Unbinding Ourselves from Ourselves

Knowledge < = > Experience

Nov 23, 2022

If you were to ask me, "What has it been like to live in Bali for the past five years?" I'd certainly give you an answer. But it will not be a big help in motivating you to move to Bali. Why?

Let's consider this thought experiment by distinguished philosopher L. A. Paul (by way of The Marginalian):

If you were offered the chance to become a vampire — painlessly and without inflicting pain on others, gaining incredible superpowers in exchange for relinquishing your human existence, with all your friends having made the leap and loving it — would you do it?

"The trouble is, in this situation, how could you possibly make an informed choice? For, after all, you cannot know what it is like to be a vampire until you are one. And if you can’t know what it’s like to be a vampire without becoming one, you can’t compare the character of the lived experience of what it is like to be you, right now, a mere human, to the character of the lived experience of what it would be like to be a vampire. This means that, if you want to make this choice by considering what you want your lived experience to be like in the future, you can’t do it rationally. At least, you can’t do it by weighing the competing options concerning what it would be like and choosing on this basis. And it seems awfully suspect to rely solely on the testimony of your vampire friends to make your choice, because, after all, they aren’t human any more, so their preferences are the ones vampires have, not the ones humans have."

If you have never visited Bali, then even if I paint the most compelling picture, my actual transfer of valuable, actionable information from me to you will have serious limitations.

"When you find yourself facing a decision involving a new experience that is unlike any other experience you’ve had before, you can find yourself in a special sort of epistemic situation. In this sort of situation, you know very little about your possible future, in the same way that you are limited when you face a possible future as a vampire. And so, if you want to make the decision by thinking about what your lived experience would be like if you decided to undergo the experience, you have a problem… You find yourself facing a decision where you lack the information you need to make the decision the way you naturally want to make it — by assessing what the different possibilities would be like and choosing between them. The problem is pressing, because many of life’s big personal decisions are like this: they involve the choice to undergo a dramatically new experience that will change your life in important ways, and an essential part of your deliberation concerns what your future life will be like if you decide to undergo the change. But as it turns out, like the choice to become a vampire, many of these big decisions involve choices to have experiences that teach us things we cannot know about from any other source but the experience itself."

These long-winded but extremely insightful points by L. A. Paul address the "bound self" that we have craftily put together over decades in order to make sense of the world.

If I describe a scenario that you can't fully relate to, such as my life in Bali, regardless of how great a storyteller I might be, there is virtually no chance that I can break through or help you see things through my eyes.

"In many ways, large and small, as we live our lives, we find ourselves confronted with a brute fact about how little we can know about our futures, just when it is most important to us that we do know. For many big life choices, we only learn what we need to know after we’ve done it, and we change ourselves in the process of doing it. I’ll argue that, in the end, the best response to this situation is to choose based on whether we want to discover who we’ll become."

To "choose based on whether we want to discover who we’ll become".

What does that mean? My take on it is that although we can research various options about what it would be like to move or retire in Bali or Belgium or Belize, we cannot know enough about what the experience will be like in advance. We will only know as it unfolds, as we unwind from the self we know and step-by-step wind up a new self.

We don't have to throw away our old selves. But we must take a leap of faith that the strangeness and wonder of letting go of our tried-and-true perceptions and then, uncomfortably at first, meander along a new path, eventually (and hopefully joyously) wind up a new layer of self upon the old one.

We cannot know what it's like until we try.

Retire in Bali

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