Res Philosophica has just announced a cfp "on the topic of transformative experiences for a special issue of the journal." The invited speaker line-up is fantastic. Papers are invited that explore "the implications of the possibility that certain major life experiences are phenomenologically transformative: that is, they are relevantly just like Mary’s when she leaves her black and white room." (For a refresher on Mary see here.) One of the invited papers, "What Mary can’t expect when she’s expecting," by the eminent metaphysician, L.A. Paul, was first called to my attention after my post on the lack of available vocabulary for the emotional life of fatherhood. Paul argues that:
[H]aving one’s own child is an epistemically transformative experience. If it is impossible for me to know what it is like to have the transformative experience of seeing and touching my own child, to know what emotions, beliefs, desires, and dispositions will be caused by having a child, and by extension to know what is like to have the emotions, beliefs, desires, and dispositions caused by having my child, it is impossible for me to gauge the expected value, in phenomenal terms, of having a child. If I cannot gauge the expected value of having my child, I cannot compare this value to the value of remaining childless. And if I cannot compare it to the value of remaining childless, I cannot—even approximately—determine which act would result in the highest expected value. And thus, on the standard model, I cannot use our ordinary, phenomenal-based approach to rationally choose to have my child, nor can I rationally choose to remain childless.
Now the point of the paper is not to argue that becoming a parent is fundamentally an irrational act; Paul allows that there may be ways of thinking about rationality far removed from standard rational choice models that can capture the rationality of such a decision. Paul's paper also allows that models that merely capture the extrinsic features of having children (predator-prey models in ecology, Malthusian growth models in economics and ecology, etc.) do a good job explaining or predicting observed regularities. Paul's approach is even compatible with the possibility that we can experimentally induce utility curves for prospective parents to estimate their willingness to pay for a child.
Now, Paul models the transformative experience of having a child on Frank Jackson's well known case of black-and-white Mary, "a brilliant neuroscientist, locked in a colorless cell. Mary has never experienced color." When she leaves the cell and is exposed to red, "she learns what it is like to see red." This is said to be a "radically new experience" (like eating Vegemite for the first time). Paul thinks that this is akin to the "simple fact that the content of the state of seeing and touching your own newborn child carries with it a unique phenomenological character."
As an aside, Paul also implies that this epistemic transformation also generates "a deep phenomenological transformation" of the "self." No doubt there also hormones and bio-chemical transformations that make us forget what we were like before having a child and -- as has been increasingly documented -- also make us forget what it's like to first have a child. Let's stipulate that when such a deep phenomenological transformation of the self is possible then we are in the realm of a radically new experience.
With that in place... I admire Paul's paper. But I want to express some minor reservations in the spirit of the project. First, color-less professor Mary knows that that there will be a new experience. Given all she knows about color science, which includes quite a bit of psycho-physics and given that she is free to read quite a bit of color phenomenology including, say, great work by Goethe (and the tradition inspired by him) and poetic works on color experience she may have, in fact, an inkling of what color experience would be like. [Full disclosure: my wife is a retina-surgeon and cognitive scientist.] We have, in fact, available a very rich color vocabulary that has been invested with psychological, cultural, and cognitive resonances--e.g., "blue mondays," "purple rain," (not to mention "virginal white," etc.). The fact is we can come to know what purple rain would feel like by listening to Prince without ever experiencing rain that is purple.
Indeed, in cultures where there is a rich vocabulary for the variety of food-tastes, one can be prepared to know what to expect when tasting Vegemite--without having to claim that such a proto-feeling is the same as the actual thing. Recall my post on Adam Smith. (If you have never felt it's really important to distinguish the taste of the hot tongue sandwich at the old 2nd Avenue Deli from, say, the impoverished version served at Katz's you may never understand this latter claim.) Food-tasting is a skill, even a projectable skill (that's compatible with the possibility of surprise); for some fashion-designers and artists color experience is also a projectable skill. [Full disclosure: I am the color-impaired child and grand-child of several generations of fashion designers.]
So, compared to expectant Mary, scientist Mary is much closer to Hume awaiting his missing shade, which when experienced pretty much leaves the world as it was before, than to a radical transformative experience. (It is possible, of course, that in some circumstances seeing color would transform Mary's self, but I doubt that is our default assumption.)
Second, one problem with parenthood in our culture is that in addition to the existence of extremely impoverished psychological vocabulary -- the product of the fact that our artistic and philosophical heritage has been produced by predominately child-less men or disinterested parents {this is consistent with other factors about the way in which, say, purchasing commodities are said to bring satisfaction, in which working is thought to bring fulfillment, a religion in which etc. ) -- prospective parents are systemically lied to about what it is like to be a parent. (My sister-in-law has done very interesting work on the cultural construction of having and being a child.) In popular culture, parenting is the stuff of comedy or romance. This is an instance where Christianity does no better than capitalism. The cult of the Madonna has created an aesthetic of veneration surrounding the (sacred) infant. This may be instrumentally useful (for all I know it reduces the amount of child-abuse), but it is far removed from the phenomenology of parenting.
Third, I think L.A. Paul is not entirely immune from the after-life of the language of veneration (and the religiosity associated with baptism). Paul isolates "the unique state of seeing and touching her newborn child." It is indeed a new state to see and hold one's newborn. And it is possible that the transformation of the phenomological self may be complete at that instant in some people, but I have to admit to a certain mistrust to such "flash" like moments--they remind me a bit too much of the Pauline conversion (seeing the Risen Christ on the road to Damascus), which thanks God for setting "me apart from my mother’s womb and called me by his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son in me," Galatians 1:15. Leaving aside (a) the fascinating relationship to pregnancy/childhood articulated here and (b) to what degree Saul of Tarsus was prepared to see what he saw, I am inclined to think that the transformation of the self in parenthood is not best captured by such a quasi-baptismal origin moment; the transformation is almost certainly not completed at that instance.
To conclude: I am grateful to Paul for setting the discussion of these matters on a rigorous footing. I hope that our philosophical culture will generate the vocabulary and taxonomy that will allow us to become better able to understand and more healthily experience parenthood, motherhood, fatherhood, etc. One, perhaps, unintended benefit may be that we will think more wisely about conditions of epistemic uncertainty more generally.
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