Is ESP More Probable Than Advanced Alien Life?

[Slowvehicle]

You are wrong on the second sentence. It is not a logically coherent claim.

Perhaps I should have said "a heard of thousands of T-Rex's" is still alive in the jungle in Brazil.

The T-Rexes were all changed into Tapirs (which are totally the same thing--just a "tiny change").

 

[jaydeehess]

Esp does not exist only in fiction...many people have experienced it...

Ah yes, anecdotal evidence is always to be considered absolute proof, in some odd segments of society.

 

[Slowvehicle]

Actually, you're on record claiming bachelors "cease to exist" when they get married, but if you want to water it down, it's no skin off my nose.

Right. The "bachelor" does, ihn fact, "cease to eixst"--the "bachelor" is not-there-any-more; the being in the "bachelor's" place is a "married man" (which is not a "bachelor", in case you missed it). The "bachelors only" bus that dorve to the airfield with one passenger had to leave empty; there was none to qualify, any longer (after being changed into "...something entirely else...") to ride in it.

A "married man" is not a "bachelor".

Keep after it; I am confident you can reach understanding.

Pay attention to your idea of being changed into "...something entirely other..."

Nobody is "tough" on these forums. There used to be people, like Sol Invictus, who would occasionally chime in. Now we're down to people like "John Jones" and "Tsig".

And yet you simply cannot walk away, can you?

FWIW, I disagree; I am, after all a survivor of both "Terrific Tablecloth" threads, as well as several similar...

it is to snerk.

See the fine-tuning thread if you want to see what the Science Forum has become.

I think your arguments here are illustrative enough, thanks.

I thought this thread might result in interesting discussion. Apparently, the people who are capable of it have left (with a few exceptions, you and Aridas, Giordano... but that's too much separating of the wheat from the chaff, for my tastes).

I'll stick to politics.

/thread.

Well, that is one way to avoid answering questions, innit?

Have fun...

 

[Slowvehicle]

I doubt he's turned into a chicken.

That's why the non-holiday T2 sports the symbol it does...

 

[fuelair]

When will you post proof. (never) The post is not very zen

The post is not supposed to be zen, just the girl. Though, in all fairness I am pretty sure neither is. Unless of course she is a) a girl and b) a zen.

 

[Slowvehicle]

Well we started off with "If advanced alien life can exist then so can ESP" so there was really no up direction here.

Not to argue D) but at the nadir, isn't everything "up"?

 

[jaydeehess]

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d...-find-galaxys-100-billion-earth-like-planets/
that was 2013
In this month's year in science in review, newly discovered planets are spoken of including two Earth like planets in the Goldilocks zone.

Then there is "Weird Life" by David Toomey which discusses this very subject.
Its not like a great deal of serious consideration of this hasn't been undertaken and by and large the probability of life besides on this planet considered to be quite high. On the other hand ESP has also been studied and found rather wanting wrt its existence.

I'll look through my copy of Weird Life and see what exactly was said.

 

[Aridas]

Nowhere did I talk about "exact probability".

Irrelevant. It wasn't meant to be a perfect analogy, as was already pointed out. It was an example to make a concept obviously clear. Two unknown probabilities do not have to be regarded as equally likely, contrary to the claim that you made in the post that mine was a response to. This is another attempt to nitpick, given that you don't actually have a valid argument, by the look of it.

A Bayesian calculus can be used to calculate the rough probability of the visit of a parent: such an event would either be surprising or not surprising (based on particular circumstances). In my case, a Bayesian calculus would determine the event to be "not surprising". If an event IS surprising, then it could be determined as to how surprising it would be. If both parents are dead, it would be extremely surprising if they showed up. If they live in another state, it might be very surprising.

A Bayesian calculus of a god showing up would show that such an event would be extremely surprising. In other words Pr(living parent visit) > Pr(god visit).

So your example did not disprove my premise, because a bayesian calculus can be performed for both events, showing that one event is extremely more likely than the other.

First of all, if your standard is that your arbitrary Bayesian calculation can only have the binary result of "surprising to you" and "not surprising to you," it's no wonder that you are having such a hard time here with relative probability and keep being unable to demonstrate that the counters to your arguments are wrong. Second, if you really want to go back to your premise, take a serious look back at your OP and what you're actually doing in it. You started from the position that advanced alien life is fairly reasonable on the face of it and then tried to pile on potential issues to try to reduce the supposed likelihood. In short, you only really focused on the negatives. Meanwhile, you glossed over the issues with ESP and only really focused on the positives, going so far as to try to argue that we should ignore things that are normally highly relevant to Bayesian probability calculations, specifically for ESP. The overwhelming difference in treatment rather screams out that the same concept that makes special pleading a fallacy is in play. After all of this, you try to argue that, based on your incredibly biased evaluation, it should be all be thrown out the window and treated evenly.

