PASCAL'S WAGER, OR "WHY I AM NOT AN AGNOSTIC"

DA: "...for the afterlife, omnipotent deities etc... I would have thought the default position for many people is a modest agnosticism."

Although this is getting distinctly silly (and drifting ever further from the "explanatory gap"), I cannot resist replying (because the connection is not altogether zero) that default agnosticism suffers from the same rational (and practical) defect as Pascal's Wager:

Pascal thought that -- given the trade-off between the grave risk of eternal damnation if Received Writ is all true and one fails to be obey, and the mild risk of a somewhat more constrained finite lifetime if it's false yet one obeys anyway -- the lesser risk should be the default option. 
This founders on the fact that there are competing claims on our obedience, from the Mosaic edicts to the Mohammedan injunctions to voodoo to the dictates of the Great Pumpkin. Is one to hew then, as in Selfridge's Pandemonium model, to whichever demon raises the ante the highest? (If so, I'll meet you and double the eternities of agony you will suffer if you don't send my temple a $1M pledge and make and send 100 copies of this letter to 100 other infidels.)

There are also links here with "flat priors" in Bayesian Inference, with the Cauchy Distribution, with Zeno's Paradox (especially Lewis Carroll's version of it), and with Dawkins's "Green-Eyed Monster," but I alas haven't the time to explain them all.

DA: "The claim that 'it all depends on the brain' etc strikes me as a kind of scientistic dogmatism... until someone can demonstrate clearly that consciousness can be explained in purely neuroscientific terms..."

Just a clarification, that the predicate "all depends on the brain" referred, yet again, only to the explanatory gap: how/why the brain causes feelings. (The eschatology was just a bonus -- though of course the brain, indeed multiple brains, are behind that too, if rather more circuitously!) 

Derek seems to think that the explanatory gap -- an epistemic gap -- somehow sanctions agnosticism about the brain; I think it just sanctions scepticism about the power of causal explanation to explain the fact of feeling. It raises no doubts whatsoever, in my mind, about the fact that feelings are caused (somehow) by the brain.



-- SH