From the review by Scott Siskind at ACX of the biography of John von Neumann
Still, he had the presence of mind to make a last request: after a lifetime of culturally-Jewish atheism, he wished to be baptized. His daughter attributed her father’s “change of heart” to Pascal’s Wager: the idea that even a very small probability of gaining a better afterlife is worth the relatively trivial cost of a deathbed conversion. Even as his powers deserted him, John von Neumann remained a game theorist to the end.
Pascal's Wager has been dismissed as an idea that looks intelligent at first, but upon examination is revealed as impossible, as there are so many religions, so many gods one would have to please. I have always thought that as a practical matter, that is not so. We are presented with a few at most in our lifetimes. Who considers becoming a Zoroastrian now, for example? Or any of the thousand flavors of animist? Still, that is not a proof of the wisdom of the the Wager.
Unless the smartest person who ever lived thought otherwise, I suppose...
I recommend this review as well.
5 comments:
WRT Pascal's Wager: even setting aside exposure, it isn't obvious that most religions are relevant to the wager. Animism says nothing about eternity, IIRC karma has to do with what you do, not who you worship, Greeks did have something, Romans didn't seem to, Egypt--sort of... You get Christianity, Muhammadanism, the Zoroastrians, and a handful of others. Some you can rule out as impossible (nobody's left to teach the Eleusinian mysteries), and you can judge the plausibility and degree of attestation of the rest.
Baptism is quick. Presumably, other religions have more time-intensive entry procedures.
"the idea that even a very small probability of gaining a better afterlife is worth the relatively trivial cost of a deathbed conversion"
This is a smart person?
A form of Pascal's wager has been employed to argue that the consequences of severe global warming would be so severe that it makes sense to do *anything possible* to avoid it, even if the probability of such severe warming is very low.
John von Neumann's wife, Klara, was also an interesting person. She had never been any good at math in school...one teacher said she got a passing grade only because she admitted that she didn't understand any of it...but quickly learned to program the Army's ENIAC computer, which was by no means programmer-friendly...and made contributions to the change of this system to operate in stored-program mode and to some of the nuclear weapons simulation projects, including the simulation of an igniter design for the hydrogen bomb.
I discussed the von Neumann's, along with several other interesting people, in my post noting ENIAC's 75th anniversary:
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/64972.html
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