Simply speaking, you aren't even remotely treating the subject objectively in your premise, which means that your argument as a whole is remarkably untrustworthy, before even getting to anything else.

For two events for which no probability calculus can be performed, they are both equally likely.

This, frankly, is nothing more than false assertion. An easy example of why this is blatantly wrong can be found when comparing two similar events for which no direct probability calculation can be performed, with one of them simply having more specific requirements. What is the chance of picking out a blue toy from a pile of toys? What is the chance of picking out a round blue toy that weighs about 3 pounds from the same pile? Indeed, without knowing what the pile contains, the probability will be unknown. However, it is trivially true that the latter chance will never be more likely than the former and will almost always be significantly less likely in practice, which makes the general estimated probability lower than the former. Thus, they cannot be reasonably considered to be equal. In short, your argument fails from the start, before even touching your "going further," because relative probabilities don't have to be directly calculable to be able to be reasonably compared.

The parallels to the case of alien life existing VS. ESP are obvious. No calculus exists for the probability that alien life will be discovered. There are too many unknown variables.

A Bayesian calculus for the surprisingness of the existence of alien life can return any result you want, and all results would be equally invalid, since we lack the necessary knowledge to assign probabilities to key pieces of knowledge: the number of necessary conditions for life to be possible and the odds of abiogenesis occurring.

And yes, if we inhabit a unique spot in the universe, the existence of alien life could be considered a physical impossibility. It depends on your view of the laws of nature:

"The difference is, perhaps, highlighted most strongly in Necessitarians saying that the Laws of Nature govern the world; while Regularists insist that Laws of Nature do no more or less than correctly describe the world."
http://www.iep.utm.edu/lawofnat/

I believe the laws of nature describe the world. If the we find out we inhabit the only spot in the universe for life to exist, then it would be a law of nature that life only exists on Earth, and life existing anywhere else would be a violation of a law of nature, and therefore physically impossible.

I notice that, yet again, you don't even try to objectively consider ESP and advanced alien life while using similar standards and, in fact, didn't address how ESP stands up here at all. In short, at best, you've made half an argument. It's certainly not complete enough to even bother directly addressing, regardless.

 

[Aridas]

I wondered if you would go down this road. It's a strange one for materialists to take. You've blundered (either knowingly or unknowingly) into the Ship of Theseus problem. Namely, how much change does a thing have to go through before it's not the same thing anymore.

That's actually not quite a valid assessment of the Ship of Theseus, as I recall, given that it's not about change. Rather, it's about the value and nature of some kinds of labels and how easy it can be to conflate concepts. Either way, it's a very simple dilemma to solve when you recognize that it's just playing with the nature of assigned labels.

 

[Daylightstar]

That's actually not quite a valid assessment of the Ship of Theseus, as I recall, given that it's not about change. Rather, it's about the value and nature of some kinds of labels and how easy it can be to conflate concepts. Either way, it's a very simple dilemma to solve when you recognize that it's just playing with the nature of assigned labels.

It's about replacement of parts and identity of a whole after replacement of parts.
In Fudbucker's coin scenario, even if only the very outer surfaces of the coin were changed mid air from heads to tails but the inner parts of this coin remained the same, the now changed coin still landed tails, not heads, it's no longer a coin with heads.

Theseus' boat does not even apply remotely here.

But of course, there is no prior probability for a coin to change like that in mid air.

 

[Aridas]

It's about replacement of parts and identity of a whole after replacement of parts.

That's what happens in it for the former, not so much what it's about. As for identity, that's an example of an assigned label.

In Fudbucker's coin scenario, even if only the very outer surfaces of the coin were changed mid air from heads to tails but the inner parts of this coin remained the same, the now changed coin still landed tails, not heads, it's no longer a coin with heads.

Two heads, specifically, though it supposedly was a coin with two heads when the flip began, even if it is no longer validly identified as a coin with two heads when it lands. Frankly, it's doable in a few ways, but the entire two headed coin tangent is rather pointless and little more than an empty distraction, in my opinion.

