Pascal's Wager:
"If the Christian God does not exist, the agnostic loses little by believing in him and gains correspondingly little by not believing. If the Christian God does exist, the agnostic gains eternal life by believing in him and loses an infinite good by not believing"
- (Encyclopedia Britannica)If God exists, and you don't believe in him, you go to hell. You lose. If God doesn't exist, whether or not you believe in him, you won't go to hell. Might as well believe in god.
In other words, based on the possible consequences of the belief, it makes more sense to act as if God exists rather than not.
' As if ' philosophy was popularized by the post-Kantian philosopher Hans Vaihinger who posited that because, as Kant illustrated, our ability to know is limited and thereby supplemented with mental conceptual synthesis, we must rely on fiction to form coherent narratives of our self, others, and the world.
We come to simulate the world through fictions, and through this simulation we form models of knowledge acquisition.
More important than his influence on philosophy, Kant was instrumental for the science of physics, specifically Euclid's fifth postulate:
"The fifth postulate is not so easy to accept on the basis of experience. Might it not be that even lines that start out looking parallel come together slowly as they get farther and farther from us? Or, conversely...that lines that start out looking as if they will intersect bend away from each other slowly as they are produced out towards infinity...
For many centuries people believed that it was not possible for the Fifth Postulate to be false in our space. There were two sorts of reasons given for this belief. The first was...God...The second...Immanuel Kant...his argument...was that space is largely a creation of our own minds, that we cannot imagine non-Euclidean space, and hence space is Euclidean...the idea is that we cannot see or imagine seeing anything that is not located in space...space may have no 'real' existence, but there is no way in which we can order our sense perceptions without using the organizing framework"
- (Geometry, Relativity, and the Fourth Dimension, Rudolf Rucker, 1977, pg. 20-21).It's not important that we know all the ins and outs of Euclid's postulates. What is important is that Kant was somewhat wrong, but still kinda right. As Einstein went on to show, space is curved, therefore lines may appear straight despite being curved. Theoretically, the existence of matter warps space. Empirically, physicists talk of geodesics covered in lines (one may here be reminded of Deleuze and Guattari's egg-like body without organs).
That is, despite what Kant theorized, we can imagine and even model non-Euclidian space. However, this does not mean that space is not a synthetic a priori production of the mind. Nor does it contradict the idea that space has no 'real' existence yet is an indispensable concept and undeniable experience. Thus, in science, we act as if both Euclidean and Non-Euclidean models are valid (disjunctive synthesis).
Faith and Hyperstition
Inseparably built into the fabric of science and its historical developments is the acceptance of the power and force of theological fictions that function on and in reality - the Kantian notion of 'as if.' We must act as if space, a kind of transcendental fiction, exists (Nick Land points out that to say time is 'in' time is a transcendental error. Likewise, we cannot conceptualize space 'in' space. Space is a category that is hard to think outside of. Thing's happen in it, space does not happen within itself).
After all, it is a common critique of Kant that for all his scientific critical undermining of the theological argumentation of his time - his refusal to appeal to the name of God in order to make concepts fall in line (to make all that is crooked straight, as Nietzsche would say) - Kant undoes his own critical work by cashing out his concepts and critiques to get back God.
That is, Kant asserts that due to our limits we must still retain faith.
Is this not precisely what Pascal predicted? That faith would incentivize and therefore functionalize itself more than pure reason? And is this not what the CCRU was trying to demonstrate with their notion of hyperstition?
In other words, Pascal's Wager works in reverse order too:
Pascal's Wager: Based on the possible consequences of belief, it makes more sense to act as if God exists rather than not.
Gnon's Wager: the possible consequences of belief are created by acting as if their source existed (just as Oedipus, in trying to avoid his destiny, acts in a way that guarantees it).Acting 'as if' may have the same effect as 'is.' As if = hyperstition machine.
Similarly, Freud, a secrete Kantian-Nietzschean, quoted an author in his 1899/1900 'The Interpretation of Dreams:'
"if one is afraid of robbers in a dream, the robbers indeed are imaginary, but the fear is real."If life is the dream, God is the robber - 'if one is afraid of God in life, God is indeed imaginary, but the fear is real.'
On a Kantian and Freudian register, belief creates reality. Reality creates belief.
To believe in God gives the concept of God a power that then imbues the believer with the sense that God was always there (not unlike a kind of grandfather paradox). That is, to a degree, one acts a certain way when one believes as if there was a God watching the act (as Foucault said regarding the Panopticon - it doesn't matter if someone is watching, only if the prisoner believes someone is watching. This is of course the rule of the Oedipal super ego).
In this sense, not unlike Deleuze and Guattari's explication of Sam Butler's theory of machinic reproduction - that machines use humans as a mere link in the chain for machine reproduction - God uses the human as a mere link in the chain to create himself out of his own fiction.
He made us in his image for reasons similar to the narcissistic parent - to have a clone-pet gaze back at him, validating his holy existing, making him real.
"The Judaeo-Christian portrait of God is a classic sketch of pathological insecurity. How desperate he is to be loved! So insufficient to himself, and so alone..."
"Time, on the contrary, is as vacant as a marriage, or God alone in the dark...Could such a God glimpsing the impossible sovereignty of his fury - time opening as a dark shaft of impersonal loss - and, howling in utter loathing at the servility of self, restrain from scurrying to a squalid death on the cross?"
"is it that we imagine God being disappointed by his creation? A surprised God? A bewildered God? His great work gone astray."
"Being created in the image of God, we mean nothing to ourselves, and want only the inhuman"
- (Thirst for Annihilation: George Bataille and Virulent Nihilism, Nick Land, 1992 pg. 83, 93, 94, 205).If God dies in the void with no one around to hear him, does he die?
God is a sadistic exhibitionist.
Pence's Wager
Vice President Pence praying to ward off Covid19 is a loaded move. On the one hand, Pence is acting as if God is looking out for him. He exercises faith. On the other hand, strangely, this decision is a radical anti-theological, Nietzschean roll of the dice that affirms necessity and chance, that affirms the random brutality of nature, the chaotic hyperrreal.
Which is the better path? To go through the rituals of virus safety and die, or to abstain and live?Though ballsy, this is an anti-Pascal's Wager, not to be confused with the reverse, hyperstitional Pascal's Wager above.
As I have shown in my previous posts (Viral Epistemology I, and VE II), there is doubt as to whether masks help deter the spread of COVID19. I aimed to show that it is clear masks do help in preventing the spread of the virus, and that this virus accelerates the breakdown of scientific discourse by exploiting or hacking its core weakness - its tendency to drag its feet on delivering helpful information by getting caught up in honing its simulation models and appealing to foolproof methods instead of human values.
Here, in opposition to Pence, is the Pascal's Wager of the Mask:
"If the masks are not effective, the mask-wearer loses little by wearing it and gains correspondingly little by not wearing it. If masks are effective, the mask-wearer gains eternal life by wearing it and loses an infinite good by not wearing it."If masks work and you wear them, you live.
If masks work, and you don't wear them, you die.
If masks don't work, and you wear them, you die.
If masks don't work, and you wear them, you die.
Might as well believe as if masks work.
God is dead, science is cool but trips over itself, and, based on the possible consequences of the belief, it makes more sense to act as if ...
