Curiosity’s Wager 1: Can we change what we believe?
Part 1 of 10 in Curiosity’s Wager.
I want to begin with Blaise Pascal and a wager. Pascal was a 17th century mathematician, inventor, and religious thinker. His work helped develop probability theory. The argument I want to work with concerns the question, what should you do if you cannot settle whether God exists? I'll briefly explain the wager and some objections, then turn to what interests me about practice and uncertainty. The familiar version asks you to consider how to live under that uncertainty. You can wager for God or against. And God can exist or not exist. Four combinations to consider. Simple.
Wagering for God offers an infinite gain if God exists. If God does not exist, the costs of a religious life are finite. But if God does exist and you wagered against, perhaps an infinite loss. Under the assumptions of his argument, Pascal concludes that you should wager for the existence of God. This is an argument about what it would be advantageous to do.
And of course, this does not establish any empirical claim itself about whether God exists, or as you'll see, what God exists. Pascal also challenges the idea that you can decline to choose. You are embarked, he says. Your life is already taking a course. Of course, there are substantial objections. Which God? Which religious possibilities? Why accept this account of the outcomes, how should we reason about the uncertainty and what would believing for a reward mean for the adequacy of that belief. Pascal takes up another difficulty. Even if you accept the argument, how do you actually come to believe? So he turns towards practice, learning from people who have come to believe and participating in this religious life to endeavor to believe. What interests me is that we can undertake activities that change us, that doesn't establish that the beliefs we develop are justified, but it gives us a question to ask of our own practices. What are we endeavoring to cultivate?
Stepping back, my doctoral research examines how people use search systems in their work. I studied how these tools participate in asking questions, finding information and making sense of what comes back. As generative AI became widely available, I found myself confronting related questions. Where might this go? How are people asking questions of these new machines? What could we do to shape it? How could we know what questions to ask? How could we prepare ourselves to act in different arrangements of these systems? This concerns more than my own use. Other people's use of these tools also shapes our world.
Here is the parallel wager I want to propose. We face uncertainty about what these tools will make possible and what harms they will bring. How can we pursue what is good and avoid or resist what is harmful without pretending we already know which is which? Consider both sides. There may be worthwhile possibilities we haven't recognized. Failing to investigate could mean failing to pursue them. There may also be harms we haven't recognized. Failing to investigate could mean allowing them to develop or contribute to them ourselves. These aren't two separate futures, one good, one bad. Benefits and harms can coexist and fall on different people. We need to ask what is happening to whom and what we could do differently.
My wager is that practicing curiosity with others can improve our ability to recognize and respond to both possibilities worth pursuing and harms worth preventing.
We commit time, attention and effort to that practice. We make our assumptions available for challenge. We risk discovering that something we wanted to build should change or shouldn't be built at all. The hoped-for return is a better understanding of our situation, better ways to act and greater capacity to keep learning and acting together. That return isn't guaranteed. Inquiry can be misdirected, exclude people, or fail to change what we do. The wager itself needs scrutiny. This departs from Pascal in important ways. I'm not offering an infinite reward or a calculation that proves one choice must win. And our actions can help shape the very outcome we're uncertain about. We can change these arrangements through participating. We also change our own knowledge, skills, and relationships. We're already part of the changing world. We are embarked. Refusing a particular tool or use remains possible still. Shared inquiry may give us stronger reasons to refuse, better capacity to refuse. What I'm proposing is a commitment to engage with the questions, not an obligation to adopt the technology. That is curiosity's wager. We practice shared curiosity both to help shape a world we want to inhabit and to develop our capacity to understand and shape it. The practice can also change what kind of world we come to want.
To make that practical, I want to situate the endeavor, look beyond the model to the arrangement we are participating in, and include ourselves in the picture.
Series contents · Next: Situating: the arrangement—and our place in it