Transformative choices and the structure of experience

Yuri Cath (La Trobe University)

Paul (2014, 2015) argues that one cannot rationally decide whether to have a new and very different experience—like becoming a parent for the first time—on the basis of one’s prior judgments about what it would be like to have that experience, and the subjective value of having that experience with those 'what it is like' properties. In Cath (2018) I argued that ‘what it is like’-knowledge comes in degrees and, appealing to this idea, I also suggested that some instances of Paul’s argument schema might commit a fallacy of equivocation. The purpose of this paper is to explore a range of different replies that might be given to this equivocation objection, including replies that appeal to first-personal perspectives, the difficulties in comparing experiences across different sensory modalities, and holistic views of experience on which phenomenal properties cannot be broken down into different “building blocks”.