Transformative Experience (L.A. Paul, 2014)
“If an experience changes you enough to substantially change your point of view, thus substantially revising your core preferences or revising how you experience being yourself, it is a personally transformative experience.
The inaccessibility of radically new experiences brings out the personal dimension of the fact I mentioned above, that what you can know at one time can be inaccessible to you at another time.
Some personal transformations might be extensive, but also predictable, perhaps because you’ve undergone a similar transformation in the past.
But if a personally transformative experience is a radically new experience for you, it means that important features of your future self, the self that results from the personal transformation, are epistemically inaccessible to your current, inexperienced self.
A radically new experience can fundamentally change your own point of view so much and so deeply that, before you’ve had that experience, you can’t know what it is going to be like to be you after the experience.
It changes your subjective value for what it is like to be you, and changes your core preferences about what matters.
This means that experiences, as I shall discuss them, have two ways of being transformative.
They can be epistemically transformative, giving you new information in virtue of your experience.
And they can be personally transformative, changing how you experience being who you are.
Some experiences may be epistemically transformative while not being personally transformative, like tasting a durian for the first time.
Some experiences may be personally transformative without being epistemically transformative.”