The standard answer is “But what if the Muslims are right?” You can’t be both a Christian and a Muslim, and you lose by guessing wrong. We have no more reason to believe we’ll be rewarded for believing in God X than we have to believe we’ll be punished for believing in God X, as we would be if God Y were the correct one.
All this does is show that the dilemma must have a flaw somewhere, but it doesn’t explicitly show that flaw. The same problem occurs with finding the flaws in proposed perpeptual motion machines, you know there must be a flaw somewhere, but it’s often tricky to find it.
I think the flaw in Pascal’s wager is allowing “Heaven” to have infinite utility. Unbounded utilities, fine; infinite utilities, no.
“The original problem with Pascal’s Wager is not that the purported payoff is large. This is not where the flaw in the reasoning comes from. That is not the problematic step. The problem with Pascal’s original Wager is that the probability is exponentially tiny (in the complexity of the Christian God) and that equally large tiny probabilities offer opposite payoffs for the same action (the Muslim God will damn you for believing in the Christian God). ”
This is just wishful thinking, as I said in another reply. The probabilities do not balance.
What about “living forever”? According to Eliezer, this has infinite utility. I agree that if you assign it a finite utility, then the lifespan dilemma fails (at some point), and similarly, if you assign “heaven” a finite utility, then Pascal’s Wager will fail, if you make the utility of heaven low enough.
The standard answer is “But what if the Muslims are right?” You can’t be both a Christian and a Muslim, and you lose by guessing wrong. We have no more reason to believe we’ll be rewarded for believing in God X than we have to believe we’ll be punished for believing in God X, as we would be if God Y were the correct one.
All this does is show that the dilemma must have a flaw somewhere, but it doesn’t explicitly show that flaw. The same problem occurs with finding the flaws in proposed perpeptual motion machines, you know there must be a flaw somewhere, but it’s often tricky to find it.
I think the flaw in Pascal’s wager is allowing “Heaven” to have infinite utility. Unbounded utilities, fine; infinite utilities, no.
See The Pascal’s Wager Fallacy Fallacy.
Betting on infinity.
That’s a great video.
Elliezer in that article:
“The original problem with Pascal’s Wager is not that the purported payoff is large. This is not where the flaw in the reasoning comes from. That is not the problematic step. The problem with Pascal’s original Wager is that the probability is exponentially tiny (in the complexity of the Christian God) and that equally large tiny probabilities offer opposite payoffs for the same action (the Muslim God will damn you for believing in the Christian God). ”
This is just wishful thinking, as I said in another reply. The probabilities do not balance.
What about “living forever”? According to Eliezer, this has infinite utility. I agree that if you assign it a finite utility, then the lifespan dilemma fails (at some point), and similarly, if you assign “heaven” a finite utility, then Pascal’s Wager will fail, if you make the utility of heaven low enough.