L.A. Paul
Appearances
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
Yes. So, okay. So it depends on where we want to start. I think he had experiences as a child when his father was killed and his mother was committed basically to a mental institution. I think that was very traumatic for him. He had... an experience when he was in school where he was told he couldn't become a lawyer because he was black. And as he developed and grew, he was imprisoned.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
So he engaged in some burglaries and was caught and then he was imprisoned. But when he was incarcerated, he discovered basically the beauty of reading. And there's a quote where he describes months passing without even thinking about his imprisonment, that he had never felt so truly free in his life.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
And so what happened basically is Malcolm X sort of embarks on this very kind of literary and intellectual process of kind of self-development. And at the same time, he becomes exposed to the nation of Islam and becomes basically a kind of minister with the group.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
So what he does is he comes into himself as a deeply, I think, intellectual and powerful and motivating speaker supporting black emancipation and the black power movement. And he's very critical then, of course, of like the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King, because these are nonviolent advocates of a nonviolent movement. way of achieving civil rights.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
And he thought this was kind of, you know, not powerful enough, right? Like, he didn't want to fight against racial segregation. He wanted to defend racial segregation as the best way to kind of preserve true emancipation.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
When he goes on the pilgrimage, he discovers that there are Muslims of all different races. He describes seeing Muslims of all colors, from blue-eyed blondes to black-skinned Africans, basically interacting as equals. Everybody was interested in the same kind of spiritual development. Everyone was making this pilgrimage.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
And he discovered through having this experience, it wasn't something that he could think of or conceive of. given his previous experience in the US and how badly he and his family had been treated by white people on a very consistent basis. Also, other members of the Nation of Islam, there were lots of terrible interactions with white police members, particular.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
But this experience opened up like a new framework for him where he thought, wow, I see a way in which Islam could provide a means to kind of overcome racial problems. In other words, it opened up a conceptual space for him that allowed him then to change his perspective and to think that maybe you didn't have to think that white people were devils.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
You didn't have to have this kind of deeply exclusionary kind of worldview.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
Yes. And an important thing is that his mother died when he was very young. And I think this made him feel very unhappy and very alone, especially when his father remarried and basically sidelined John. Yeah.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
It's quite disruptive. He changes his worldview. He changes his message. He starts to rethink the question of racial justice and how to get there.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
What I mean by the phrase transformative experience is an experience that results from discovering a new kind of experience. In other words, having a kind of experience that you've never had before. That's also very distinctive. I mean, you can have a new kind of experience like, you know, tasting a new esoteric flavor of jelly bean and it might not change anything radical.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
But some new kinds of experiences are very profound. They teach us something new that basically reorganizes the way that we make sense of the world and ourselves in relationship to it.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
Yes. So if it's a new kind of experience, then I think of you learning something new or gaining a new ability to represent the world or to think about yourself as interacting with the world. And so you can learn something about yourself through that experience by learning that you have new abilities to respond in ways that you didn't realize that you had.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
But you can also create those new abilities in virtue of having the experience. Say you were blind and had a retina operation and gained the ability to see. You would gain all kinds of new abilities, but partly in virtue of having these new sensory experiences.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
It's interesting. So the new experience there is first the experience of incredible danger. And I'm sure the power of the storm was also like the amount of force that he must have experienced with the waves must have been kind of overwhelming. I'm sure that you wouldn't normally experience that. So he has this new kind of experience and this brings home to him
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
his vulnerability in a way that it seems like he probably hasn't experienced since he was a child. And so you're right. So there's this external experience, the storm, that then creates a response in him, which is, I think, a new kind of feeling, a new capacity for vulnerability. And then what he discovers in himself is he feels this vulnerability. And what does he do? He hopes for grace.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
He hopes for redemption. He hopes that the Lord will take mercy on him. And he then also discovers then this kind of latent desire to be saved.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
No. Well, his father was distant and unemotional and was focused heavily on self-discipline. So I suppose this was his father's way of supporting him, but John did not find it helpful. In fact, it alienated him both from his father and from other people. And his character also then started to deteriorate. He behaved badly. He was arrested. He was rebellious. He was publicly flogged.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
In Jackson's thought experiment, the idea is that Mary grows up in a black and white environment. She's never been in anything other than a black and white space, and her skin is painted black. either black or white, whichever you prefer so that she doesn't have, she's never had any experience of color.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
Now in Jackson's example, she's also a scientist who knows all of the science of color and the science of the brain so that she knows basically, you know, all the scientific facts about what seeing color involves.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
