Choosing When the Chooser Changes: Laurie Paul on Transformative Experience

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/11/15

Yale philosopher Laurie Paul discusses her influential work on transformative experiences—life events that profoundly alter our values, preferences, and sense of self. Paul explains how these experiences challenge traditional decision theory, especially when choices must be made without knowing their future personal impact. From parenthood to psychedelics to disability and Alzheimer’s, Paul explores how subjective transformation defies standard rational models and necessitates self-reconstruction. Drawing from metaphysics, epistemology, and real-life examples, she argues that transformation is not inherently good or bad but a profound, identity-shaping process central to the human condition.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Laurie Paul is the Millstone Family Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Cognitive Science at Yale University, with a secondary appointment in the Department of Psychology. She is renowned for her work in metaphysics, decision theory, and the philosophy of mind. She introduced the influential philosophical concept of the transformative experience—life events that profoundly alter a person’s values, identity, and epistemic perspective. Her research challenges traditional models of rational choice and personal identity. Paul is the author of Transformative Experience (Oxford University Press, 2014) and co-author of Causation: A User’s Guide (with Ned Hall, Oxford University Press, 2013). She also directs the Self and Society Initiative at Yale’s Wu Tsai Institute, which explores how subjective experience informs our understanding of the self and social decision-making. What is the core philosophical problem that transformative experiences pose for traditional decision theory?

Prof. Laurie Paul: The core problem is that traditional decision theory—specifically expected utility theory—assumes that agents can assign values to outcomes and make rational choices by maximizing expected utility. For ordinary decisions, like choosing an ice cream flavour, this works well. Suppose you walk into an ice cream shop and choose between chocolate, vanilla, pistachio, and strawberry. All options are visible and accessible. If you prefer chocolate over pistachio, rational choice theory says you should pick chocolate. You know what chocolate tastes like; you know you like it more.

But in more complex decisions—especially those involving uncertainty—you also have to consider the probability of different outcomes. You evaluate each outcome by multiplying its subjective value by its likelihood of occurring. This gives you its expected value. You then choose the option with the highest expected value.

This framework breaks down with transformative experiences—decisions that change what you care about and how youunderstand yourself and the world. For example, choosing to become a parent or to undergo a profound religious conversion. Before having the experience, you cannot fully understand what it will be like. You also do not know how it will change your preferences. You are, in effect, trying to evaluate an outcome that is both epistemically inaccessible (you cannot understand what it is like beforehand) and personally transformative (it will change who you are).

Because of this, you cannot assign meaningful subjective values to the outcomes in advance. And suppose the values cannot be known or anticipated. In that case, the expected utility theory fails to guide the decision. This raises profound philosophical questions about rational agency, identity over time, and what it means to make an authentic choice when the self-making the choice is not the same self who will live with the outcome.

What I argue is that although many decisions can be made using the traditional model of expected utility, there is a special class of decisions—preferred in a certain way—that involve what you care about at a deep level. Morally speaking, youcould go either way with these choices. Legally speaking, you could go either way. But importantly, they involve a new kind of experience—something qualitatively unfamiliar.

Imagine a bizarre flavour of ice cream that you have never tried before. You must decide whether you want to try it. The twist is that this new experience is not trivial—it is life-changing. Real-life examples include deciding to become a parent, enlisting in the military, choosing a specific career path, or relocating to a completely different part of the world to start anew.

When you face choices like this, the problem is that you cannot honestly know what the new experience will be like for you in a meaningful, first-person way. Even if others describe it, there remains an essential gap: you do not know what it will be like for you. And the experience changes you—it reconfigures who you are.

This breaks the ordinary decision-making model. You cannot assign value to the outcome the way you can with something familiar, like choosing pistachio ice cream. More importantly, it is not just about achieving a desired result. When you try to bring about a life change—say, having a child or going to war—that very experience can change what you care about most.

Therefore, the philosophical problem lies in the fact that the person who makes the decision is not the same as the person who experiences the outcome. The person making the choice may have very different values and priorities from the future version of themselves that the outcome will shape. And because of that, the traditional decision theory model fails.

