Proof of Immortality II

[Loss Leader]

Filippo,
- I forgot about that attempt...
- Can you show me how I ran away from it?

Here is the thread..


You stated that you wanted me to deal with one point at a time here. In your very next post, you wrote:

- I'll deal with two points here.
....

As for abandoning the thread, I posted on January 25 at 12:15 p.m. I received no response. I posted again on January 25 at 3:00 p.m. The thread was closed by the Mod Team on January 26 at 5:21 a.m.

Between January 25 at 12:15 p.m. and January 26 at 5:21 a.m., you made this post in the commentary thread. In fact, you made at least 9 posts to the commentary thread on January 25 compared to the 1 post you made in our debate thread. 4 of them were moved to the original thread starting here.

You made 9 posts addressing people other than me in two different threads compared to 1 post in our dedicated argument over the course of one day. I consider that evidence of a desire to abandon our argument.

Incidentally, I also consider it terribly rude. It's a rudeness that you would not tolerate and I'm not sure why one would expect me to do so.

 

[John Jones]

Jabba, I say this out of concern for you, truly. If your memory is as poor as you imply - that you cannot remember that you requested special treatment and a one-on-one discussion, which was provided to you as a particular favour by this forum, in which you failed to abide by your own rues of 'one point per post' and which you abandoned despite your interlocutor agreeing to concede your argument in order to move the discussion along - then I really think you should see a doctor and perhaps consider requesting a referral to a geriatrician. Memory problems need not be a unavoidable part of growing older, nor are they untreatable.

What Agatha said.

Mister Savage, you don't have to live this way. Get some competent person in your family or your doctor to read this thread, and see what they think about your cognitive processes.

 

[Monza]

xt,

- Don't you suspect that it would take me forever to respond fully to your post above...? Well, it would...
- I'll try to stick to a couple of points.

1) In 'my' previous thread about the Shroud, I asked -- numerous times --for you guys to elect a spokesperson. Numerous times I was turned down. I've probably asked for a spokesperson in this thread, but I can't remember, and don't want to take the time to do the search -- I have miles to go...
- But anyway, you have just nominated yourself and Dave to be that spokesperson(s). Thanks; I think that's a significant step in the right direction...
- Now, with the help of the others, you or Dave could round up the best and most repeated points/questions for my consideration, and tell me which one you would like me to address first. At the same time, I'll be doing my own "examinations," and cross-examinations in the direction that I would like to go. Sounds tedious, but wht'r'ya'gonna'do?

2) (I forget what that second point was...)

Dave,
- A SELF is more than the biochemistry of the brain. A perfect replica of my brain would not produce the same me.

There is some consistency here. Jabba feels overwhelmed with all of the questions that he never seems to address. He has complained about trying to respond to a question and then when doing so, receiving an exponential growth of new questions. To most of us, this is a cop-out as the variance in questions is in reality very small. Going back through this thread will reveal that there is a very small number of actual questions and objections raised about Jabba's reasoning. We have all been stating the same thing over and over.

Unfortunately, it does appear that Jabba treats all of these as separate questions. In other words, an identical question asked in a separate post is (in Jabba's mind) not the same question.

I have no idea how he intends to respond to the 100+ times Slow Vehicle has asked him to present, "evidence that the "soul" exists and is "immortal"." Each one would have to be replied to separately!

 

[Hokulele]

- Identical, but not the same. It would not produce my SELF.

How could you tell which was your SELF, and which was the replica?

 

[JoeMorgue]

- Identical, but not the same. It would not produce my SELF.

And this isn't even meanigful enough to rate as a distinction without difference. It's nothing. It is literally meaningless nothing.

But fine let's say you are correct. You are a magical special snowflake so wonderful and unique that you can never be replicated.

Okay... and? You're still gonna die. One day you, no matter how unique in the universe you are, are gonna to stop breathing, turn cold, and die. The neurological activity in your brain, which consist of the entirety of what you are as person, is going to stop. And it is not going to go anywhere and it is not going to come back.

I'm sorry.

 

[xtifr]

- I claim that the value of P(me|A) is either one over infinity or one over a totally unimaginably large number.

And, while pretty much everyone has denied the former, absolutely no one has disagreed with the latter. I freely state (not admit) here and now that the value of P(me|A) is one over a totally unimaginably large number. I fact, have loudly claimed this to be the fact numerous times. It is not infinity, but it is mind-bogglingly large. Large enough that the exponent is probably a mildly boggling number itself. I put an absolute bare minimum possible estimate on the value at 10 to the 80th power (1E80) factorial (i.e., 1E80 x (1E80 - 1) x (1E80 - 2) x (1E80 - 3) ... 4 x 3 x 2). That's a number so large that there may not be enough particles in the universe to write out the exponent in full, let alone the number itself. And I suspect it's bogglingly less than the actual value.