And we can even add to it that maybe other people who know about color tell her about kind of, you know, well, color is like this and red, you know, red is like warm water and blue, you know, blue is like cold water and fire engines are painted red and that sort of thing. So she has all this information, but she's never left her black and white space.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
And then the question that Jackson asks is, well, Mary knows all this information. Does she know what it's like to see red? And the thought experiment is designed in such a way that we're supposed to say, and most people do say this, and I certainly think this, and most philosophers think this, that no, Mary doesn't know what it's like to see red.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
She knows all the scientific facts about seeing red, but that's just not enough. She has to actually leave her black and white space and go out into the world and see red for herself to know. And once she's done that, then she'll know what it's like to see red. Then she can add that to her scientific knowledge, but that's a different thing over and above all of those scientific facts.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
Right. So in Jackson's example, he assumes that we're at the end of all scientific inquiry. So there are no new scientific facts to learn. And Jackson wants to say, well, maybe there's something else to learn about the world that's more than just all the scientific facts. In virtue of having a subjective experience, you learn a way that the first person perspective or the mind meets the world.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
And that's just not something that you can capture with a kind of third person objective scientific point of view.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
Exactly. And I think also seeing people performing various acts together and seeing people kind of exercise a kind of devotional revelation is very powerful. And he probably responded empathically as well. And so you could know all the science of like empathic response. And still, once you feel that, that's going to be motivationally different. And it's that kind of thing that I want to pinpoint.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
I want to say that, yeah, Malcolm X probably knew, in theory, he would meet people of all different races, right? But when he actually did and interacted with them, he saw that there was a capacity for something and was motivated to sort of change his way of thinking in a way that maybe he just, you know, physically wouldn't have been able to do if he hadn't had that actual experience.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
That's right. My favorite case is the example of the durian fruit because at least many people who live in the U.S., which is where I live, have never tasted a durian. And the durian fruit is very strange because it's both incredibly foul smelling, but the taste, independently of the smell, is supposed to be something like, I don't know, strawberry vanilla custard or something.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
And so if you haven't tasted it, I can tell you it's like having a strawberry vanilla custard next to a sewer. And that's pretty evocative or it's like eating stinky cheese. But you still don't know what it tastes like. That's just an evocative description.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
I think that's right. This is exactly what happened to me when I had my first child. So I became pregnant and the pregnancy was already a series of discoveries. In other words, what it was like to grow a person inside of you was both something that's exhaustively discussed in various contexts and also completely impossible to understand until you've actually had that happen.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
And he also, importantly, I think, had this kind of experience of despair where he blamed others and wasn't able to kind of take responsibility for who he was and how he was behaving.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
And even more so with the process of giving birth. There's something utterly bizarre about knowing that you're growing a child inside you. There's something utterly bizarre about having to kind of get that child outside of your body because it's far too big, as you realize in a very important and profound way when it's about to happen.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
And then also the transition from this child that you've known from the inside, moving inside you, to seeing the baby after the birth, it's profound. You know this child in one way, and then you meet this child after you push it out of your body. It's just not something that you can understand unless you actually go through that experience.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
That was a really enlightening moment for me, precisely because I saw the connection between that and the trivial experience of like seeing red for the first time or trying a durian for the first time, because I thought, wait a minute, the same structure is here. But this experience, it's so profound and so moving that it's really changed something about me in a very fundamental way.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
That's right. And part of the title is a play on a famous book called What to Expect When You're Expecting. And I read that book and I was so disappointed because it didn't tell me at all what to expect when I was expecting anything. I remember getting so frustrated that I threw it against the wall.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
And so that's why I had to write a paper in response after going through the process of pregnancy and giving birth and realizing that it was profoundly different from anything that anyone could have described to me through testimony or in the pages of a book. When I say I'm not the same person, what I mean is that what I care about most in this world has changed as a result of the transformations.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
I care most about my children. And that's made me into a different kind of person. And so the testimony you're getting from me now about how great it is to be a parent doesn't apply to the person who's like to me before I ever even thought about having a child. I didn't care about those things.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
I ask us to imagine ourselves, or ask you to imagine yourself, traveling on summer vacation, exploring a castle and going deep into the dungeons when Dracula comes to you. And he offers to make you into a vampire.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
OK, so I would say recruited is a good phrase. He was press ganged by the Royal Navy. What happened was, I mean, so if you were press gang, then you had you were pressed into service as he was. He had some. background with the sea, so he was especially valuable. But he wasn't obviously interested in hard work and he wasn't a model seaman, shall we say.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