That is the idea: the standard model of rational decision-making does not apply. And it is crucial to recognize that it fails. Consider becoming a parent. You decide to have a child. You cannot understand the experience of parenting until youhave the child. But once you do, the experience transforms you—you form a bond, an attachment, and you want that very child. It alters the kinds of things you care most deeply about.

You are doing something that changes you—something that reshapes you into a different kind of person. And there is an essential sense in which you cannot know ahead of time how it will change you. That is why you cannot use the ordinary decision-making model for these kinds of decisions.

Jacobsen: Are there ways in which we can invert those experiments? That is, to move from a subject-centered framework into an object-centered one? For example, the subject who decides to have children moves within an object space—but the act of creating children, those “little teensy subjects,” in turn alters the original subject’s perspective on life.

That is one perspective. But what if we invert it? What if the object space—the societal context—is so strongly imposed that choosing not to conform radically alters how the person sees themselves about that object space? To put it less abstractly, suppose a woman lives in a society where women are only valued insofar as they conform to one of two roles—either as virgins or as mothers—drawing from traditional Christian imagery of the Virgin Mary and the Mother Mary. If such a woman chooses not to have children, and the societal pressure and judgment are extreme, could that external imposition itself constitute a transformative experience?

Paul: Yes, so—okay. I am not going to answer your question directly. Still, I’ll respond indirectly because I think a lot is going on here.

One of the reasons this line of questioning is so important is because these kinds of choices affect everyone, but they do not affect everyone equally. When you make a personal choice, it can feel like it is all about you—but in reality, youroptions are often shaped and constrained by how the world around you has already structured your possibilities.

It is like being in a garden labyrinth. Whether you turn left or right—and how you get through the maze—is determined by how the gardener has shaped the paths with hedges. The structure of the garden defines the choices you can make. Youstill have agency, but your agency is exercised within a framework already imposed on you. This is what is referred to as choice architecture.

Society plays a significant role in shaping many aspects of this architectural choice. And different kinds of people face various types of structures. Speaking personally, as a woman, when I decided to become a parent, I was faced with two profound commitments: continuing to pursue the philosophical work I deeply cared about or starting a family.

It was not that I believed I would stop caring about my work or that I could not continue in some form. Still, I would no longer be able to engage with it to the fullest extent of my abilities. That would impact the range of opportunities available to me down the line. I would have to make sacrifices. I would have to make hard choices—because the way the world is traditionally structured for women often places us in these constrained positions. That is not true for everyone, and the distribution is not uniform.

So, yes, the way the world is—the social architecture—deeply affects whether an experience is transformative. If you do not have to face such a stark trade-off, then the experience may still change you, but the stakes are lower. The transformation may not be as profound because you were not forced into such a difficult decision. For someone in a more privileged or traditional position—say, a man in a male-dominated structure—the same choice might not carry the same weight or consequences.

But what does not change—whether the pressure comes from the external environment or arises from within—is the internal conflict. What fascinates me is the kind of unintelligibility that accompanies life-altering decisions. It is a deep, felt uncertainty we understand when we are about to make a transformative choice.

Take, for example, deciding whether to get married—or whether to get divorced. You know there is something you must choose to do or not do, and yet you have no idea who you will be on the other side of that decision. Suppose it is not immediately clear what you want. In that case, if you are weighing different outcomes—you can end up agonizing over the choice.

And people agonize precisely because they understand that it is not just a matter of adding up numbers, assigning values, and making a purely rational decision. The world does not operate that way. Our minds do not work like that. If you could evolve yourself forward—project yourself into the future—and know who you would become, then you could decide whether or not you wanted to be that version of yourself. You could compare that future self to the self you would remain if you made the opposite decision. That is what traditional rational decision theory assumes you can do—but of course, we cannot do that.

Jacobsen: Right. If your self-reflective capacity is the mirror, by the time you reach that future point, the mirror itself has changed.