As I have said numerous times over the last year, if you can accept a finite number—any finite number, no matter how large—do so, and this debate can move forward!

A perfect replica of my brain would not produce the same me.

Only in the sense that there'd now be two, which wouldn't share the mathematical property of identity. It could just as reasonably (or just as unreasonably) be said that the copy was you and the original no longer was. You're getting stuck in semantics. English is not designed to cope with the existence of two yous, but that's what we would essentially have. Two yous, both you in every reasonable sense, but still distinct and separate individuals.

Most importantly, the copy would have exactly the same sense of continuity and sense of self! Subjectively, both would be you! If you were teleported and copied at the same time, there would be no way of saying which had been teleported and which copied, subjectively or objectively, because teleportation is indistinguishable from destroying the original when creating a copy!

So yes, a perfect copy of your brain would produce the same you. There would now be two same yous, and we could tell them apart from each other, but neither would be THE same you. They would each be A same you. They would both be as much the same you as each other.

ETA: anyway, isn't all this arguing about whether it would be the "same you" just to try to get to infinity? When you just admitted that you don't need to get to infinity for your proof? Just forget about infinity and present your proof of immortality!

 

[Mojo]

Unfortunately, it does appear that Jabba treats all of these as separate questions. In other words, an identical question asked in a separate post is (in Jabba's mind) not the same question.

Even if a question is an exact replica of a previous question, it does not produce the same QUESTION.

 

[pakeha]

Dave,
- A SELF is more than the biochemistry of the brain. A perfect replica of my brain would not produce the same me.

Jabba, have you already forgotten how "me" (or more accurately, a sense of self) is defined?

- Identical, but not the same. It would not produce my SELF.

Obviously not.
Remember how SELF (or more accurately, a sense of self) is defined?

Jabba, I say this out of concern for you, truly. If your memory is as poor as you imply - that you cannot remember that you requested special treatment and a one-on-one discussion, which was provided to you as a particular favour by this forum, in which you failed to abide by your own rues of 'one point per post' and which you abandoned despite your interlocutor agreeing to concede your argument in order to move the discussion along - then I really think you should see a doctor and perhaps consider requesting a referral to a geriatrician. Memory problems need not be a unavoidable part of growing older, nor are they untreatable.

I'm in agreement with Agatha. I think you deserve to enjoy your years ahead without these memory problems that are bedeviling you, at least judging by your posts.

 

[Giordano]

Jabba,

If you are having real difficulties keeping up with this thread and in remembering your very own recent posts that it is causing problems for you in presenting your argument here, you should definitely consider talking to professionals to rule out any problem that could be helped by modern medicine. As I noted elsewhere, I had a serious medical problem that I did not know (in any way) that I had, and if I had not seen a doctor, I could be dead today. i would not attempt to diagnose you on a web site, but you might want to rule out anything with which a medical person might be able to help.

 

[jond]

And, while pretty much everyone has denied the former, absolutely no one has disagreed with the latter. I freely state (not admit) here and now that the value of P(me|A) is one over a totally unimaginably large number. I fact, have loudly claimed this to be the fact numerous times. It is not infinity, but it is mind-bogglingly large. Large enough that the exponent is probably a mildly boggling number itself. I put an absolute bare minimum possible estimate on the value at 10 to the 80th power (1E80) factorial (i.e., 1E80 x (1E80 - 1) x (1E80 - 2) x (1E80 - 3) ... 4 x 3 x 2). That's a number so large that there may not be enough particles in the universe to write out the exponent in full, let alone the number itself. And I suspect it's bogglingly less than the actual value.

xtifer: for what it's worth, I DO disagree with the latter. Because the "self" is not a thing, but rather is a process, the probability of Jabba's self being Jabba's self is not 1/Wicked Big Number. It is 1/1: it's the only "self" that it could be. The probability of a given brain may be 1/Wicked Big Number, but once that brain is formed, the only "self" it could generate is the one that it does.

As for the Wicked Big Number, I believe it was Loss Leader who, sometime in the late 14th Century, posted a great explanation of why it's not so big using a coffee analogy and water molecules to explain why, once mom and dad have done their thing, the probability has decreased rather significantly.

 

[Loss Leader]

As for the Wicked Big Number, I believe it was Loss Leader who, sometime in the late 14th Century, posted a great explanation of why it's not so big using a coffee analogy and water molecules to explain why, once mom and dad have done their thing, the probability has decreased rather significantly.

It was actually 1403, so early 15th century.

And, by the way, that only assumes that the universe is random, something that we cannot entirely put to rest. If we live in a clockwork universe, it would unravel exactly the same way each and every time. So, the actual probability of any event is 1:1 (whether we can compute it or not).