Theseus' boat does not even apply remotely here.

If you stretch things a bit, it can, but it's likely not the best thing to use. Fudbucker has demonstrated that he has a habit of using terms in not quite proper ways, though, so this really isn't a surprise.

But of course, there is no prior probability for a coin to change like that in mid air.

As noted, there are a couple tricks that could be used, potentially. If you're assuming that no tricks were used, which I don't think was ever stated to be either the case or part of the description, you're likely right that there's no prior probability, though. Either way, invoking the chance of something completely unexpected happening isn't specifically wrong to do. It's just fairly pointless on a practical level, much like it's not wrong to acknowledge the usually vanishingly small chance that a flipped coin will settle on its edge, rather than either side for whatever reason, but not all that useful to take into account. It's the kind of thing that may as well pass without comment.

 

[Fudbucker]

That's actually not quite a valid assessment of the Ship of Theseus, as I recall, given that it's not about change. Rather, it's about the value and nature of some kinds of labels and how easy it can be to conflate concepts. Either way, it's a very simple dilemma to solve when you recognize that it's just playing with the nature of assigned labels.

Problem of change

The question then arises as to what sort of change happens after a thing is destroyed? When a person dies, one does not say that the person's life has changed. Neither does one go around saying, "Harry just isn't the same sort of guy since he died." Instead, one says that Harry's life has ended. Similarly, when a building is demolished, one does not say that the building 'changes'; one says that it is destroyed. So what sort of events, on the one hand, result in a mere change, and what sort of events, on the other hand, result in a thing's destruction — in the state of its existence? This is one aspect of the problem that will be considered here. It is called "the problem of change and identity".

The Ship of Theseus

The "problem of change and identity" is generally explained with the story of the Ship of Theseus:

https://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Identity_and_change.html

You're also wrong about Bayes Theorem:

D. The confirmatory effect of surprising or diverse evidence. From the corollary above, it follows that whether E confirms (or disconfirms) H depends on whether E is more probable (or less probable) conditional on H than it is unconditionally — that is, on whether:

(b1) P(E/H)/P(E) > 1.
An intuitive way of understanding (b1) is to say that it states that E would be more expected (or less surprising) if it were known that H were true. So if E is surprising, but would not be surprising if we knew H were true, then E will significantly confirm H. Thus, Bayesians explain the tendency of surprising evidence to confirm hypotheses on which the evidence would be expected.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology-bayesian/

Sorry, couldn't resist!

 

[Fudbucker]

Irrelevant. It wasn't meant to be a perfect analogy, as was already pointed out. It was an example to make a concept obviously clear. Two unknown probabilities do not have to be regarded as equally likely, contrary to the claim that you made in the post that mine was a response to. This is another attempt to nitpick, given that you don't actually have a valid argument, by the look of it.



First of all, if your standard is that your arbitrary Bayesian calculation can only have the binary result of "surprising to you" and "not surprising to you," it's no wonder that you are having such a hard time here with relative probability and keep being unable to demonstrate that the counters to your arguments are wrong. Second, if you really want to go back to your premise, take a serious look back at your OP and what you're actually doing in it. You started from the position that advanced alien life is fairly reasonable on the face of it and then tried to pile on potential issues to try to reduce the supposed likelihood. In short, you only really focused on the negatives. Meanwhile, you glossed over the issues with ESP and only really focused on the positives, going so far as to try to argue that we should ignore things that are normally highly relevant to Bayesian probability calculations, specifically for ESP. The overwhelming difference in treatment rather screams out that the same concept that makes special pleading a fallacy is in play. After all of this, you try to argue that, based on your incredibly biased evaluation, it should be all be thrown out the window and treated evenly.

Simply speaking, you aren't even remotely treating the subject objectively in your premise, which means that your argument as a whole is remarkably untrustworthy, before even getting to anything else.




This, frankly, is nothing more than false assertion. An easy example of why this is blatantly wrong can be found when comparing two similar events for which no direct probability calculation can be performed, with one of them simply having more specific requirements. What is the chance of picking out a blue toy from a pile of toys? What is the chance of picking out a round blue toy that weighs about 3 pounds from the same pile? Indeed, without knowing what the pile contains, the probability will be unknown. However, it is trivially true that the latter chance will never be more likely than the former and will almost always be significantly less likely in practice, which makes the general estimated probability lower than the former. Thus, they cannot be reasonably considered to be equal. In short, your argument fails from the start, before even touching your "going further," because relative probabilities don't have to be directly calculable to be able to be reasonably compared.



