Transformative experiences are those in which you do not know what type of person you will become afterward. Laurie Ann Paul, the author of Transformative Experience, argues that because you are epistemically limited in knowing what an experience will be like, you cannot apply your subjective values to possible outcomes—the primary input of normative decision theory (NDT). She concludes that NDT cannot adequately determine rational actions for transformative experiences. I argue that NDT can det…
Read moreTransformative experiences are those in which you do not know what type of person you will become afterward. Laurie Ann Paul, the author of Transformative Experience, argues that because you are epistemically limited in knowing what an experience will be like, you cannot apply your subjective values to possible outcomes—the primary input of normative decision theory (NDT). She concludes that NDT cannot adequately determine rational actions for transformative experiences. I argue that NDT can determine rational outcomes for transformative experiences. Evidence, coupled with your present subjective values, provides sufficient grounds to form rational predictions of what any experience will be like for you. Through a Bayesian NDT framework, primarily concerned with evidence weighting, limited phenomenal perspectives can be brought into view. Transformative experiences, therefore, do not threaten the authority of normative decision theory.
