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.
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.