3 ms·
It sounds like a variant of Pascal's Wager - and Pascal himself is widely regarded as extremely intelligent, as the article states :) http://plato.stanford.edu
by GFischer 10y ago
It sounds like a variant of Pascal's Wager - and Pascal himself is widely regarded as extremely intelligent, as the article states :)
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pascal-wager/ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pascal-wager/
http://www.iep.utm.edu/pasc-wag/ http://www.iep.utm.edu/pasc-wag/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_Wager https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_Wager
edit: I missed jahnu's post inmediately below, with a similar theme "That's the essence of Pascal's Wager"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12486377 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12486377
edit2: and mcguire
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12488731 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12488731
So I guess I should say "me too"
- vintermann 10y agoI assume you speak about the third step, that if you suspect existence may meaningless, you might as well assume it has a meaning, because if you were correct it doesn't matter that you are wrong anyway (by definition). I don't think it's like Pascal's wager, because there's no need for probability here, and you're not trying to avoid any bad outcome. I think it's more like how Pascal rejected the concern that he might be insane (if you ask yourself "how do I know I'm not crazy?" you're basically already assuming you're not crazy). But, I haven't actually read all of Pascal's Pensees. What extracts I have read of it suggests to me that he's heavily straw-manned both by later philosophers and people writing about it today, so for all I know the "wager" was more like this, too.