revelation, especially given the fact that not taking a decision is a decision in itself, and that defaulting to mere ignorance could even yield catastrophic consequences. We therefore, more often than not, will need to choose between the lesser of two evils, between a transformative experience and the status quo, each with their own unintended consequences.

Revelation is therefore a useful tool that can be used to strengthen the value of personal indexing and subjective norms within the context of transformational experiences. Furthermore, another useful tool that can be used to supplement this paradigm is the use of Hierarchical Bayesian Modelling. Similar to the historical lived experiences that informs the probable outcomes and personal normative values of transformative experience simulations, the Bayesian framework associates the content of specific transformative experiences with adjacent experiential constructs at a higher level of abstraction. For example, if we face the decision of joining the Hell’s Angels biker gang even though we have no prior experience of riding motorcycles or being associated with notorious gang members, we might consider exploring adjacent experiences in our memory such as riding mountain bikes or being affiliated with the local football club. Although mountain biking or belonging to a football club does not directly translate to joining the Hell’s Angels, they do however belong to the same conceptual universe. Our lived experience of breaking a leg on a mountain bike or being bullied by the football coach might provide some epistemological insight into how we might experience joining the Hell’s Angels. The Hierarchical Bayesian Model can therefore be used as a powerful tool to map possible futures onto our lived experience within a subset of epistemological hierarchies.

However, one massive blind spot in the book is that people have for centuries relied on transtemporal maxims as a mediating construct for navigating transformative experiences. Religious faith, especially as a non-propositional decision-making tool, is in fact exceedingly useful within the context of transformative experiences, as it renders to us an imaginal ideal that models the preferred teleological outcomes for a general set of epistemological contexts.

The insufficiency of rationality within the context of simulating transformative experiences can indeed be supplemented by revelation and personal normative standards, but even these paradigms are insufficient to adequately model life or death situations and our cognitive framing needs to be strengthened by our non-propositional cognitive machinery. Religious doctrines that afford wisdom and virtue are therefore indispensable when confronting transformative experiences, otherwise we are rejecting powerful tools at our immediate disposal that could aid us in the simulation and navigation of life’s most perplexing experiences. Where rationality fails, faith prevails.

One quote of Billy Graham comes to mind when he was transformed by Jesus Christ:

“One day, I was faced a choice when Christ said: "I am the way, the truth and the life." Can you imagine that? He was a liar, or he was insane, or he was what he claimed to be. Which one was he? I had to make that decision. I couldn't prove it. I couldn't take it to a laboratory and experiment with it. But by faith I said, I believe him, and he came into my heart, and he changed my life.”