Paul: Yes, that is a good way to put it.

Jacobsen: Then, in that sense, transformative experiences become anchored in narrative. Their transformative character is defined by the narrative one constructs around them. I recently interviewed someone who made a profound life change. They had been a Harvard-trained lawyer but transitioned into nonviolent communication, meditation, and related work. Now, they teach executives in Fortune 500 companies. It is an unusual but interesting shift.

One thing I brought up was the elasticity of narrative. To what degree can people shape or reinterpret their own stories? That seems to be the question: Do you see contexts where an experience is truly transformative within one person’s narrative but would not register as transformative in another’s? That is, it might not cross some internal or external threshold of “transformation” for someone else.

Paul: People are different. However, the differences often relate to how they approach the choice. Let me revisit the case of having a child, which is my favourite example. Some people know. They have always wanted a child—it has been clear to them since they were young. Others have always known that they do not want children. Even with social pressure, they remain sure of that. And then there are others—many, actually—who are ambivalent. They are unsure. They hesitate. They deliberate.

And it is often for these people, the ones facing genuine uncertainty, that the experience of deciding—and then transforming—becomes so profound. So they struggle with the decision. However, in many cases, having a child can be transformative, regardless of the initial desire. This happens all the time—someone does not want to have a child; they have a child, and it profoundly changes them. And afterward, lo and behold, they would never wish their child away. They love their child.

That does not mean the person they were before was wrong. It just means that a person has been replaced—so to speak—by a new version of themselves. That is what transformative experience means. It is a descriptively neutral term. I do not mean it has to be positive—it simply refers to a profound change in perspective, values, and identity.

Jacobsen: That is what I wanted to follow up with. What are some contexts in which experiences are negatively transformative—where the change is just as life-altering as having a child, getting married, or going through a divorce?

There is a well-known and often-cited line, though now sometimes treated with ironic detachment in our culture, that originated from one of the Nazi camps. It was scrawled on a wall in Majdanek: “If there is a God, he will have to beg my forgiveness.” It is a profoundly weighty and piercing statement, especially in its context. We might flatten it now with a smirk, but initially, it came from a place of devastating transformation. So, yes—what are some of those experiences? What are the darker contexts of transformation?

Paul: Many experiences are transformative but not positive in the conventional sense. However, it is essential to approach this with nuance. Some experiences that we would not initially describe as positive are, in retrospect, seen by those who went through them as meaningful, even valuable. People will say, “It changed me, and I value who I am now. I would not want to go back.”

Cases of disability are significant here. People respond very differently to life-altering events—a serious climbing accident, a car crash, a horseback riding fall—that result in becoming paraplegic or quadriplegic or losing vision. These are not experiences people seek out. And yet, they can be deeply transformative.

Some individuals will say that, after the initial period of hardship and adjustment, they came to value who they became. They would not undo the event, even if they could. Others do not feel that way—they would reverse it in a heartbeat. AndI do not take a normative position on which response is correct. I think it genuinely varies from person to person.

Another powerful example is cognitive decline, mainly due to Alzheimer’s disease. That is a case I am especially interested in. No one wants to experience mental deterioration. But again, what is striking is the variation in how people internally respond over time—particularly after the transition period.

From the outside, these experiences seem wholly negative. But from the inside, especially once the person has adapted, the response can shift. Some people come to terms with being cognitively or physically different and find ways to live meaningfully within their new circumstances. Others continue to struggle. There is no universal outcome.

So yes, these are transformative experiences—sometimes profoundly so—but they defy simple classification as good or bad. They are existentially complex. Some people respond in ways that allow them to flourish. They adapt, and they come to endorse the new version of themselves.

To give a counterintuitive example, imagine someone who is highly successful in their career but works constantly—as many of us do—caught in the hamster wheel of productivity. They might be high-performing but also anxious, overworked, possibly depressed, and certainly exhausted. Now, suppose this person experiences a life-altering event—say, an accident—that results in cognitive limitations preventing them from continuing in their high-intensity role.

