Most of the essay is thoughtful and interesting as usual - good points about laypeople uttering "evolution" with the same semantic force with which others utter "god". But why bring up that god stuff at the end? Doesn't it just create confusion to stretch metaphors this way? You have only to look at how religionists have seized on Einstein's and Hawking's metaphorical use of the word "god" to suit their purposes.

Evolution isn't "god", it's just what happens when you have competition between replicators. Trying to use "theology" and "god" and "Judeo-Christian deity" (whatever that means - I don't think Judaism calls it a "trinity", for example) when talking about evolution only makes things murky.

douglas -- it's "Johnjoe", not "Joejohn", and as a molecular biologist myself I will say I do not in the least consider it an oversight on my part never to have read his book. The idea of DNA being in quantum superposition is hard enough to swallow - then you realize that for it to work the way he wants it to (to have a differential effect on survival), the entire cell needs to be in superposition since it isn't just the DNA itself, but the mRNA that gets transcribed, and the proteins that get translated, that determine the cell's response to the environment. So every relevant molecule in the cell is in one giant superposition?? This idea is an extremely bizarre, profligate wasteful hunch, but worse, it fills no conceptual gaps. Whether there are any out-of-the-ordinary phenomena going on in bacterial adaptation is itself controversial and not agreed on. If there is ever any consensus that there is a phenomenon that needs explanation, may some scientists have the humility to test something more mundane before trotting out the word "quantum" along with the idea that we have to rethink almost everything.

Okay, here's the data: I choose SPECKS, and here is my background and reasons.

I am a cell biologist. That is perhaps not relevant.

My reasoning is that I do not think that there is much meaning in adding up individual instances of dust specks. Those of you who choose TORTURE seem to think that there is a net disutility that you obtain by multiplying epsilon by 3^^^3. This is obviously greater than the disutility of torturing one person.
I reject the premise that there is a meaningful sense in which these dust specks can "add up".

You can think in terms of biological inputs - simplifying, you can imagine a system with two registers. A dust speck in the eye raises register A by epsilon. Register A also resets to zero if a minute goes by without any dust specks. Torture immediately sets register B to 10. I am morally obliged to intervene if register B ever goes above 1. In this scheme register A is a morally irrelevant register. It trades in different units than register B. No matter how many instances of A*epsilon there are, it does not warrant intervention.

You are making a huge, unargued assumption if you treat both torture and dust-specks in equivalent terms of "disutility". I accept your question and argue for "SPECKS" by rejecting your premise of like units (which does make the question trivial). But I sympathize with people who reject your question outright.

My algorithm goes like this:
there are two variables, X and Y.
Adding a single additional dust speck to a person's eye over their entire lifetime increases X by 1 for every person this happens to.
A person being tortured for a few minutes increases Y by 1.

I would object to most situations where Y is greater than 1. But I have no preferences at all with regard to X.

See? Dust specks and torture are not the same. I do not lump them together as "disutility". To do so seems to me a preposterous oversimplification. In any case, it has to be argued that they are the same. If you assume they're the same, then you're just assuming the torture answer when you state the question - it's not a problem of ethical philosophy but a problem of addition.

If you could take all the pain and discomfort you will ever feel in your life, and compress it into a 12-hour interval, so you really feel ALL of it right then, and then after the 12 hours are up you have no ill effects - would you do it? I certainly would. In fact, I would probably make the trade even if it were 2 or 3 times longer-lasting and of the same intensity. But something doesn't make sense now... am I saying I would gladly double or triple the pain I feel over my whole life?

The upshot is that there are some very nonlinear phenomena involved with calculating amounts of suffering, as Psy-Kosh and others have pointed out. You may indeed move along one coordinate in "suffering-space" by 3^^^3 units, but it isn't just absolute magnitude that's relevant. That is, you cannot recapitulate the "effect" of fifty years of torturing with isolated dust specks. As the responses here make clear, we do not simply map magnitudes in suffering space to moral relevance, but instead we consider the actual locations and contours. (Compare: you decide to go for a 10-mile hike. But your enjoyment of the hike depends more on where you go, than the distance traveled.)

Looks like there had been 52 responses before me.. I hope I am free to attend (I'm in Berkeley..)

From the post:

While I disagree with Dennett on some details and complications, I still think that Dennett's notion of belief in belief is the key insight necessary to understand the dragon-claimant. But we need a wider concept of belief, not limited to verbal sentences.

If you've read Dennett on beliefs, you'll appreciate that this "wider concept" based on behavior and predictability is really at the heart of things.

I think it is very difficult to attribute a belief in dragons to this "dragon-believer". Only a small subset of his actions - those involving verbal avowals - make sense if you attribute a belief in dragons to him. There is a conflict with the remainder of his beliefs, as can be seen when he nonchalantly enters his garage, or confabulates all sorts of reasons why his dragon can't be demonstrated.

But as you have shown, everything makes sense if you attribute a related, but slightly different belief, namely "I should avow a genuine, heartfelt belief in dragons". Perhaps we can say that this man (and the religious man, since this is the real point) doesn't just believe in belief, but they believe that they believe. He tries to make a second-order belief do the work of a first-order belief.