A Permissivist Defense of Pascal’s Wager

The Wager

The PortraitPrograms Project grew out of hyperinterdisciplinarianism of the famed Gigabase Sculpture Group,l in turn stimulated by recent cutbacks in government support for the arts. The National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Science Foundation had jointly funded the Gigabase Sculpture Project to foster the literary/musical genre of composing genetic codes for novel organisms. L...

Response: A Quest and a Wager

Jed Rose: I think we are far from exploiting the full potential of nicotine itself as a replacement for smoking. At present, fewer than 10 percent of people using nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) achieve longterm smoking cessation. I think the success rate is low because we haven’t yet learned to administer nicotine in a way that reproduces the full effect of nicotine obtained from smoking. A...

Towards a Frequentist’s Approach to Pascal’s Wager

Pascal’s wager attempts to provide a mortal with a proper choice of believing or not believing in a god, based on the expected reward of a given belief. It is essentially a Bayesian approach to the existence of a supreme being, as it deals with a degree of belief approach to proability. However, given the ineffability of a supreme being, the idea of finding a Bayesian prior for performing infer...

Response to Reviewer Elizabeth Wager

Hyperreal Expected Utilities and Pascal's Wager

This paper re-examines two major concerns about the validity of Pascal's Wager: (1) The classical von Neumann-Morgenstern Theorem seems to contradict the rationality of maximising expected utility when the utility function's range contains in nite numbers (McClennen 1994). (2) Apparently, the utility of salvation cannot be re exive under addition by real numbers (which Pascal's Pensée 233 deman...