always a good time to mention that "pascal's" wager was supposedly found in a journal after he died and i believe it to be a complete hoax
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@hipsterelectron I looked that up today for a blog post 'cause I thought that was the case but couldn't find a source so I decided to just remove the metaphor in its entirety 🤷♀️ I hate the 2026 Internet
@vtrlx i found the bit on wikipedia mentioning the CRITICAL bit of info that it was not something pascal ever said himself to itself be inadequately sourced. i wanna know who could have stood to gain from this!
@hipsterelectron It's really strange! I'm not sure if anyone would really have anything to gain from it? Perhaps it's one of the machine devil's hallucinations, or perhaps it's someone who abhors the idea that Pascal would make such a Wager. Either way I'm left unable to trust anything I knew ever.
@vtrlx i personally abhor the idea that pascal would make such a wager and i believe it to be someone affiliated with some form of christianity who sought to take pascal's name and use it to buttress the claim that mathematics can prove the inherent righteousness of specifically their one god--yet failing to note that once an infinity is introduced, any absurdity can be proven, including the religion of the devil, or pagans, or even perhaps the exact opposite of religion, for if it were false, consequently one could surmise that any time at all spent in prayer is a second wasted and any tithe would be taxation without representation
@vtrlx pascal's wager is often invoked in advocacy for the "rationalist" (fascist) form of "utilitarianism" in which one sets the weighting for the value of life for people they don't care about to zero and subsequently claims that math proves hitler was right "if you think about it". this is why we call it "rationalization"
@vtrlx pascal's wager is a classic attempt to wield math [which is prized for its supposed truth because it admits no master, and defines itself by a system of universal agreement (deeply anarchic, in a very literal sense)] for its rhetorical weight in order to justify an illogical conclusion. we do actually have a framework in mathematics to represent things which are provably unprovable (or rather not disprovable), such as the continuum hypothesis (which notably deals with the cardinality of infinity: exactly the thing which pascal's wager manipulates to its benefit!)
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@vtrlx we should rather call it pascal's casino, for the way it introduces a rigged game. mathematicians are precisely the ones who get bludgeoned by henchmen for counting cards, or otherwise bringing information to bear.
@vtrlx take a look at the citation for the claim: https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2015/entries/pascal/ not only does it begin with:
Pascal did not publish any philosophical works during his relatively brief lifetime.
the only other indication of his religious fervor was.......also found on him after death:
During the night of 23 November 1654, Pascal had a dreamlike or ecstatic experience which he interpreted as a religious conversion. He wrote a summary of the experience in a brief document entitled the Memorial, which he sewed into his coat and carried with him until his death eight years later.
this mysterious text began with an introduction from some other fucking guy:
Périer may have exaggerated the other-worldly attitude of his late brother-in-law,
he apparently did write about religion, under a pseudonym (not explained how it was known to be pascal), but it was to defend someone else from church censure:
The Provincial Letters are Pascal's deeply personal, angry response to the use of political power and church censure
then we get to the same concern i had with franz kafka:
Cole (1995, Chapter 15) argues that Pascal exhibited signs of manic depression and an almost infantile dependence on his family in his mature years.
so you're saying he could easily have been manipulated by his family, or perhaps even led to death by neglect at their desire
In addition, many of the reported details of his personal life suggest a fundamentalist interpretation of religious belief that is difficult to reconcile with the critical reflection that defines philosophy as a discipline.
which again, is also at odds with the faux-"logical" argument of the "wager"! consider this:
according to Pascal's radical theological position, it was impossible in principle to acquire or support genuine religious faith by reason, because genuine religious faith was a pure gift from God.
which is completely at odds with the translations of the text on the wikipedia page which describe a finite number of lives as a bet. but then it just says this outright:
Given the status of the Pensées as a posthumously published notebook, it also remains unclear whether Pascal endorsed the opinions that are recorded there, or whether he planned to use some of them merely for comment or critique. They are reliably attributed to Pascal only when he expressed similar views elsewhere.
emphasis mine because oh? you're saying there's stuff in this notebook that may not be attributable to blaise pascal? you're just gonna say that as the immediate sentence before mentioning the section which has the "wager"?
@hipsterelectron This subject is honestly worth doing a deep dive on. What you've pointed out makes me think some kind of conspiracy is abound.