 

[xtifr]

xtifer: for what it's worth, I DO disagree with the latter. Because the "self" is not a thing, but rather is a process, the probability of Jabba's self being Jabba's self is not 1/Wicked Big Number. It is 1/1: it's the only "self" that it could be. The probability of a given brain may be 1/Wicked Big Number, but once that brain is formed, the only "self" it could generate is the one that it does.

That's not disagreement. If the probability of a given brain is 1/BIGNUM and the probability of a specific self given that brain is one, then the total probability of that specific self is found by multiplying the two numbers. And 1/BIGBUM x 1 = 1/BIGNUM. In other words, the probability of a particular self is the same as the probability of the brain in which that process of self takes place. We're both saying the same thing.

Jabba doesn't seem to agree, though. He seems to think the probability of his exact self existing is lower (has a larger denominator) than the probability of his exact brain existing.

As for the Wicked Big Number, I believe it was Loss Leader who, sometime in the late 14th Century, posted a great explanation of why it's not so big using a coffee analogy and water molecules to explain why, once mom and dad have done their thing, the probability has decreased rather significantly.

Sure, causality is a factor, but we're not talking about after mom and dad have done their thing. We're looking at the prior probability of Jabba's existence, given only a Big Bang of the exact size of the one that created our universe. And you have to concede, that's a number with a pretty big denominator!

Anyway, the exact value of BIGNUM is both irrelevant and probably not determinable by humans. And the exact value doesn't affect the argument. As long as it's finite, I don't care what value you or Jabba imagine it might have, since the results will effectively be the same: Jabba has a finite possibility of existence. And, in fact, his SELF has the exact same probability as his physical brain. (Since even an identical brain is still not the same physical brain.)

Now, if you want to get technical about the number I proposed as a minimum, I'll point out how I came to that, and why I think it's probably insanely low even once you factor in causality to eliminate many possibilities. But I'm going to spoiler it, because it's long, and probably not that interesting to most people in this thread:

10^80 is a rough estimate of the number of particles in the universe, so 10^80 factorial is a naive estimate of the number of permutations of those particles. But that assumes a linear arrangement, while the universe has three spatial dimensions, so the actual number of possible arrangements of particles is far larger. Furthermore, the universe is much larger than it needs to be to contain that many particles. So much larger that most of the universe consists of empty space. And all that empty space factors into the possible arrangements as well. However, the existence of the Planck length means that the number of arrangements is still finite.

Unfortunately, my desire to juggle huge numbers to make an irrelevant point ran out at that point, so I haven't figured out the exact number of possible arrangements of all 10^80 particles to the nearest Planck length within a volume of space the size of the universe. It's going to make my 10^80 factorial look tiny, though. And then, yes, you can probably eliminate all the permutations that don't have a reasonable causal path to them. Which is going to eliminate a mind-boggling number of them. But you can eliminate a mind-boggling number of those possibilities without getting close to my ridiculously small estimate of 10^80 factorial.

So I still think 10^80 factorial is probably much smaller than the actual probabilities involved here. Possibly orders of magnitude of orders of magnitude smaller! But I freely admit I'm going on pure guesswork at this point, since I haven't go the faintest idea of how to estimate how many possible arrangements of particles don't have a possible causal chain of circumstances.

And all that without even factoring in time, or the expansion of the universe. Bottom line, we're dealing with big numbers here! See also: Combinatorial explosion^WP.

 

[AdMan]

Filippo,
- I forgot about that attempt...
- Can you show me how I ran away from it?

Here is the thread..


You stated that you wanted me to deal with one point at a time here. In your very next post, you wrote:

- I'll deal with two points here.
....

As for abandoning the thread, I posted on January 25 at 12:15 p.m. I received no response. I posted again on January 25 at 3:00 p.m. The thread was closed by the Mod Team on January 26 at 5:21 a.m.

Between January 25 at 12:15 p.m. and January 26 at 5:21 a.m., you made this post in the commentary thread. In fact, you made at least 9 posts to the commentary thread on January 25 compared to the 1 post you made in our debate thread. 4 of them were moved to the original thread starting here.

You made 9 posts addressing people other than me in two different threads compared to 1 post in our dedicated argument over the course of one day. I consider that evidence of a desire to abandon our argument.

Incidentally, I also consider it terribly rude. It's a rudeness that you would not tolerate and I'm not sure why one would expect me to do so.

I'm not sure I believe Jabba's claims that he doesn't remember the whole "Jabba's own personal threads" fiasco. But anyway:

If he truly doesn't remember that, yes--he has more important things to deal with than futilely attempting to prove immortality with Bayesian statistics. He needs to see a doctor.

