Is ESP More Probable Than Advanced Alien Life?

[Aridas]

Nah, I'm done. You're not getting it,

I'm getting what you're saying, actually. It's just wrong when applied like you're trying to apply it. You're focusing on the singular, when they should be applied over much larger sets of possibilities, given that you're unable to distinguish which of the possibilities is the case in that instance.

If you're trying for qualifications jab, though, come back when you've practiced your reading comprehension a bit more.

 

[Slowvehicle]

<respectful snip for focus>
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.

In agreement, I would add that am Albanian 1-Lek coin with the image of a two-headed eagle on one side is not a "two-headed coin", in any semantically honest use of the term...

 

[Slowvehicle]

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.

"If all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a a nail. On the other hand, if you actually do have a nail, you can smack it all day with a screwdriver, or a pair of dyke pliers, or a plug gapper, and get nowhere; when one good blow with the right hammer would drive the nail."

 

[Aridas]

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.

When it lands on the ground. It's honestly not horribly wrong to refer to the coin as it is when launched, though, just more intentionally confusing and annoying. Again, though, the entire semantics debate is a bit pointless, functionally.

 

[jsfisher]

Practicality wasn't the issue. It was a question of who was right or wrong.

That seems to be an acute concern of yours. Well, with a fixed perspective on your own correctness. Maybe we should revisit your count of the planets in the opening post so you can detail your correctness there, too.

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.

This is an equivocation. It was never a question of whether the same person landed (and in the most complete sense of "same" you'd still be wrong, but that would be linguistic quibble only marginally better than the dross you are selling).

For the case at hand, no bachelor landed. A married man did. Moreover, it doesn't matter when the man became married, just that he was at the landing.

 

[Daylightstar]

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.

Fudbucker used following example of the mid air change of the coin:

...
Example: I toss a two-headed coin. I zap it with my atom rearranger and it becomes a two-tailed coin. It lands tails.

That is how a two-headed coin can land tails.
...

It's not a trick, it's fantasy.

Anyways, it doesn't even matter how such a coin would change it's surfaces mid air, fantasy, magic, tricks ..... the coin with two heads is not the version of the coin which is landing after the flip.

Fudbucker abuses philosophical concepts, Boltzmann Brain, Ship of Theseus in addition to faulty Bayesian calculus and rejection of the actual null hypothesis replaced by a redefinition of it, all to facilitate his fantasy.

It's much like I said earlier:

Fudbucker, you are more concerned with what you believe than with what you could learn.

 

[Daylightstar]

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.

Let's say the bachelor goes into an air balloon with his fiancée and some official and they get married in the air.
Now they land. Although the man is still the same person, he no longer is a bachelor, he is a married man and as such he lands.

Him being the same person doesn't matter in your scenario.

 

[Daylightstar]

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.

You actually unambiguously demonstrated that you are wrong.

 

[slyjoe]

Wait. There was that one guy. Didn't he spend 2+ years trying to prove immortality via Bayesian theory?

That worked-out pretty well didn't it?

Over 10,000 posts in two threads, plus the debate thread with Loss Leader and the Commentary thread on the debate thread.

A classic of train-wreckedness.

 

[jsfisher]

When it lands on the ground. It's honestly not horribly wrong to refer to the coin as it is when launched, though, just more intentionally confusing and annoying. Again, though, the entire semantics debate is a bit pointless, functionally.

Ordinarily, I'd agree with you. If the purpose of the qualifier were to indicate which coin (person, card deck) and not to identify a specific characteristic, then you are exactly right. But Fudbucker had been using it call out a specific characteristic of a deck of cards.

This current arc started with Fudbucker's remark that the probability of finding an ace in an ace-less deck of cards was almost zero. When pressed about his use of "almost", he simply quoted a Stanford University web page stating that probabilities were between 0 and 1. His use of bold text and large fonts made it clear he believed "between 0 and 1" meant not equal to 0. Thus, he justified his "almost zero" remark and could hold firm on his perfect score of correctness.

Once that obvious blunder was torpedoed, Fudbucker then rerouted his I've-must-be-right campaign to eventually include bachelors in parachutes.

The point stands. Fudbucker's use of the term, bachelor (or two-headed or aceless), in context was to identify a specific characteristic of something. At whatever point it lost the characteristic, it was no longer the something Fudbucker had tendered.

 

[The Norseman]

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.

Then show your work with a proper Baye's Theorem when applied to ESP and advanced alien life, without priors. It should be simple enough to show that the theories of ESP and AAL have an approximately equal probability. It's not necessary to go into heavy detail, just put your numbers down and let's all go from there.