I do think that we rely on simulation in lots of contexts, and I think it can be very effective when we're relying on simulation of things that are familiar to us. Or, for example, trying to kind of put together simulations of combinations that are familiar to us.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
So maybe I've never had coconut coffee ice cream, but I can imagine the flavors mixed together and probably could get a pretty good simulation. But when we try to simulate ourselves as being very different, I think there are like two really serious problems that we have there.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
The first one is related to the problem of this example of where Mary, who grows up in a black and white room and has never seen color, can't imagine what it's like to see color, doesn't know what it's like to see red until she actually goes out and has the experience. If you ask Mary to simulate what it's like to see red before she's ever had that experience, I just don't think she could do it.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
I think she might simulate something, but I just don't think it would be accurate. So the first problem is that our ability to simulate is, I think, just kind of limited in certain ways by our experiences and maybe by the capacity of the human mind.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
I mean, you know, it just might not be possible to simulate truly great pain if you ever haven't had it, like the pain of giving birth or something like that. But there's another problem as well. The other problem has to do with what I think of as the kind of conceptual revolution that we undergo when we change the kind of person that we are.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
So going back to when we were talking about religious conversion, I think that John Newton, as well as Malcolm X, each underwent a kind of conceptual revolution in how they made sense either of the world or of the possibility of God or of the capacity for people of other races.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
to embrace a shared goal okay and um in all of these contexts the kind of conceptual revolution that that they underwent uh may be similar to like the copernican revolution right in other words a real change in how you understood like the nature of the world also changed like how they understood themselves and who they were and there's another philosophy example
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
that I've been thinking about a lot recently it's another famous one developed by Thomas Nagel or at least popularized by Thomas Nagel about imagining the possibility of being a bat okay and what Nagel says is look it's just not possible for a person to imagine or to know what it's like to be a bat and now that's sounds a lot like the Mary in the black and white room example but there's something extra that Nagel says that I think is really important Nagel says sure you can imagine a
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
having wings and flapping upside down and maybe detecting sound through echolocation, the way that human beings do it when they hear someone walking down a corridor. But that's not imagining what it's like for a bat to be a bat. That's imagining a human version of being a bat.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
And what he's trying to get at there is that there's a kind of conceptual incoherence in imagining yourself as someone else. And it's just there's a way in which you just can't do it. On the one hand, there's this kind of inconceivability of it. On the other hand, you don't even know the nature of the change that's supposed to bring this about.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
And at one point, what happened was he was traded basically to a slave ship. The Navy ships will exchange one set of seamen for another. And this is what was happening. He clearly wasn't a very appealing member of the crew. So he got swapped into a slave ship. And this became then very formative for him because he entered the slave trade.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
And so you can't even kind of perform some kind of educated kind of forward evolution of how that change would happen.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
Sure. This is my favorite thought experiment. So I ask us to imagine ourselves, or ask you to imagine yourself, traveling in on summer vacation somewhere in Romania, exploring a castle and going deep into the dungeons when Dracula comes to you. he offers to make you into a vampire. And this is a very, you know, this is a rather stunning development in your summer vacation.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
So you rush back to your Airbnb and you start thinking about, what do I want to do? And before you left, Dracula said to you, look, leave your window open at midnight and I will come to you. Otherwise, in the morning, leave and never return. It's like, this is a one-time only choice. And if you become a vampire, you can never go back.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
So as you reflect, you start looking up information about vampires and you start calling your friends and talking to them about it. And you find out that all of them have already become vampires. So, of course, after getting upset with them for not telling you before, you know, you say, well, like, why didn't you tell me? And they say, well, like, you can't possibly understand.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
You just don't can't understand what it's like to be a vampire. You wouldn't you wouldn't know what to make of it. You just have to become one. And of course, they all tell you that it's fabulous and that you should do it. Right. And so you go, maybe I should do it. You keep thinking about it and then you realize, well, wait a minute.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
If I can't possibly understand what it's like to be a vampire, then on what basis can I meaningfully and rationally like evaluate this as an option and compare it against what it's like to be human to make my choice? I haven't got the information I need. You're supposed to be able to compare the happiness of the person after the choice to the happiness of the person before the choice.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
But if you basically replace the person, then this comparison doesn't really make any sense anymore.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
I think it tells us that The ordinary approach that we have towards advanced directives in some deep way really doesn't work. In other words, if you think of an advanced directive as something that you would use to make a decision about your future self, like, so for example, let's say you're a committed vegetarian.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
And so you specify that, you know, and you've been diagnosed with Alzheimer's and it's coming on fast. So you specify that like you're not to be given bacon
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
