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Imagine that you have a one-time-only chance to become a vampire. With one swift, painless bite, you’ll be permanently transformed into an elegant and fabulous creature of the night. As a member of the Undead, your life will be completely different. You’ll experience a range of intense new sense experiences, you’ll gain immortal strength, speed and power, and you’ll look fantastic in everything you wear. You’ll also need to drink the blood of humanely farmed animals (but not human blood), avoid sunlight, and sleep in a coffin.

Now, suppose that all of your friends, people whose interests, views and lives were similar to yours, have already decided to become vampires. And all of them tell you that they love it. They encourage you to become a vampire too, saying things like: “I’d never go back, even if I could. Life has meaning and a sense of purpose now that it never had when I was human. It’s amazing! But I can’t really explain it to you, a mere human. You’ll have to become a vampire to know what it’s like.”

In this situation, how could you possibly make an informed choice about what to do? For, after all, you cannot know what it is like to become a vampire until you become one. The experience of becoming a vampire is transformative. What I mean by this is that it is an experience that is both radically epistemically new, such that you have to have it in order to know what it will be like for you, and moreover, will change your core personal preferences.

So you can’t rationally choose to become a vampire, but nor can you rationally choose to not become one, if you want to choose based on what you think it would be like to live your life as a vampire. This is because you can’t possibly know what it would be like before you try it. And you can’t possibly know what you’d be missing if you didn’t.

We don’t normally have to consider the choice to become Undead, but the structure of this example generalizes, and this makes trouble for a widely assumed story about how we should make momentous, life-changing choices for ourselves. The story is based on the assumption that, in modern western society, the ideal rational agent is supposed to charge of her own destiny, mapping out the subjective future she hopes to realize by rationally evaluating her options from her authentic, personal point of view. In other words, when we approach major life decisions, we are supposed to introspect on our past experiences and our current desires about what we want our futures to be like in order to guide us in determining our future selves. But if a big life choice is transformative, you can’t know what your future will be like, at least, not in the deeply relevant way that you want to know about it, until you’ve actually undergone the life experience.

Transformative experience cases are special kinds of cases where important ordinary approaches that people try to use to make better decisions, such as making better generalizations based on past experiences, or educating themselves to better evaluate and recognize their true desires or preferences, simply don’t apply. So transformative experience cases are not just cases involving our uncertainty about certain sorts of future experiences. They are special kinds of cases that focus on a distinctive kind of ‘unknowability’—certain important and distinctive values of the lived experiences in our possible futures are fundamentally first-personally unknowable. The problems with knowing what it will be like to undergo life experiences that will transform you can challenge the very coherence of the ordinary way to approach major decisions.

Moreover, the problem with these kinds of choices isn’t just with the unknowability of your future. Transformative experience cases also raise a distinctive kind of decision-theoretic problem for these decisions made for our future selves. Recall the vampire case I started with. The problem here is that, before you change, you are supposed to perform a simulation of how you’d respond to the experience in order to decide whether to change. But the trouble is, who you are changes as you become a vampire.

Think about it: before you become a vampire, you should assess the decision as a human. But you can’t imaginatively put yourself in the shoes of the vampire you will become and imaginatively assess what that future lived experience will be. And, after you have become a vampire, you’ve changed, such that your assessment of your decision now is different from the assessment you made as a human. So the question is, which assessment is the better one? Which view should determine who you become? The view you have when you are human? Or the one you have when you are a vampire.

The questions I’ve been raising here focus on the fictional case of the choice to be come a vampire. But many real-life experiences and the decisions they involve have the very same structure, such as the choice to have one’s first child. In fact, in many ways, the choice to become a parent is just like the choice to become a vampire! (You won’t have to drink any blood, but you will undergo a major transition, and life will never be the same again.)

In many ways, large and small, as we live our lives, we find ourselves confronted with a brute fact about how little we can know about our futures, just when it is most important to us that we do know. If that’s right, then for many big life choices, we only learn what we need to know after we’ve done it, and we change ourselves in the process of doing it. In the end, it may be that the most rational response to this situation is to change the way we frame these big decisions: instead of choosing based on what we think our futures will be like, we should choose based on whether we want to discover who we’ll become.

The post Vampires and life decisions appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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by Rayna (14)

I can’t say the exact moment when Jesus came into my life, changing me. You see, I had been going through an extended period of conviction and guilt. And numerous times, I knelt and gave my life to Him. But nothing really seemed to change, and even now, almost a year since my baptism, I don’t feel like a completely different person. I still fail daily. With my siblings, with my parents, I struggle most with controlling my tongue. But His grace is great, and plentiful, and I beg for it every evening.

But here is the truth: The moment (even though I don’t know that moment) Jesus entered into my heart, I became a new creature. “Old things were passed away, and all became new.” So even if the change wasn’t entirely visible, and even though I may not feel it, I know it’s there. Because the Bible is to be trusted.

So how has Jesus changed me? The simple answer is: in everything, because I became a new creature. And as a new creation of Jesus Christ’s I want to become more and more like Him, until I enter the shining, marvelous New Kingdom some sweet day.

Thank you Rayna!

So how has Jesus Changed You??

by an anonymous teen writer.