They transition to a much less demanding job or even stop working altogether. It is entirely reasonable for such a person to say, “I was anxious and unhappy before. I do not want to go back to that.” There are autobiographical accounts of experiences like this—one example is a woman who had a stroke and described her post-stroke life as profoundly altered in tone and perception. She became more relaxed. She no longer pursued the same goals or felt the same pressure. She endorsed this new state of being, even though others might have seen the stroke as a loss.

Some people describe parenthood in similar terms. They no longer care about the same things they did before, and they come to embrace the new person they have become fully.

So, transformation is not necessarily good or bad. It is just that: transformation—a fundamental change. And human beings are remarkably resilient. We reconstruct ourselves through these changes. We adapt our values. Sometimes, people feel they have lost something—and that sense of loss dominates. But at other times, people come to see their former selves as different rather than something to return to.

I think about the version of myself who might have existed had I never had children. I have no connection to that person. That version of me feels entirely foreign. It’s a completely different self altogether.

Jacobsen: Sometimes that change becomes so vast—so significant—that the psychological space between who you are now and who you were then is too large to bridge mentally. It redefines everything.

Paul: Yes, precisely. This belief is also reflected in studies, which have shown that genetically identical individuals—starting from what appears to be the same base—can diverge radically in life, ending up in entirely different psychological and value spaces.

Jacobsen: So, is the notion of a transformative experience, in some ways, a philosophical framing of what psychology might call a phase change? A dramatic reorganization of the self or psyche.

Paul: That is a good way to put it. A transformative experience, as I use the term, is a descriptive framework that highlights these profound existential reconfigurations. It can happen to anyone, at any point, and in any number of ways. It is not tied to any one life path—it is a structural feature of human existence.

It is essential to have a conceptual framework for this kind of phenomenon. Take, for example, psychedelic experiences. Many people have found my work on transformative experiences helpful in trying to make sense of the effects of psychedelics, particularly when trying to explain why these experiences are so difficult to describe. There is often a mysterious quality: Why is it that these shifts in perception and meaning cannot be fully articulated?

I characterize that shift as an epistemic transformation. In some cases, people undergo such a radical reworking of how they perceive and interpret the world that it alters their core preferences. Having a structured conceptual framework provides people with a way to identify, categorize, and compare various kinds of experiences, helping us understand their similarities and differences.

It also helps researchers formulate more precise hypotheses and test them. So, yes, while your description of a psychological “phase change” gets at something important, I would say it is more than that. A transformative experience is not just a psychological phase—it carries profound philosophical implications about identity, knowledge, and preference formation.

Jacobsen: The Alzheimer’s case and the psychedelic case seem to have at least a conceptual overlap. Of course, one typically occurs later in life and involves neurodegeneration—a structural breakdown of the brain. The other involves chemically induced changes in neural function—electrochemical shifts triggered by psychedelics.

But both appear to alter the nature of qualia—the character of conscious experience itself. With Alzheimer’s, the transformation is disintegrative, with very little hope of reintegration at a more functional or resilient level. With psychedelics, however, there is evidence—albeit preliminary—that these experiences can help people reintegrate at a healthier baseline. For example, studies have shown that middle-aged individuals with alcohol dependency who take psychedelics one or more times often reduce or cease alcohol use.

How would you distinguish these two classes of transformative experience, given how distinct they are in outcome and origin?

Paul: Yes, exactly—this gets to the heart of the matter. Both Alzheimer ’s-related transformation and psychedelic experience share a standard structure: they involve epistemic transformation. That is, the subject undergoes a type of experience that cannot be fully grasped through description or secondhand reports—you have to live it to know what it is like.

In virtue of undergoing this kind of experience, something fundamental shifts—how you interpret the world, how youfeel, even what you value. In both cases, these transformations are rooted in radical changes to the brain. Of course, all experience changes the brain in some way, but these are especially significant neural alterations.

The key difference lies in the direction and potential outcome of the transformation. Psychedelic-induced transformations often allow for reintegration, sometimes even therapeutic benefit. Alzheimer’s, by contrast, typically involves a progressive decline with little or no capacity for reconstructing a coherent or resilient self.

