Peter Adamson's monumental 'History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps' podcast series has made it to the mid-1600s and Pascal's Wager. Here it is: "Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing." By contrast, if you wager that God doesn't exist, you risk losing all, while gaining only a finite amount if you win. Arguably all of choice, game and decision theory follows from this single challenge (let alone a whole school of theological argument). For me, the significance is that it marks the transition to thinking of life in terms of 'value', that is, something that can be counted, weighed and measured. Pascal's wager falls in the middle of the Cartesian revolution I've written about elsewhere, where we transition from sensing to calculating. We are at the end of this stage (Jeff Jarvis describes this in the Gutenberg Parenthesis while John Ralston Saul offers his take on the same phenomenon in Voltaire's Bastards). Can we imagine a future were we no longer weighed, measured and found wanting?
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