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Proof of Immortality II

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Dave,
- I'm not saying that we should trash A. I'm just saying that we have new evidence against A -- and unless we were totally sure about A before gaining this new evidence, we need to apply the new evidence to our prior probability of A in order to determine the post probability of A.

Finally!

NOW is when you are going to present your evidence that the "soul" exists,and is "immortal", right?

Right?
 
Dave,
- I'm not saying that we should trash A. I'm just saying that we have new evidence against A -- and unless we were totally sure about A before gaining this new evidence, we need to apply the new evidence to our prior probability of A in order to determine the post probability of A.


Jabba, don't forget that order is important. The opposite ordering (discovering "b" first) is related to that Lone Star State thing.
 
Jabba,

I think that you made an error in your recent posts in that, in reaction to my first question, you initially tried to divert attention while at the same time you demonstrated that you understood very well that your "I am special" theory conflicts with the large number of existing souls that you have proposed under your theory. You did not respond at all to my second question, which was an attempt to bring the discussion back to the original question. All of this occurred within a very brief time period and was soon followed by your posting on irrelevant topics. So you made it very clear that (1) you read my posts but (2) deliberately ignore all of the ones that you cannot rebut. You also demonstrated that you understand the fatal problems with your theory, but will persist with proposing it anyway.

I was willing to help someone understand a problem that they might not recognize, but I don't see any point in helping anyone to understand a problem that they already clearly recognize and ignore.
 
Who said anything about cheating death by moving our brains around?


Jabba.



<snip>

This is going nowhere fast.


No, it's going nowhere at a rate somewhat less rapid than 'glacial'.

For example, the OP claimed evidence for immortality and yet two years later we're not a hair's breadth closer to knowing what it is for which this immortality is claimed.

Do you know?
 
Akhenaten,
- No one noticed that you were agreeing with me.


Neither did anyone notice that Charles Darwin was agreeing with the author of Genesis.

How could this be?

Maybe there's more to your current existence than luck.


Perhaps you'll be so kind as to explain where luck fits into Bayes' formula as you are attempting to implement it.
 
1. Jabba's existence means no more to me than a random grain of sand on Mars, as I have made explicitly clear on several occasions.


Judgement of the clarity of your explanations is, whether you like it or not, in the hands of your readership.

Or to put it another way, whether your explanations are valid and your readers are just to thick to understand them or your explanations are complete rubbish and nobody is interested in dealing with them, the fault remains yours.



2. A convincing explanation of how any individual might logically arrive at the conclusion that their specific existence materially affects their conditional probability of the "scientific model" being the sole explanation for their sentient experience would be worth considerably more than you've earned, if I perchance possessed such insight and the expertise and inclination to effectively communicate it to people who are clearly ideologically indisposed to hear it. So why would I bother to burden myself with such an attempt?


quod erat demonstrandum



3. Can you explain why I should unquestioningly believe, with starry-eyed faith, that my specific existence is consistent with a model which lays prior odds of 1080! : 1 against my specific observed existence?

Hint: My question (3.) is at least as valid as yours.


Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. The bottom line, however, is that your beliefs are irrelevant.
 
3. Can you explain why I should unquestioningly believe, with starry-eyed faith, that my specific existence is consistent with a model which lays prior odds of 1080! : 1 against my specific observed existence?

Hint: My question (3.) is at least as valid as yours.

Sigh. Because you keep misisng the point.

See , why does it matter if the probability of any specific being coming into existence is 1/100 or 1/(100000000^100000!) ? Hint : it does not , because a normal healthy pregnancy will lead to a human being in 100% of the case. So your specific existence POST birth, is actually consistent with any probability of a specific person being born.
 
Giordano,
- I'm actually claiming that my likelihood of currently existing, given A, is 7,000,000,000/1080!*1080!.

1/1080!*1080!= 1

You're claiming that your likelihood of currently existing is 7,000,000,000, after factoring out the number 1?

That makes no sense in terms of probability.
 
1/1080!*1080!= 1

You're claiming that your likelihood of currently existing is 7,000,000,000, after factoring out the number 1?

That makes no sense in terms of probability.

TO be fair to jabba I am betting he place the parenthsis as such :
1/(1080!*1080!) which is jsut 1/102*(80!) and make didly squat different as if he had used 1/1080! (by that i mean the number do not matter, the fact it is finite simply put a crimp in jabba making any progress past choosing any arbitrary low number).
 
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TO be fair to jabba I am betting he place the parenthsis as such :
1/(1080!*1080!) which is jsut 1/102*(80!) and make didly squat different as if he had used 1/1080!