um no matter how much you want it when you're living in your assisted living facility um or you know maybe you're very religious and you specify that you need to be taken to church you know or taken to to a place where you can worship on a regular basis and then what can happen in these contexts is um You lose your commitment to vegetarianism.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
Everyone around you has bacon and sausage every morning. What you're committed to is enjoying various kinds of gustatory experiences, and you are deeply miserable about the fact that this advanced directive has prevented you from gaining some source of pleasure in a life that's diminished in so many other ways.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
Or you lose your faith entirely and then you become incredibly upset at being forced to kind of go to these places of worship and participate in this, what you regard as a farce now or something you just don't even care about. You have so little time left in the world that now you're forced to kind of spend it kind of engaging in these practices.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
um other kinds of things happen like with respect to like there can be kind of catastrophic memory loss or a loss of agency in various ways and um and the problem is is that um when you're trying you can be told well this is a kind of change that's going to happen to you but until you're actually you know experiencing that change there are just dimensions of it that you can't predict and
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
The thought behind an advanced directive is that you're supposed to lay this out now or you're a rational individual and make rational choices for your future self who's unable to make those rational choices.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
But if you're not able to actually rationally make those choices in the way that we described, because you don't know enough about the nature of that experience to assign it value in the right way or what you're going to care about in that context, because you're going to change as the result of having the kind of cognitive change or the cognitive degradation that happens. that's in store.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
So seems to me that instead of asking people to perform an impossible task, we should just be more flexible and not require people to have to make rational choices about their future care before they're actually like embedded in that situation.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
Now, there is a problem because sometimes people can't make choices at all, like if they're not able to speak or they're not able to kind of advocate for themselves in various ways. And I think part of the reason why people develop advanced directives is because they want their family members to have something from them. that guides them.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
That's right. I mean, well, for someone who doesn't want to be where they are, who doesn't have any kind of religious, shall we say, belief or faith to guide them, who I think is alienated, unhappy, it's really no surprise that he was completely miserable. And then he also had started to have serious health problems. So I think this added a certain kind of difficulty to his life.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
And family members often feel very grateful at having this guide. But again, it's not clear to me that those guides are appropriate for the selves that result from whatever has happened, either if it's like cognitive decline or physical decline or some combination of that.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
So you have a guide in how you're supposed to kind of make decisions for someone, but that guide was appropriate to who they were before the transformation. It doesn't fit to who they are afterwards. I think the notion of an advance directive actually really does need to be rethought.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
I do think it can happen at a collective level. I think, for example, when we went through a pandemic, what happened was a kind of collective discovery of the collective effects of social distancing and not being able to do things like go to the gym or see people that you regularly saw in some kind of casual way. We discovered the value of casual kind of contact in lots of informal circumstances.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
It's changed us as individuals and it's changed us as a society. And so, and I think war can do that to a society. And I think massive political upheaval and other kinds of contexts can do that. And I don't think there are any straightforward answers.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
I think it's also just super helpful to understand that this conceptual framework can apply and to recognize that there's an element of true unknown when that happens.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
Well, that's right. And, you know, it may be that the process of electing someone changes the person who you've elected so that what they were committed to before the election might actually change afterwards.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
So if the person that they are is changed by, for example, a landslide victory or being surrounded by people who change that person's character or commitments in various ways, then what we end up with as the result of an election process might actually be a transformed candidate, which then is going to change the results in various ways.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
Alfred Nobel was a chemist, an inventor, and what he invented was dynamite. And so basically he was a contributor to, indirectly to the deaths of many, especially when explosives are used in war. And what happened was, There was a premature obituary that described him as the merchant of death. And he was horrified when he discovered this because that was not how he wanted to be remembered.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
And so when he got this kind of insight, this sort of unexpected discovery of how he would be regarded by future generations, he dedicated his fortune basically to establishing the Nobel Prize in which obviously is a huge contribution to scientific discovery and innovation and to intellectual discovery more generally, and changed his legacy fundamentally.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
So he's rescued. But that's right. He's not even he hasn't repented. Right. He's even though he had a difficult time in Africa, he was badly treated, got himself into trouble. And in general, he sort of just went back to his old ways. And even this kind of near miss didn't seem to have a significant effect. Yeah.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
Well, okay, so a detail was that he happened to have with him a devotional text called The Imitation of Christ, and he had been reading it. And this is before the storm. So this was something that he'd been reading as he was traveling.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