 

[steenkh]

Has someone spelled out a definition of ESP? Not sure how it can be declared "impossible with known physics" (or maybe I'm missing some definition of physics local to this thread).

Yes, Fudbucker has mentioned seeing the future as being covered by his ESP. Another aspect seema to be telepathy.

It's not for me to specify which law would permit it. It's for my opponent to specify which laws it would violate. If ESP does not violate any laws of nature, then it is physically possible.

OK, seeing the future is a violation of the second law of thermodynamics (that directs the flow of time).

 

[tsig]

Yes, Fudbucker has mentioned seeing the future as being covered by his ESP. Another aspect seema to be telepathy.


OK, seeing the future is a violation of the second law of thermodynamics (that directs the flow of time).

Since the future hasn't happened yet how can anyone see it?

 

[The Norseman]

Since the future hasn't happened yet how can anyone see it?

ESP!

 

[Darat]

Has someone spelled out a definition of ESP? Not sure how it can be declared "impossible with known physics" (or maybe I'm missing some definition of physics local to this thread).

I did enquire at the start of the thread but Fudbucker did not supply his definition so I've been using the "usual" Rhine definition which includes clairaudience, telepathy, precognition, clairvoyance and the like.

Obviously all of the above do not exist - or rather do not exist outside fiction. We have extensively checked and looked and there is zero evidence they do exist plus over the last couple of decades we have explored the physics at the scales they would have to interact and we now know there is simply no gap left for them.

 

[Daylightstar]

Since the future hasn't happened yet how can anyone see it?

Because the future was the past and is still the same past, just only slightly different.

 

[Daylightstar]

Since the future hasn't happened yet how can anyone see it?

Or, if you haven't proven that you can not, it is possible. Not logically possible or physically possible, just possible.

 

[Fudbucker]

Then show your work with a proper Baye's Theorem when applied to ESP and advanced alien life, without priors. It should be simple enough to show that the theories of ESP and AAL have an approximately equal probability. It's not necessary to go into heavy detail, just put your numbers down and let's all go from there.

I did one for advanced alien life. The hypothesis (H) is that "alien life exists". E is our evidence that there's life on Earth. Pr(E/H) is either through the roof (i.e., not surprising at all, and therefore not confirming) or, if looked at counterfactually, a number can't be assigned because we don't know the necessary conditions for which life is possible, and therefore don't know how surprising it would be for life to occur on Earth if we were looking at Earth 4 billion years ago, without the knowledge that life would eventually occur, and wondering how surprising it would be for life to occur. (counterfactuals get a little tricky, but you have to do something like that if the evidence is already known to exist (problem of old evidence*)).

More devastating to the calculus is that Pr(E) is either so high that no confirmation occurs, or, again, counterfactually impossible to assign.

So you have a case where there's either no confirmation, because the evidence is already known to exist, or unknown confirmation, because the surprisingness of the evidence can't be determined.

I didn't get a chance to do a Bayesian ESP calc. No one would agree my Bayesian one on alien life was correct (although it is).

* http://fitelson.org/probability/eells_bpooe.pdf

*"The problem first emerges when considering cases in which pr(E) is taken to have the extreme value of 1. In those circumstances, E is treated probabilistically just as if it were a tautology. It cannot confirm anything, since pr(H/E) will be equal to pr(H). Once one is absolutely certain about one’s evidence, it no longer is evidence

...

The most immediately appealing, and most widely criticized, direct approach to the synchronic problem relies on counterfactual degrees of belief. For an agent who knows E, this approach would analyze confirmation with the standard positive relevance definition; however, it would be applied not to the agent’s actual probabilities, but to what those probabilities would have
been in circumstances where the agent did not know E.

http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/onlinepapers/christensen/MeasuringConfirmation.pdf

 

[Daylightstar]

...
I didn't get a chance to do a Bayesian ESP calc. No one would agree my Bayesian one on alien life was correct (although it is).
...

Your 'calculus' was constructing a false distinction.
And that's all it did. Worthless.

 

[Darat]

I did one for advanced alien life. The hypothesis (H) is that "alien life exists". E is our evidence that there's life on Earth. Pr(E/H) is either through the roof (i.e., not surprising at all, and therefore not confirming) or, if looked at counterfactually, a number can't be assigned because we don't know the necessary conditions for which life is possible, and therefore don't know how surprising it would be for life to occur on Earth if we were looking at Earth 4 billion years ago, without the knowledge that life would eventually occur, and wondering how surprising it would be for life to occur. (counterfactuals get a little tricky, but you have to do something like that if the evidence is already known to exist (problem of old evidence*)).

...sniop...

But we do know some of the conditions that are necessary for life.