thomblake comments on The Importance of Self-Doubt - Less Wrong

23 Post author: multifoliaterose 19 August 2010 10:47PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (726)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: thomblake 25 August 2010 03:28:12PM 0 points [-]

If this actually happened to you, and you walked away and did not convert, would you have some fear of being condemned to hell for seeing this and not converting? Even a little bit of fear? If you would, then your probability that Islam is true must be much higher than 10^-20, since we're not afraid of things that have a one in a hundred billion chance of happening.

This is false.

I must confess that I am sometimes afraid that ghosts will jump out of the shadows and attack me at night, and I would assign a much lower chance of that happening. I have also been afraid of velociraptors. Fear is frequently irrational.

Comment author: Unknowns 26 August 2010 06:40:55AM 0 points [-]

You are technically correct. My actual point was that your brain does not accept that the probability is that low. And as I stated in one of the replies, you might in some cases have reasons to say your brain is wrong... just not in this case. No one here has given any reason to think that.