And then in the middle of the storm, he suddenly had the realization that not only was his life in danger and the life of the entire crew is in danger, it was this incredibly intense situation, but he realized that if there was a God, he could expect no mercy.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
And so he realized at the heart of this incredibly frightening situation where imagine a small, basically wooden boat being tossed around the sea with incredibly huge waves towering over it, looking like, knowing that at any moment death could come. And then at that moment, you realize that you're in a position of vulnerability.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
And I think someone with religious faith would then look to God as a protector. And he realized both in that moment that he truly was vulnerable, but given his past life and his past way of being, that even in this moment of vulnerability, he didn't deserve the kind of mercy that God would provide.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
Yeah, exactly. So I think it's like, I think it's a combination of, you know, realizing that, wait, I'm in trouble, but also for the first time, maybe kind of comprehending what vulnerability requires. It seems to me that in this particular context, he was able, maybe for the first time, to realize what real vulnerability implied and also what the promise of being saved from that entailed.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
In other words, he was able to kind of see the appeal of religious belief, maybe for the first time.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
So it did survive, but I think an important element of that survival came from Newton because he took the helm for many hours and for most of a day and used this time, apparently, as he was basically attempting to kind of having the ship respond to the waves and dealing with all the problems of the storm, also reflected on his situation and who he was and what he was doing
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
What he had done, his past immorality, his past behavior, the way that he had isolated himself from other people and really had a bit of an existential crisis. As the storm subsided, he, I think, sort of also kind of emotionally collapsed.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
That's right. So it seems like what happened was after experiencing this intense vulnerability and in the midst of that, recognizing the power of being saved and sort of understanding what that really meant and how in a moment of great openness you can be saved and recognizing that as in some sense as the appeal of Christ. So I think he interprets this, it seems like he interpreted this as
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
moment of insight, then he was allowed to then return to land and survive. And the ship gets back just before a second huge storm. So he feels like there was a sequence where he experienced a kind of openness and a recognition of the divine kind of power and grace of God. He prays in response. God grants him then the opportunity to survive by getting him to land in time.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
After that, basically, he starts going to church and kind of performing devotional services.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
So the hymn begins with amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost, but now I'm found, was blind, but now I see. Twas grace that taught my heart to fear and grace my fears relieved. How precious did that grace appear the hour I first believed. And so you see it here, right?
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
So here's this description, basically, of someone who's finding themselves really in a pit of despair and in darkness and lost and who's gone through great pain and then suddenly is relieved from this fear and can see the beauty of what protection and love and goodness could bring.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
Well, I think this is something that's very hard for any of us to make sense of. So anyone, certainly someone like John Newton, would view the future version of themselves that was kind of committed to a religious perspective as fundamentally unlike them because the way that they made sense of reality is fundamentally how they can make sense of reality.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
And I think would, you know, kind of reject that. You know, of course I wouldn't be like that. That's just not me.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
Yes. This is another transformative experience. And I expect that it was related to his own discovery of both how one can be deeply vulnerable and how protection from the horrors of a problematic and violent world is so important. And my thought is that he participated in the slave trade and he participated in some of the atrocities.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
And so I think he had a direct understanding of the kinds of individual and societal cruelties that were being imposed on people that were being enslaved. And I think to understand how terrible it is to be in a vulnerable position, I think one has to have experienced that.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
So if you've never experienced that kind of vulnerability, or maybe you've papered over it, I mean, he did lose his mother at a young age, and he was taught to kind of be a hard man and not be empathic and not think about himself or about others.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
But when he learned to think about himself and understand himself as a vulnerable person who needed saving, I think that what he discovered when he discovered redemption was And being saved himself from a watery grave was, I think, his capacity to understand that there might be other people who could also be vulnerable and needed saving.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
And so I like to think that his path basically to becoming an abolitionist was lighted by his ability to discover his own redemption and, you know, and to kind of find connection with other people through that.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
Exactly. And so this is, I think, another version where he realizes how badly he had behaved. What he did was he drew from his own personal experience, both what he did as a slave trader and what he saw as a slave trader, others doing, and recognized that he needed to confess. He needed to confess to his own sins and also describe the sins of others.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
And obviously, this is the same kind of thing that you see in other sorts of religious confessions of being a sinner and was able to, I think, demonstrate through implicating himself in the truthfulness of his account and also the cruelty and outrageousness of what was being done.
Hidden Brain
The Moments that Change Us
So he was able, I think, through the pamphlet to bring home in a particular way the outrages that were being perpetrated and to show the immoral nature of the practice. And this made, I think, a significant contribution to the political movement to abolish slavery in England.