I’m pretty sure I could be convinced of an afterlife pretty quickly. Obvious things would be allowing me to see my dead body and funeral, and the other events surrounding my death. I’d also like some evidence that I’m talking to a being with powers that humans generally lack. The most obvious ways to test that is to pick some list of statements that probably have proofs (e.g. the Riemann hypothesis, whether there are infinitely many Mersenne primes, possibly a few substantially weaker statements thrown in) and to have it pick one and present a proof or disproof to me. It is possible that it is wrecking with my brain to think that I’m seeing a valid proof when it isn’t but I don’t assign that a very high probability. I’d also be interested in seeing personal information that no human has an easy way of knowing (and I have a few obvious examples ready on hand). This all wouldn’t make me certain that I’m in an afterlife- a sufficiently powerful alien force could duplicate this sort of thing, but it would be assigned a pretty high probability.
Incidentally, I’m not sure I agree with the statement that the situation demonstrates a failure of Pascal’s Wager by itself. Nothing in the hypothetical says that there’s an afterlife where one is rewarded iff one believed in the right deity. By itself, finding out that there’s actually an afterlife might even be a pleasant surprise. If for example we’re in a simulation and the simulator cares enough about intelligence that all intelligent life is not only backed up but gets to keep processing, that would be a good thing. Even if the afterlife is due to a more classical theistic universe where it turns out that we really have “souls” or some other ontologically irreducible portion of our consciousness, that seems not obviously bad.
I’m pretty sure I could be convinced of an afterlife pretty quickly. Obvious things would be allowing me to see my dead body and funeral, and the other events surrounding my death. I’d also like some evidence that I’m talking to a being with powers that humans generally lack. The most obvious ways to test that is to pick some list of statements that probably have proofs (e.g. the Riemann hypothesis, whether there are infinitely many Mersenne primes, possibly a few substantially weaker statements thrown in) and to have it pick one and present a proof or disproof to me. It is possible that it is wrecking with my brain to think that I’m seeing a valid proof when it isn’t but I don’t assign that a very high probability. I’d also be interested in seeing personal information that no human has an easy way of knowing (and I have a few obvious examples ready on hand). This all wouldn’t make me certain that I’m in an afterlife- a sufficiently powerful alien force could duplicate this sort of thing, but it would be assigned a pretty high probability.
Incidentally, I’m not sure I agree with the statement that the situation demonstrates a failure of Pascal’s Wager by itself. Nothing in the hypothetical says that there’s an afterlife where one is rewarded iff one believed in the right deity. By itself, finding out that there’s actually an afterlife might even be a pleasant surprise. If for example we’re in a simulation and the simulator cares enough about intelligence that all intelligent life is not only backed up but gets to keep processing, that would be a good thing. Even if the afterlife is due to a more classical theistic universe where it turns out that we really have “souls” or some other ontologically irreducible portion of our consciousness, that seems not obviously bad.