by Tim Sommers
Welcome to the VR office and, hopefully, welcome to the coven! No, it’s not just witches, a group of vampires is called a “coven” too. VR? Human Resources for vampires, obviously.
Just a few last details before we can move forward. Lunch after, so let’s get through this.
I know that some of this has already been covered, but there’s a certain vampire to human ratio that it’s essential to enforce if we are going to continue letting humans do the hard work of maintaining things while we live amongst them undetected.
You’re aware, no doubt, of the many positive aspects of being a vampire. You will stop aging, repair injuries easily, potentially live forever, be erotically mesmerizing to humans (even though always dressed like a goth), have superhuman senses and strength and, yes, you can turn into a bat.
Can you even imagine what it’s like to be a bat?
Downsides. Obviously, can’t go to church, be around crosses, holy water. You can’t go outside during the day. You don’t appear in mirrors, which for many is a big one, I mean, fixing your hair can be a nightmare!
What else? You can’t put garlic on your pizza. In fact, you can’t have pizza at all. Or coffee. Or chocolate. Or alcohol. Or anything except human blood. Which I guess is a biggie for a lot of people, but I don’t really get it. I mean, sure, you have to murder and consume the blood of a human several times a week, but what’s the big deal really? There are billions of them.
But please, keep in mind, being a vampire, a hunter, an outsider, is no easy thing. It’s not like the movies where you just go to parties or lounge about all night between kills. No. Being a vampire, in many ways, is more a thrill than a pleasure.
For me, Zadie Smith put it best when she said,
“Occasionally [being a vampire] is a pleasure, though mostly [it] is a joy, which means in fact [you get] not much pleasure at all but rather that strange admixture of terror, pain, and delight that I have come to recognize as joy and now must find some way to live with daily. This [will be your] new problem.”
Oh, no, you’re right. She was talking about having a child. But close enough.
Did you know that as many as 14% of new parents regret their decision to have a child? Did you know that over the past 50 years, one of social science’s most robust findings is that kids don’t make parents any happier. The net effect is zero or slightly less happiness on average.” Those numbers may seem small, but suppose that many vampires were unhappy in their new life? It could be a big problem.
So, here’s the whole “why are we here here” part. Like becoming a parent, undergoing a religious conversion, or even traveling to a new place and adapting to a new culture, becoming a vampire is a transformative experience. When you come out the other side of this experience you will literally be a new person – and that’s the problem. How can you make a reasonable choice about whether to do it, whether to embrace a transformative experience? And, more importantly, how can we trust your choice?
I’m going to walk you through some of the issues and see what you have to say.
So, number one, why would you choose to be a different person? Not only can you not, in the present, reasonably regard the person you will become as you, but they can’t regard themselves as having been you. In a very real sense, you are killing yourself.
Human sources tell us that “The possibility of non-existence (or something regarded as equivalent to non-existence) means that even if an agent knows all the facts about value and future preferences, they cannot use standard decision-making procedures in a straightforward way—at least not if they’re self-interested. After all, even if a future transformed self would be incredibly happy and live a good, meaningful life, that doesn’t help the agent contemplating transformation if that future transformed self is not them in the relevant sense.”
Hmmm… That’s a good response. All humans do change over time – even if vampires don’t. So, people can become someone new without undergoing a transformative experience. But not all at once. This is more like Saul on the road to Damascus, than Alcoholics Anonymous.
Some people do argue that all of us will be different people in the future and that us-now may be more closely related to others than to us-then. But that just spreads the problem around without solving it, doesn’t it?
Oh. So, you don’t feel that great about yourself now, anyway? Great.
Still, be aware, transformative experiences also involve extreme preference changes. How you value something is unlikely to remain the same. All blood, no food, for example. Submitting yourself to such an experience based on your preferences now, in fact, in no way guarantees that those preferences will survive the transformation. Nothing guarantees that. So, even if you are sure of preferences now you may regret the decision based on your new preferences. In fact, most vampires, like humans, have a bias towards the present and future, and give little or no weight to past preferences. Once you transform, you too will very likely give no weight at all to your past preferences – including your original desire to be a vampire.
You hadn’t thought of it that way? I understand. Starting to doubt your ability to decide? More time to think about it? No problem. Alright.
Let me show you to our lunch room, then.
Why?
Well, as I indicated at the beginning, one way or another, we are having you for lunch.
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*Based on L.A. Paul’s book Transformative Experience.