Life’s biggest decisions are always the most Uncomfortable. Should you have a baby? Should you quit your job? Should you move to a new country? Should you drop acid? Anytime you’re faced with a decision that is likely to change who you are, you’re faced with a unique conundrum: The person you’ll be - who’ll judge whether you made the right call or the wrong one - is future you. They’re a different person than Future You would be if present-day You had made the opposite decision. Still with me? How are we supposed to decide how to lead a good life, if we can only ever know what we know right now (but we need to make decisions now that will affect who we become in the future)? Laurie Paul is a professor of philosophy and cognitive science at Yale University who’s a leading expert on the counterfactual analysis of causation and the concept of transformative experience. She joins Josh to discuss how we judge whether to become a parent, how your preferences get scrambled by addiction, why atheists and religious people are secretly terrified of each other’s epiphanies, what cochlear implants tell us about identity, A.I., psychedelics, and what it means to make a choice in a state of radical ignorance… about who you’ll be once you’ve made it.

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“What did the council decide on item 42?” — answered with the speaker and the moment.

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