Transformative experience

L. A. Paul is Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at Yale University. Paul is best known for her research on the counterfactual analysis of causation and the concept of ‘transformative experience’. Paul’s principal research interests are in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind, with her work focusing on causation, mereology, the philosophy of time, and related topics in phenomenology, the philosophy of science, and philosophy of language. She is the editor of Causation and Counterfactuals, coauthor of Causation: A User’s Guide, and author of Transformative Experience. In 2014 Paul received a grant from the John Templeton Foundation to study religious and transformative experience, as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship. She received a NHC Fellowship from the National Humanities Center and an Institute for Advanced Study Research Fellowship at the Australian National University.

To begin with, I’d like to discuss the term ‘transformative experience’. At the Philosophy in 15 Minutes event in 2014 you outlined a thought experiment in which someone has to decide whether or not to become a vampire – an irreversible choice to be sure. Could you run through this thought experiment now?

The thought experiment, as I conceive of it, is a fictional story designed to elucidate the concept, to expand on the concept, of transformative experience and to give people an intuitive window into the idea. I like to think about a case where, let’s say you’re on holiday somewhere in Europe, somewhere in Romania, you’re touring a castle and you’re down in the dungeons examining all the interesting mediaeval torture instruments. Suddenly Dracula comes to you, which is quite surprising, and makes you a one-time offer to become a vampire. He says, “I like the look of you. You seem like an interesting person. Very thoughtful. You look like my type. I’m going to give you a one-time only opportunity to become a vampire. Go back to your hotel room now and think about it, and if you decide you want to become a vampire, leave your window open just before midnight and I will enter and change your world.” And then he says, “if you’d like to pass up on my offer, then you’d better leave town and never return.” So the stakes are high for many reasons, obviously you know enough about vampires to know that they’re undead and that this is not going to be a small, everyday experience.

So you rush back to your hotel room and you think about it – you start texting your friends, you call your mum,