Good point, I edited my form of the argument to include ‘sets of beliefs’. If having a set of beliefs maximizes your utility, then having the set is what you “should” do, I think, in the spirit of the argument.
Accepting God as a probable hypothesis has a lot of epistemic implications. This is not just one thing, everything is connected, one thing being true implies other things being true, other things being false. You won’t be seeing the world as you currently believe it to be, after accepting such change, you will be seeing a strange magical version of it, a version you are certain doesn’t correspond to reality. Mutilating your mind like this has enormous destructive consequences on your ability to understand the real world, and hence on ability to make the right choices, even if you forget about the hideousness of doing this to yourself. This is the part that is usually overlooked in Pascal’s wager.
(Belief in belief keeps the human believers out of most of the trouble, but that’s not what Pascal’s wager advocates! Not understanding this distinction may lead to underestimating the horror of the suggestion.)
Good point, I edited my form of the argument to include ‘sets of beliefs’. If having a set of beliefs maximizes your utility, then having the set is what you “should” do, I think, in the spirit of the argument.
Accepting God as a probable hypothesis has a lot of epistemic implications. This is not just one thing, everything is connected, one thing being true implies other things being true, other things being false. You won’t be seeing the world as you currently believe it to be, after accepting such change, you will be seeing a strange magical version of it, a version you are certain doesn’t correspond to reality. Mutilating your mind like this has enormous destructive consequences on your ability to understand the real world, and hence on ability to make the right choices, even if you forget about the hideousness of doing this to yourself. This is the part that is usually overlooked in Pascal’s wager.
(Belief in belief keeps the human believers out of most of the trouble, but that’s not what Pascal’s wager advocates! Not understanding this distinction may lead to underestimating the horror of the suggestion.)