So, while structurally similar, the two forms of transformation diverge sharply in terms of narrative continuity, agency, and potential for flourishing.

With psychedelics, what happens is a combination of changes at both the epistemological level—what you come to understand or perceive—and at the neural level, where the brain itself is altered. The nature and degree of those changes differ from person to person. However, when transformation does occur, it can alter core preferences or reframe how a person perceives their experiences.

That is why psychedelics can sometimes produce very positive outcomes for individuals struggling with addiction, depression, or other self-involving psychological conditions. The transformation affects how they see themselves and what they value.

With Alzheimer’s disease, on the other hand, you also get neural changes, but of a destructive kind. While the precise neurological mechanisms are still debated, what we do observe are changes in moral character, shifts in what people care about, and profound memory loss. These changes often lead to a reconstruction of preferences and identity.

For instance, someone who previously identified as a vegetarian may no longer care about dietary restrictions. Someone deeply religious may no longer engage with their faith. A parent may no longer recognize their children. The sources of joy and meaning become entirely redefined—sometimes limited to immediate surroundings or sensory experiences.

So, the conceptual framework remains the same in both cases. The structure involves epistemic transformation and personal transformation. The difference lies in whether the experience is chosen or not. With psychedelics, individuals typically choose to undergo the experience. There is a decision-making phase, followed by the transformation itself.

In contrast, transformative experiences like Alzheimer’s—or even specific religious experiences—can happen to people without any choice on their part.

But again, the framework still applies. The epistemic transformation introduces a new kind of experience that reshapes the person’s preferences, values, and sense of self. What varies is the nature of the knowledge and the mechanism that facilitates the transformation.

This is why it is beneficial to have a high-level philosophical framework in place. It allows us to map different types of transformation and identify the specific pathways or mechanisms involved—whether they are chemical, neurological, psychological, or social.

This also helps clarify applied ethical questions. For example, in the case of Alzheimer’s, we should think carefully about advance directives. People may be unable to project themselves into their future state with Alzheimer’s and may issue directives that conflict with the preferences of their future selves. Perhaps those later preferences—however diminished the person’s rational capacities—deserve more moral weight than we tend to allow.

Likewise, with psychedelics, verbal descriptions cannot convey what the experience is like. No matter how vivid or detailed, a description cannot communicate what it is like to undergo an altered state of consciousness induced by psilocybin or to perceive colour or meaning in a radically new way. That is precisely because it involves an epistemic transformation.

Perhaps changing the way you make sense of the world—your interpretive framework—can also change how youunderstand yourself. It alters how you perceive yourself as a mind embedded in the world. That, to me, is at the heart of a transformative experience.

Jacobsen: We can think of such transformation as something that occurs at a moment in time or, more accurately, as something that unfolds over a period. Either way, it happens. What, then, should we take to be the post-transformative state? What is the arc of that change, typically? Though perhaps the word “typically” might be inadvisable here.

Paul: Yes, I agree—it is difficult to generalize. I’m not entirely sure if there is a typical arc. But I tend to think of it as involving a process of self-reconstruction. That’s something I’m very interested in, though I have not yet developed a formal philosophical framework for it.

I co-authored a paper with some collaborators, where we modelled a concept we called epistemic conceptual replacement. We used the allegory from Flatland—a novella by Edwin Abbott—as a conceptual illustration. In Flatland, you have two-dimensional shapes living in a two-dimensional world. The story follows one such shape who is suddenly thrust into the third dimension. In that new space, the shape sees circles and squares for what they are: spheres and cubes.

This completely transforms how the shape understands reality. But when he is thrust back into two-dimensional space, he can no longer explain what he saw. The other shapes cannot comprehend his transformation, and they reject his account. This inability to communicate a radically new conceptual framework—after experiencing a higher-dimensional world—is a metaphor for how conceptual replacement works. You move from one structure of understanding to another. Once youhave made that leap, you cannot fully return to the earlier perspective.