Everything was crashing down, and then my world was turned around. I was dealing with many things, everything was pouring in, burying me it seemed. My father’s relationship with my family was never a superb one. Even so, I was always considered to be ‘Daddy’s Little Girl’. Then he got a job across the country. It was supposed to be temporary but then the phone rang one evening, and everything changed.

He had decided to leave that night, and there I was… abandoned.

Four years later the divorce was finalized. I was angry with everything and everyone; I shut down emotionally, wanting to disappear into my own world of writing. This went on for a long, long time, I was trapped. A bit later an opportunity to go to a Christian conference in Colorado came up. It sounded fun and it was a way to get away, so I took up the offer. I soon found myself in Colorado Springs, Colorado for a week of ‘escape’. Then on the third day I was in the conference listening to the speakers, nothing seemed special that night, until worship began.

After the speaker they put music on, it was a song about surrendering. I was listening to the words when I was overcome with emotion, I began crying. I was supposed to surrender something to the Lord, but I had no idea what. I was frustrated with the fact that He wanted something that I didn’t think I had. Suddenly an arm was wrapped around me; a friend of mine had come over to comfort me. We sat in silence for a minute, and then he began to speak. He told me that I needed to surrender the broken half of me, and that I was a person with spirit and joy who couldn’t be both broken and joyful at the same time. He said that he saw Christ in me and that God wanted me to completely give Him my burden so I could be what He wanted me to be. I needed to surrender the pain, the anger, the abandonment. My friend told me that I was God’s daughter, no matter what. I came home from that conference changed. My family noticed it, and I noticed it too.

The Lord became my Shepherd, I was done wanting.

My life changed on my third day, the world changed on His third day. So when everything was crashing down, my world was turned around. I’m a child of God, and Jesus changed my life.

As the last week of March heats up, I’d like to post an extra life-changing entry. This one comes from a sweet gal who at the age of 13 has a better grip on this topic than I do most days. Thank you, Arianna for sharing your story…

My Life-Changing Moment

by Arianna

“Jesus has changed my life by always being there for me. I can be so stupid! I run from God, and try my own way. I like it too….for awhile. Then its over and I am left in a puddle of broken dreams and fears. And he’s always there, just waiting for me to come back, and take His hand. I have ditched Him so many times, but He’s loyal; He always waits for me to come back.
For this, I think I must say God is changing me. He’s not done. So, my life changing story is still in the process.”

How have you been changed?

by Rayna (14)

I can’t say the exact moment when Jesus came into my life, changing me. You see, I had been going through an extended period of conviction and guilt. And numerous times, I knelt and gave my life to Him. But nothing really seemed to change, and even now, almost a year since my baptism, I don’t feel like a completely different person. I still fail daily. With my siblings, with my parents, I struggle most with controlling my tongue. But His grace is great, and plentiful, and I beg for it every evening.

But here is the truth: The moment (even though I don’t know that moment) Jesus entered into my heart, I became a new creature. “Old things were passed away, and all became new.” So even if the change wasn’t entirely visible, and even though I may not feel it, I know it’s there. Because the Bible is to be trusted.

So how has Jesus changed me? The simple answer is: in everything, because I became a new creature. And as a new creation of Jesus Christ’s I want to become more and more like Him, until I enter the shining, marvelous New Kingdom some sweet day.

 Thank you Rayna!

So how has Jesus Changed You??

Ever feel like you’re wallowing in your own mud pit? Hang in there my friends. Another inspiring story will post tomorrow. You won’t want to miss it!

There’s good inside of everyone. Sappy or not, I believe that. Sometimes it takes a little more digging, but it’s there. Where’s the good inside of you? What do you do that puts others’ needs before your own? Share with us…

And don’t for get to share your life-changing stories. There’s only one more week before the entries close. Check it out. There are people who need to here your story–it might just encourage them in their journeys. Plus there are awesome giveaways and great teen writer mentors willing to help.

And if you’ve already written in…Thank You! We’ll begin posting them next week Thursday (3/2/11).

As I read through the blog challenge entries, I’m shredded by the events that have taken place in such young lives. Thank you for sending them in, everyone. Whether those life-changing moments came in a quiet, only-I-know-what-God-has-done event or a traumatic situation where God  rescued you in a public way, doesn’t diminish the power of your stories. So please don’t feel like your story isn’t important enough to share. Each story has merit.

I am touched by the grace and forgiveness each story holds as well. For this reason, I cannot wait to share them with everyone, but I must–wait that is. Sorry. Waiting does provide more folks to share their moments, though. I hope you will consider adding yours if you haven’t, yet. Someone needs to read your story. To be encouraged by your life. You have something beautiful to share. And I can’t wait to read it.

I’ll be praying for you.

Have you experienced a life-changing moment? One that redirected your entire outlook? Maybe you prayed for a friend and witnessed the answer to that prayer. Or perhaps you read a story or Bible verse that struck you as though God, Himself had spoken to you.

Please consider sharing your story with us. Throughout the month of March, we’ll feature writers (from 13 to 18 y-o) sharing their life-changing stories. In 500 words or less, tell us how Jesus has touched your life. All entries must be received by February 28, 2011 in order to qualify. For awesome writing tips and helps check out Caleb Breakey’s site (http://www.calebbreakey.com). One entry shall receive a $50 Amazon.com gift certificate and be featured all Easter Week. (Winning entry will be drawn at random).

To enter click here.

Thank you for sharing!