If he's lying and does remember--well, it's gone way beyond simple rudeness (which he's exhibited for a while by simply ignoring the majority of posters in a discussion forum) and dishonesty. His arguments are tainted by his lies.

Either way, he seriously needs to focus on something else.

 

[Mojo]

10^80 is a rough estimate of the number of particles in the universe, so 10^80 factorial is a naive estimate of the number of permutations of those particles. But that assumes a linear arrangement, while the universe has three spatial dimensions, so the actual number of possible arrangements of particles is far larger. Furthermore, the universe is much larger than it needs to be to contain that many particles. So much larger that most of the universe consists of empty space. And all that empty space factors into the possible arrangements as well. However, the existence of the Planck length means that the number of arrangements is still finite.

Unfortunately, my desire to juggle huge numbers to make an irrelevant point ran out at that point, so I haven't figured out the exact number of possible arrangements of all 10^80 particles to the nearest Planck length within a volume of space the size of the universe. It's going to make my 10^80 factorial look tiny, though.

Yes, you need to factor in the degrees of freedom the atoms have, which is going to be a Very Big Number^TM. So, as Zaphod Beeblebrox said, "put it all together and we have a total improbability of… Well, it’s pretty vast, but it’s not infinite."

 

[Jabba]

Here is the thread..


You stated that you wanted me to deal with one point at a time here. In your very next post, you wrote:





As for abandoning the thread, I posted on January 25 at 12:15 p.m. I received no response. I posted again on January 25 at 3:00 p.m. The thread was closed by the Mod Team on January 26 at 5:21 a.m.

Between January 25 at 12:15 p.m. and January 26 at 5:21 a.m., you made this post in the commentary thread. In fact, you made at least 9 posts to the commentary thread on January 25 compared to the 1 post you made in our debate thread. 4 of them were moved to the original thread starting here.

You made 9 posts addressing people other than me in two different threads compared to 1 post in our dedicated argument over the course of one day. I consider that evidence of a desire to abandon our argument.
Incidentally, I also consider it terribly rude. It's a rudeness that you would not tolerate and I'm not sure why one would expect me to do so.

LL,
- I honestly can't understand why you would assume that. Very often, you won't hear from me for awhile, while I try to figure out how to address a particular question or comment...
- In regard to posting on the commentary thread, others were still posting there and their Q/Cs were easier to address -- so, I addressed some of them while trying to figure out how to answer one or more of your Q/Cs... I had no intention of abandoning our thread. I'm just not (nearly) as fast as you.

 

[Filippo Lippi]

More dishonesty

 

[Akhenaten]

LL,
- I honestly can't understand why you would assume that. Very often, you won't hear from me for awhile, while I try to figure out how to address a particular question or comment...
- In regard to posting on the regular thread, others were still posting there and their Q/Cs were easier to address -- so, I addressed some of them while trying to figure out how to answer one or more of your Q/Cs... I had no intention of abandoning our thread. I'm just not (nearly) as fast as you.

You seem to have rather suddenly developed a quite detailed recollection of events that had completely slipped your mind until they were shoved in your face.

In any case, as Filippo Lippi has pointed out, your recollections are, to say the least, nothing like the actual situation that developed. Apart from the fact that you continued posting all manner of nonsense in multiple threads, you refused to stick to the rules upon which you yourself had insisted.

 

[Jabba]

And, while pretty much everyone has denied the former, absolutely no one has disagreed with the latter. I freely state (not admit) here and now that the value of P(me|A) is one over a totally unimaginably large number. I fact, have loudly claimed this to be the fact numerous times. It is not infinity, but it is mind-bogglingly large. Large enough that the exponent is probably a mildly boggling number itself. I put an absolute bare minimum possible estimate on the value at 10 to the 80th power (1E80) factorial (i.e., 1E80 x (1E80 - 1) x (1E80 - 2) x (1E80 - 3) ... 4 x 3 x 2). That's a number so large that there may not be enough particles in the universe to write out the exponent in full, let alone the number itself. And I suspect it's bogglingly less than the actual value...

xt,
- But if I were to pursue that argument, I'd still need to effectively support the requirement that I'm "special," and not just one of the crowd. For the moment (at least), I think that would be more difficult to support than is an infinity of potential selves.

 

[Filippo Lippi]

You seem to have rather suddenly developed a quite detailed recollection of events that had completely slipped your mind until they were shoved in your face.

Quite. Is it time to return to the hypothesis that "Jabba" is a collective which sometime lacks coordination?

 

[Akhenaten]

xt,
- But if I were to pursue that argument, I'd still need to effectively support the requirement that I'm "special," and not just one of the crowd. For the moment (at least), I think that would be more difficult to support than is an infinity of potential selves.

What about just presenting your evidence in support of the existence of souls and see how that goes?