Very good point, and crystalizes some of my thinking on some of the discussion on the tyrant/charity thing.
As far as the specific problems you posed...
For your souped up Pascal’s Wager, I admit that one gives me pause. Taking into account the fact that Omega singled out one out of the space of all possible religions, etc etc… Well, the answer isn’t obvious to me right now. This flavor would seem to not admit to any of the usual basic refutations of the wager. I think under these circumstances, assuming Omega wasn’t open to answering any further questions and wasn’t giving any other info, I’d probably at least spend rather more time investigating Catholicism, studying the religion a bit more and really thinking things through.
For question 2 (the really “god shaped” hole) though, personally, while I value happiness, it’s not the only thing I value. I’ll take truth, thank you very much. (In the spirit of this, I’m assuming there’s no psychological trick that would let me fake-believe enough to fill the hole or other ways of getting around the problem.) But yeah, I think I’d choose truth there.
Question 3? Assuming the most inconvenient world (ie, there’s no way that I could potentially do more good by keeping the money, etc etc, no way out of the “give it away to do maximal good”) well, I’m not sure what I’d do, but I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to in any way justify not giving it away to Charity X. Though, if I actually had a known Omega give me that information, then I think that might just be enough to give me the mental/emotional/willpower strength to do it. ie, assuming that I KNEW that that way was really the path if I wanted to optimize the good I do in the world, not just in an abstract theoretical way, but was actually told that by a known Omega, well, that might be enough to get me to actually do it.
Very good point, and crystalizes some of my thinking on some of the discussion on the tyrant/charity thing.
As far as the specific problems you posed...
For your souped up Pascal’s Wager, I admit that one gives me pause. Taking into account the fact that Omega singled out one out of the space of all possible religions, etc etc… Well, the answer isn’t obvious to me right now. This flavor would seem to not admit to any of the usual basic refutations of the wager. I think under these circumstances, assuming Omega wasn’t open to answering any further questions and wasn’t giving any other info, I’d probably at least spend rather more time investigating Catholicism, studying the religion a bit more and really thinking things through.
For question 2 (the really “god shaped” hole) though, personally, while I value happiness, it’s not the only thing I value. I’ll take truth, thank you very much. (In the spirit of this, I’m assuming there’s no psychological trick that would let me fake-believe enough to fill the hole or other ways of getting around the problem.) But yeah, I think I’d choose truth there.
Question 3? Assuming the most inconvenient world (ie, there’s no way that I could potentially do more good by keeping the money, etc etc, no way out of the “give it away to do maximal good”) well, I’m not sure what I’d do, but I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to in any way justify not giving it away to Charity X. Though, if I actually had a known Omega give me that information, then I think that might just be enough to give me the mental/emotional/willpower strength to do it. ie, assuming that I KNEW that that way was really the path if I wanted to optimize the good I do in the world, not just in an abstract theoretical way, but was actually told that by a known Omega, well, that might be enough to get me to actually do it.
The souped up Pascal’s Wager seems like the thousand door version of Monty Hall.