I notice that, yet again, you don't even try to objectively consider ESP and advanced alien life while using similar standards and, in fact, didn't address how ESP stands up here at all. In short, at best, you've made half an argument. It's certainly not complete enough to even bother directly addressing, regardless.

Your toy example is also wrong.

Consider: There is a bag of metal disks. Are the odds of pulling out a disk that weighs 5.6 grams greater than pulling out a disk that weighs 5.6 grams and has 119 ridges with an eagle imprinted on the side? No. There is an equal chance the bag is filled with washers that weigh 5.6 grams as there is of it being filled with quarters.

 

[Aridas]

Problem of change

I did point out what I meant a bit. Frankly, though, the Ship of Theseus is OT. For the sake of this thread, I won't go into depth on the topic, or, indeed, continue, much as I certainly could.

You're also wrong about Bayes Theorem:

D. The confirmatory effect of surprising or diverse evidence. From the corollary above, it follows that whether E confirms (or disconfirms) H depends on whether E is more probable (or less probable) conditional on H than it is unconditionally — that is, on whether:

(b1) P(E/H)/P(E) > 1.
An intuitive way of understanding (b1) is to say that it states that E would be more expected (or less surprising) if it were known that H were true. So if E is surprising, but would not be surprising if we knew H were true, then E will significantly confirm H. Thus, Bayesians explain the tendency of surprising evidence to confirm hypotheses on which the evidence would be expected.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology-bayesian/

Sorry, couldn't resist!

Sounds more like you had yet another obvious failure in reading comprehension, actually. Multiple, likely. With that said, though, would you care even trying to addressing the main points of the post, rather than trying to obfuscate the matter to tangents that just demonstrate your failings?

 

[Aridas]

Your toy example is also wrong.

Consider: There is a bag of metal disks. Are the odds of pulling out a disk that weighs 5.6 grams greater than pulling out a disk that weighs 5.6 grams and has 119 ridges with an eagle imprinted on the side? No. There is an equal chance the bag is filled with washers that weigh 5.6 grams as there is of it being filled with quarters.

Seriously? I addressed this preemptively, even. Yet another obvious failure in reading comprehension, at best. To repeat the part where your "objection" was already pointed out and been preemptively demonstrated wrong to leave on its own -

Indeed, without knowing what the pile contains, the probability will be unknown. However, it is trivially true that the latter chance will never be more likely than the former and will almost always be significantly less likely in practice, which makes the general estimated probability lower than the former. Thus, they cannot be reasonably considered to be equal.

It's true that the "almost always" is, in fact, overstating the matter, given that that only applies to piles with blue toys in them in the first place. That does not even remotely negate the point that the probability of the latter will never be greater than the former and will frequently be less in practice, which makes it valid to say that the former is, in general, more likely to be the case.

 

[Fudbucker]

That's what happens in it for the former, not so much what it's about. As for identity, that's an example of an assigned label.



Two heads, specifically, though it supposedly was a coin with two heads when the flip began, even if it is no longer validly identified as a coin with two heads when it lands. Frankly, it's doable in a few ways, but the entire two headed coin tangent is rather pointless and little more than an empty distraction, in my opinion.



If you stretch things a bit, it can, but it's likely not the best thing to use. Fudbucker has demonstrated that he has a habit of using terms in not quite proper ways, though, so this really isn't a surprise.



As noted, there are a couple tricks that could be used, potentially. If you're assuming that no tricks were used, which I don't think was ever stated to be either the case or part of the description, you're likely right that there's no prior probability, though. Either way, invoking the chance of something completely unexpected happening isn't specifically wrong to do. It's just fairly pointless on a practical level, much like it's not wrong to acknowledge the usually vanishingly small chance that a flipped coin will settle on its edge, rather than either side for whatever reason, but not all that useful to take into account. It's the kind of thing that may as well pass without comment.

Thank you!

Practicality wasn't the issue. It was a question of who was right or wrong. A bachelor can indeed land a married man, if he is married in mid-air. Give him a physical change too, like a broken bone when he lands. It's still the same person.

Toss out a two-headed coin along with the bachelor. As it's falling, rearrange the atoms on the outer parts of the coin so that two tails appear. The bachelor lands a married man with a broken leg, the coin lands tails. It's still the same person and still the same coin.

Thus, a two-headed coin can land tails.