That is a relatively simple case. But now imagine that something similar happens at the level of core values—what youcare about most. Take my own experience with becoming a parent. It involves something deeply evolutionary or biological, but the change is unmistakable. Before, you cared about many people in your life. Still, when you grow and birth a child—or even adopt one—the reconfiguration of values can be profound.

For me, it was the experience of physically producing a child.  I am not making a prescriptive claim that one path is better than the other. Adoption may well be the morally superior option in many cases. And from what I understand, the emotional attachment to an adopted child can be just as deep as the attachment to a biological child. But in either case, what matters philosophically is the transformation of perspective, values, and identity that occurs—this is the phenomenon I’m trying to capture, and vice versa. 

But the strange thing is that when you do form this attachment, you deeply—and honestly—come to care about another person more than you care about yourself. And I think that is profoundly strange. It is not something you reason your way into. It is not a case of thinking, “Well, I might have to make a difficult decision someday, so I’d better prepare emotionally.”

No—you care. You care about them instead of yourself. If someone walked in with a gun and said, “It’s you or your child,” you would say, “Take me.” And that shift—that immediate, unquestioning prioritization—is a fundamental change. Once that change happens, it iterates. You start making decisions that reflect the new priorities. You spend thousands of dollars and reorganize your life. It is not calculated. It emerges from that transformative shift.

That kind of response—the primal urge to protect your child—is not something you develop in advance. It is not there before the child exists. Maybe there is some latent capacity, but the complete disposition arises through the attachment. You build that attachment to a person, and in doing so, you rebuild part of yourself. Not everything changes, but something fundamental does.

And that rebuilding process is both strange and fascinating. I think it is the same process that people undergo after a life-altering accident—say, a terrible climbing accident that results in quadriplegia. In those cases, people also have to rebuild themselves. Their sense of agency—what it means to act, to move, to control their body—changes completely.

And what they care about often changes, too. Profoundly. So they rebuild. And I think that’s one of the most interesting and remarkable things about human beings: our capacity to reconstruct ourselves in response to these kinds of transformative experiences. That’s also why I argue that you cannot simply label transformation as “good” or “bad.” People rebuild themselves in different ways. They emerge with other psychological, emotional, and affective profiles. The process is complex—and deeply human.

However, it is a crucial part of life. So, to return to the very first question you asked me—what I was arguing for in my book, in part, was this: There’s a prevailing view that if you are a rational agent. You have to make decisions; you should apply the ordinary model of maximizing expected utility. That is, if you’re sensible, you think about your options carefully, weigh outcomes, and make thoughtful, deliberate choices—blah blah blah.

That model works well for many small-scale decisions. But for the most significant decisions of our lives, that model breaks. Instead, we leap. We choose, and then we rebuild ourselves afterward. There’s a kind of unintelligibility surrounding these decisions—before, during, and even after we make them. And yet, we still move through them. That, I think, is what life is like.

Jacobsen: ]What are your favourite quotes about transformative experiences? I ask this of psychotherapists, psychologists, psychiatrists—and it’s always Viktor Frankl or something along those lines. So—what’s yours?

Paul: I do not have favourite quotes in the usual sense. People often ask me if I’m a vampire—that’s my favourite. That’s actually how I open Transformative Experience.

Jacobsen: I think George Carlin had a good one before he died—it was for his tombstone. They asked him why, and he said: He was just here a second ago.

Paul: This is a translation—I think it might be by Michael Della Rocca, but I’m not entirely sure. So, the quote I love—from Spinoza—is:

“It is of the nature of reason to perceive things under a certain aspect of eternity.”

Jacobsen: Well, maybe that’s why Bertrand Russell called Spinoza the most lovable of philosophers.

Jacobsen: He’s cool. I’m half Dutch, and he was half Dutch—so he’s good in my books. Okay—thank you very much for your time today. I appreciate it—your time and your expertise.

Paul: Nice to meet you.

Jacobsen: Bye.

Paul: Bye.

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