Here's the statement:

Giordano,
- I'm actually claiming that my likelihood of currently existing, given A, is 7,000,000,000/1080!*1080!.


There are no parentheses there. It's simple mathematics. I'll agree that Mr Jabba did indeed make a simple mistake -- his arguments simply can't prove immortality using any kind of stats or maths.
 
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TO be fair to jabba I am betting he place the parenthsis as such :
1/(1080!*1080!) which is jsut 1/102*(80!) and make didly squat different as if he had used 1/1080!

I agree that the actual number matters little: either number is wrong to use because of the Texas Sharpshooter approach Jabba seeks to employ. Although I think that the proper use of parenthesizes would be second nature to anyone, like Jabba, trained in statistics.

I think a more philosophical question relates to the probabilities before life formed on this planet. What is the probability of the Higgins particle having the mass it does, what is the probability of g being what it is, what is the probability of our Sun and Earth forming as they did from the original gas and particle clouds, that the distance of the Earth from the Sun was right for carbon-based life to form, etc. Of course, we don't really know these values, and we are looking at it all from a Texas Sharpshooter's viewpoint: it worked for us, and we don't know how it might have worked if things were different (or are different in an aaternative universe). The puddle is the exact size of its hole. In the absence of any evidence, I suppose it is possible that a god mandated all of this in advance just to produce people, although why an all powerful god wouldn't cut all this lengthy crap and just make people immediately I cannot understand. I can't even understand why producing people would be all that desirable: I think that dolphins are often more fun.
 
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Dave,
- I'm not saying that we should trash A. I'm just saying that we have new evidence against A -- and unless we were totally sure about A before gaining this new evidence, we need to apply the new evidence to our prior probability of A in order to determine the post probability of A.


There is no new evidence. There was some chance that you would come to exist, you came to exist. You have one data point: that you exist. That's not new evidence.


The Yankees had a 1/30 chance of winning the Pennant. They won the Pennant. That's all we know. We don't know their win-loss record. We don't know their players or their stats. We don't know anything about any other team. Can we use the fact that the Yankees won the Pennant to refigure the odds that they might have won? Not using any statistics or math. Our one data point is predicted by our model and it adds no new information.

How is your existence any different than the Yankees example above?
 
There is no new evidence. There was some chance that you would come to exist, you came to exist. You have one data point: that you exist. That's not new evidence.


The Yankees had a 1/30 chance of winning the Pennant. They won the Pennant. That's all we know. We don't know their win-loss record. We don't know their players or their stats. We don't know anything about any other team. Can we use the fact that the Yankees won the Pennant to refigure the odds that they might have won? Not using any statistics or math. Our one data point is predicted by our model and it adds no new information.

How is your existence any different than the Yankees example above?

Admittedly, I'm coming to this thread late, but it seems more like a claim that a baseball team would win the pennant, which would have a 1:1 probability. That the Yankees won is irrelevant to the probability in question, because if they didn't win, another team with 1/30 odds (another equally unique individual) would have.

But I may be missing something, not having read the whole thread.
 
Dave,
- I'm not saying that we should trash A. I'm just saying that we have new evidence against A -- and unless we were totally sure about A before gaining this new evidence, we need to apply the new evidence to our prior probability of A in order to determine the post probability of A.

What new evidence is that?

It can't be your existence, because your existence is consistent with A. That one person exists and billions of potential people - people who could have existed if events had happened slightly differently - do not is exactly what the scientific model of human consciousness predicts.

- Can you hazard a WAG as to it being below or above 1%?

No.
 
Why do you equate one specific side with a random one of the sides, as if the probability of the one specific side is equal to the combined probabilities of all the other sides?


I don't. I equate the probability of one specific side coming up with the probability of any other specific side will come up, not the combined probability of all the other sides. You're trying to set up a strawman to argue against.
 
Here's a question that I asked a couple of pages back, which didn't seem to get addressed:

Imagine we have an N-sided die with a name on each side, each of which is the name of one of N people who are in the next room. We throw the die, and then call in the person whose name has come up to look at the die. They are aware of this procedure. Should they be surprised to see their name?

ETA: I've spotted a way that Toontown could misunderstand the question, so I'll put it another way:

What is the probability that the person called into the room will see their own name?
 
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Oh my God, it's a meteor!

Giordano,
- I'm actually claiming that my likelihood of currently existing, given A, is 7,000,000,000/1080!*1080!.
I think that you need some work on your denominator there. Does that equal one? I'm reading this on a phone, so maybe I'm wrong, but I think you need some parentheses.


ETA - In any case, do we all agree that whatever actual numbers are used in the equation, they are not infinity?
 
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