A pointless derail, but Slow was convinced he was right and wouldn't back down. My ego was likewise involved.

 

[Fudbucker]

Seriously? I addressed this preemptively, even. Yet another obvious failure in reading comprehension, at best. To repeat the part where your "objection" was already pointed out and been preemptively demonstrated wrong to leave on its own -

Nah, I'm done. You're not getting it, and you obviously don't have a background in this stuff (Ship of Theseus is all about change, confirmation is all about how surprising a piece of evidence is, physical impossibility depends on how the laws of nature are defined, etc.), and my examples obviously aren't helping. I taught an intro to philosophy course at a JC for a semester. It's possible that I'm wrong, but not very likely.

 

[Slowvehicle]

Your toy example is also wrong.

Consider: There is a bag of metal disks. Are the odds of pulling out a disk that weighs 5.6 grams greater than pulling out a disk that weighs 5.6 grams and has 119 ridges with an eagle imprinted on the side? No. There is an equal chance the bag is filled with washers that weigh 5.6 grams as there is of it being filled with quarters.

Consider admitting that you missed the point of the bag of toys analogy, and are thius misusing it.

Look at your bag of "metal disks". Without more information, it is silly pretend to compare the likelihood of pulling put a quarter as opposed to pulling out a slug, or a washer. Nor does that set of circumstances address your magical two-headed-coin-that-does-not-have-two-heads.

However, Fud (and this is where you do err, Fud), IF one draws form the bag an American Quarter Dollar Coin; and flips it; and confuds physics by changing it, by altering it, in the air; so that what lands is a disk of galvanized pot metal (not a silver/copper/zinc sandwich) with no eagle, and no reeded edges; then (as seven follows six) what lands is not an American Quarter Dollar coin.

If one reaches into the bag and pulls out a washer of precisely the right size and gauge to buffer a bolt-and-nut fastener, and flips the washer through the air to awaiting workman; and, in the air, the washer is fuderalized into a copper-silver-zinc sandwich, with no hole, but with reeded edges, a picture of the St Louis Arch, and a left-facing portrait of George Washington, stamped by a US mint; then what lands is not a "washer".

You, yourself, used the term, changed into "...something entirely else...".

 

[Aridas]

Thank you!

I do ever try to be fair to the arguments.

Practicality wasn't the issue. It was a question of who was right or wrong. A bachelor can indeed land a married man, if he is married in mid-air. Give him a physical change too, like a broken bone when he lands. It's still the same person.

The broken bone is a red herring, frankly, in this. All that actually happens is that one arbitrarily assigned label is switched with a different arbitrarily assigned label, either way.

Toss out a two-headed coin along with the bachelor. As it's falling, rearrange the atoms on the outer parts of the coin so that two tails appear. The bachelor lands a married man with a broken leg, the coin lands tails. It's still the same person and still the same coin.

"Rearranging the atoms" is a rather poor way to describe ways to actually get it to happen, which has likely led to you encountering a lot of extra pointless resistance. At least involve something that can break away, be added, or make up an example of a coin with sides that are functionally similar to digital screens that can change what they're showing without issue. Any of these would be much more easily visualized, though they're not the only ways to do it.

Thus, a two-headed coin can land tails.

A formerly two headed coin can, certainly. If it's landing on tails, it's not a two headed coin when it's landing on tails. Unless both heads are on one side, which is likely necessary to point out, given the level of semantic debate going on.

 

[Slowvehicle]

Thank you!

Practicality wasn't the issue. It was a question of who was right or wrong. A bachelor can indeed land a married man, if he is married in mid-air. Give him a physical change too, like a broken bone when he lands. It's still the same person.

Toss out a two-headed coin along with the bachelor. As it's falling, rearrange the atoms on the outer parts of the coin so that two tails appear. The bachelor lands a married man with a broken leg, the coin lands tails. It's still the same person and still the same coin.

Thus, a two-headed coin can land tails.

A pointless derail, but Slow was convinced he was right and wouldn't back down. My ego was likewise involved.

Fud, no matter how often you assert your error, if what lands on the ground has some-number-other-than-two heads, it is not, it cannot honestly be said to be, a "two-headed coin".

Fud, no matter how often you assert your error, if what lands on the ground is a man married, it cannot honestly be said to be a "bachelor".

If so simple a thing eludes you, the rest of your assertions rightly seem...suspect.

Perhaps the politics forum, is, in fact, a better place for you.