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From: kjm@ut-ngp.UUCP (Ken Montgomery)
Newsgroups: net.religion
Subject: Torek's wager and its rationality
Message-ID: <1334@ut-ngp.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 16-Feb-85 01:36:46 EST
Article-I.D.: ut-ngp.1334
Posted: Sat Feb 16 01:36:46 1985
Date-Received: Mon, 18-Feb-85 05:37:11 EST
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Organization: U.Texas Computation Center, Austin, Texas
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[]

esk@wucs.UUCP (Paul V. Torek) writes:
>From: rlr@pyuxd
>> > believing in free will is OBjectively better because it carries no 
>> > penalty (of avoidable error) if mistaken but does carry a benefit 
>> > (avoiding avoidable error) if correct.  [TOREK]
>> Didn't someone else already explain this as analogous to Pascal's reasoning
>> for believing in god?  And didn't that person explain that, objectively and
>> rationally, one doesn't choose beliefs based on their utility, but rather
>> on their correctness?  [RICH ROSEN]
>
>And didn't I explain that that's a false dichotomy?  (How can a belief be 
>"correct" if we ought to believe the opposite???)

The position of the medieval catholic church was that people ought
to believe that the sun orbited the earth.  Was that belief, in fact,
"correct"?

> [ ... ]
>> Sorry, Paul.  Interestingness or noninterestingness have no bearing on
>> reality. ... Your anthropocentrism (and that of others) is hardly 
>> "sinless".  [ROSEN]
>
>Rich, you naive realist:  If there are realities which are unknowable and
>hence uninteresting, then so much the worse for *them*.  Where is my "sin"
>(my mistake)? 

That's like saying, "If I'm brained by a boulder, but it was
unknowable to be because I could not have known what hit me,
then so much the worse for the boulder."  Sour grapes?

> [ ... ]
> it is *not* the desirability of "free will" that is
>crucial but the can't-lose nature of *believing* in it.  Furthermore
>the "gain" or "loss" involved is *knowledge*:  if you believe in free
>will and are right you gain knowledge; if wrong your lack of knowledge
>was inevitable anyway so no loss.

Belief is not the same as knowledge; believing something to be true
does not make it so.  The alleged "can't lose" nature of believing
some proposition does not make that proposition correct.

[here Mr. Torek switches to responding to Kenn Barry]
> [ ... ]
> If you reject it [the theory of truths as what one "ought to believe"]
> in favor of a 
>"correspondance theory" of truth, then you face exactly two possibili-
>ties:  either all such truths are what we ought to believe, or some 
>aren't.  If some aren't, THEN SO MUCH THE WORSE FOR THOSE TRUTHS.

Then (by the claim of the medievals as to what ought to be believed),
we should pretend like the sun really does orbit the earth...  How's
that again?

>        Look at it this way:  accepting a hypothesis is a *decision*.

One's decision does not change reality.  Acceptance of the phlogiston
hypothesis does not make it (empirically) superior to combustion theory.

>   Paul V. Torek, ihnp4!wucs!wucec1!pvt1047

--
The above viewpoints are mine.  They are unrelated to
those of anyone else, including my cats and my employer.

Ken Montgomery  "Shredder-of-hapless-smurfs"
...!{ihnp4,allegra,seismo!ut-sally}!ut-ngp!kjm  [Usenet, when working]
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