over my head at least... maybe if I was a philosophy major?...

PHILOSOPHY, YOU SAY?

Hmmm...let's take a look at this link, now...

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaannnnnddddd.......

That's a load of Wittgenstein-esque garbarge, overcomplicating the ideal with an attempt to quantify and assign numerical values to soemthing as abstract as Pascal's Wager--never mind that Pascal's Wager deals with a very specific METAPHYSICAL dilemma, that being, "Should I believe in God or not? and this is borrowing the name but not at all keeping the ideas of Pascal's Wager as it takes off on the physical--while compleely missing the point.

So, yes.

Absurd--and not in the cool, Existential way.

"overcomplicating the ideal with an attempt to quantify and assign numerical values"

hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaahhahahahahaahahahahahahahahaahahahahahahha

simpleton! :p

"overcomplicating the ideal with an attempt to quantify and assign numerical values"

I call BS. Making all the involved quantities finite can only simplify the problem, not overcomplicate it.

I think a computer with 500 TB memory, operating at 2 GHz is easier to understand than an omniscient, omnipotent god.

Just take the "omni" away, and everything becomes simple.

Basvan +1

Except you're talking about a finite object or thing, already quantifiable, becoming even MORE EASILY quantifiable and finite.

That makes sense.

I don't disagree.

What THIS is doing is taking an ABSTRACT and NON-FINITE idea and attempting to make it finite and quantiofiable via jargon...

Pascal's Wager pertains to belief, spirituality, and God.

Can you quantify "belief?"
Or God?
Or spirituality?

This is no different than trying to give a a value to "love."

Sorry--not everything is finite, and your counterpoint and this ideal seems to treat them as such.

Hence the overcomolication...the OPPOSITE of what they intended to do.

Using you're logic, what's simpler:

Saying "love" and just going with your instinct on want that might mean...

Or arbitrarily assigning mass fields of numbers and signs to justify your personal interpretation of the word.

There are plenty of ways to break Pascal's Wager.

This is not one of them.

The way to break Pascal's Wager is to point out that God, if he existed, would see through Pascal's cheap attempt to con his way into the afterlife.

+1 Jamie

The advantage you get when working with numbers is that you can overestimate and underestimate.

Suppose I come up to you on the street and say "Give me 100 bucks or I'll kill your mother" (don't worry, I won't). Then you would probably not give me any money, but call the cops instead.

The next day I come back and say "Give me 10 bucks, or I'll kill 10 people". The next day 1 dollar vs. 100 people. At some point you wil decide it's not worth risking all those lives, and just pay up.

"Sorry--not everything is finite"

Really? Who told you that? That's a pretty strong statement.

Modern physics is all about removing infinities (divergences as we call them). If the physical world-view is correct, then there are no true infinities.

Can modern physics remove abstract ideas?

Abstract ideas are NOT finite.

Let's leave aside the "God/spirituality" example for the moment, since 1. I'll freely concede that such ideas are perfectly open to scrutiny and 2. I really want to avoid this becoming another fanatic-fest between believers and non-believers.

Let's instead adopt my first example...I don't believe in it myself, but it works here:

Love.

Now, you can give me a physical description of hormoes and pheremones and chemical reactions and all of that which cause attraction and the like...

But can you measure LOVE ITSELF, as unbelievably corny as that may sound?

Can you quantify how much, to what degree love exists between people, and quantify the nature of that love, make it soemthing finite?

What about freedom?

You can, again, give some physical definition of it, but at the same time, it's still an abstract ideal, "freedom," it's not entirely dependent upon, and thus not entirely open to, physical ideals.

Perhaps most classically of all...

"Goodness" and "Justice."

Plato devotes "Philo" to the former and an enormous section--if not even possibly the main focus of--"The republic" to the latter.

What is "Good?" You can give positive/negative chemical reactions as a partial answer, again, but the idea of goodness itself is SUBJECTIVE to a great extent and numbers are OBJECTIVE...

A 2 is a 2; no matter how much you might want to interpret it as such, 2 =/= 17.

And then there's justice.

What's justice?

How can you quantify THAT, finitely, with numbers?

Hence my statement that not everything is finite...

Finititude depends upon something being concrete, and so long as the abstract exists, even in part, not everything is finite.

"Sorry--not everything is finite, and your counterpoint and this ideal seems to treat them as such."

Yeah. This is when we disagree. You're approaching this from a fundamentally different epistemology. My answer to love would be to attempt to assign it a utility function, like everything else in my life, and reevaluate accordingly, based on probabilities and utilities.

"What is "Good?" You can give positive/negative chemical reactions as a partial answer, again, but the idea of goodness itself is SUBJECTIVE to a great extent and numbers are OBJECTIVE..."

Good is what I define it to be. Something is "good" to me if it gives me more utility than disutility. Let's say I value a human life at $1, a gross underestimation. Then in the original example, my utility function looks like this.

Utility(pay him off) = -$5.
Utility(don't pay him) = -$3^^^^3 * Probability(Dude is a god and is telling the truth)

Since 3^^^^3 is so absurdly large, no reasonable probability could ever be small enough to fully account for it (And even if it is, then the mugger could just choose a larger number) despite how absurd it is. Because you can't actually assign a probability of zero to that, because you can't concretely and entirely disprove the theory that he is a god and is telling you the truth.

So an individuals utility is clearly maximized by paying off the mugger. Is this the "rational" choice, despite the fact that almost no human would pay him off? Would you pay him off?

@ Jamie:

This isn't to argue against Pascal's wager. He just took the name, because it's a similar circumstance. Pascal's wager is so intrinsically and absurdly stupid he wouldn't waste time arguing against it.

@ Smiley: I was commenting on obiwan's post immediately above mine, not the OP itself.

@obiwan:
I'll join you in not bringing any religious argument into this discussion. That's beside the point right now.

It sure is difficult to define what "Justice" or "Goodness entails", but that does not mean it is impossible. These terms being subjective is no problem, you just need 6 billion versions of "justice".

You might insist that these abstract concepts are so ungraspable that they elude any definition based on nuclear and/or chemical reactions, however elaborate such a defintion would be. In that case I would argue that these abstract concepts simply do not exist in our real world.

And I don't really care what Plato said or didn't say.