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by vzidex 2222 days ago
I disagree, Pascal's Wager deals with the situation where you don't know whether the (omnipotent) entity you're trying to please exists or not.

This comment thread assumes the omnipotent entity (aliens) exists, and so you'd be taking a coin flip as to what behaviour they find pleasing. Pascal's Wager resolves to:

(infinite gain * non-zero probability of success) > (finite gain * non-zero probability of failure)

While this situation is more like:

(infinite gain * non-zero probability of success) ~= (infinite gain * non-zero probability of failure).

1 comments

Pascal's Wager hits precisely the same problem because it's not knowable what might make one eligible for "infinite gain", including not believing in gods. There's no way to differentiate between "finite gain" behavior and "infinite gain" behavior.