The utility of having a belief is what is being considered in Pascal’s wager, and is quite different from the utility of the belief itself.
The utility of a belief itself wouldn’t sway you to choose one belief over another. Suppose againyou have the two beliefs X and Y, and they each have a certain utility if they are true. If X is true, then you “get” that utility, independently of whether you believed it or not, by virtue of it being true. For example, if there is utility to God existing, then there is that benefit of him existing whether you believe in him or not.
In contrast, there is also utility for having a belief.
To complicate things, there is a component of the utility that is independent of whether the belief is true or not, and there is a component of the utility that depends on the belief being true. In the case of theism, there is a utility to being a theist (positive or negative, depending on who you ask) regardless of whether God exists, and there would also be an extra utility for believing in him if he does exist (possibly zero, if he doesn’t care whether you believe in him or not).
You mean the case of the argument applied to theism? I would be willing to forfeit the applicability of the argument for this case, since I’m just interested in discussing the validity of the general argument.
I don’t like discussing general cases when I don’t have some concrete examples. The only ones I can think of are boring cases of coercion involving unethical mindreaders.
Yes, I agree: the utility of having a belief only makes sense when for some reason you are rewarded for actually having the belief instead of acting as though you have the belief.
OK, since theism is unique in this aspect, in order to generalize away from the theistic, let’s use the utility for acting-as-though-you-believe instead of the utility for actually believing, because in most cases, these should be the same.
… but then, as soon as you do this, the argument become just about choosing actions based on average expected utility and there’s nothing controversial about it. So I guess PW might just suffer from lack of application: there are few cases where you are actually differentially rewarded for having a belief (instead of just acting as though you do), and these cases (generalizing from theism) involve hypotheses that are too complex to parametrize (Silas’ argument).
Back to the immediate object level: PeerInfinity wrote about applying Pascal’s Wager to atheism. However, atheism doesn’t make a utility distinction between having a belief and acting as though you do. Or does it? Having beliefs motivate actions and make them easier to compute.
When PeerInfinity said he chose to believe atheism because it seemed to maximize utility, he might have been summarizing together that acting as though atheism was true was deemed utility maximal, and believing in atheism then followed as utility maximal.
Why would having the beliefs have utility? Isn’t utility a function of actions, as a rule?
There’s no contradiction in thinking “A is unlikely” and yet acting as if A is true—otherwise no-one would wear seat belts.
The utility of having a belief is what is being considered in Pascal’s wager, and is quite different from the utility of the belief itself.
The utility of a belief itself wouldn’t sway you to choose one belief over another. Suppose againyou have the two beliefs X and Y, and they each have a certain utility if they are true. If X is true, then you “get” that utility, independently of whether you believed it or not, by virtue of it being true. For example, if there is utility to God existing, then there is that benefit of him existing whether you believe in him or not.
In contrast, there is also utility for having a belief.
To complicate things, there is a component of the utility that is independent of whether the belief is true or not, and there is a component of the utility that depends on the belief being true. In the case of theism, there is a utility to being a theist (positive or negative, depending on who you ask) regardless of whether God exists, and there would also be an extra utility for believing in him if he does exist (possibly zero, if he doesn’t care whether you believe in him or not).
SilasBarta has pointed out a relevant argument regarding that case.
You mean the case of the argument applied to theism? I would be willing to forfeit the applicability of the argument for this case, since I’m just interested in discussing the validity of the general argument.
I don’t like discussing general cases when I don’t have some concrete examples. The only ones I can think of are boring cases of coercion involving unethical mindreaders.
Yes, I agree: the utility of having a belief only makes sense when for some reason you are rewarded for actually having the belief instead of acting as though you have the belief.
OK, since theism is unique in this aspect, in order to generalize away from the theistic, let’s use the utility for acting-as-though-you-believe instead of the utility for actually believing, because in most cases, these should be the same.
… but then, as soon as you do this, the argument become just about choosing actions based on average expected utility and there’s nothing controversial about it. So I guess PW might just suffer from lack of application: there are few cases where you are actually differentially rewarded for having a belief (instead of just acting as though you do), and these cases (generalizing from theism) involve hypotheses that are too complex to parametrize (Silas’ argument).
Back to the immediate object level: PeerInfinity wrote about applying Pascal’s Wager to atheism. However, atheism doesn’t make a utility distinction between having a belief and acting as though you do. Or does it? Having beliefs motivate actions and make them easier to compute.
When PeerInfinity said he chose to believe atheism because it seemed to maximize utility, he might have been summarizing together that acting as though atheism was true was deemed utility maximal, and believing in atheism then followed as utility maximal.