Proof of Immortality II

[Slowvehicle]

- I didn't really "calculate" it...

- In my opinion<woo!snip>

And, an open mind about the issue is all you need in order to make the math work.

My Dear Mr. Savage:

You claimed you would "prove" "immortality".

Instead, you have (once again) asserted your conjecture, supported only by your fears.

The you have the temerity to suggest that people who point this out to you only do so because they have "closed minds".

Oddly enough, (I thought you said you had studied statistics?), "the math" works, if it works, independent of your faith.

I remain mortally yours, &ct.

 

[Filippo Lippi]

Imagine a world where error-filled maths works if your mind is open to it.

Obviously in normal maths world, Lewis Hamilton's lap time of 1 minute 29.943 seconds was the fastest in the Bahrain F1 qualifying last weekend (and a track record), but if your mind is sufficiently open, Felipe Nasr's 1:34.388 is faster.

In normal maths world, x= (-b±√(b²-4ac))/2a is the quadratic formula, but if your mind is sufficiently open, we could solve quadratics using something quite different - maybe adapt e=mc² to be a=bc².

My mind is completely open to the possibility that I have a million pounds in my bank account. In fact, when I logged in to my online banking this morning I'm almost sure that's what it said, but to be on the safe side I'll only give it a probability of 0.01.

Now we use Jabba's idea of Bayes, keeping our minds thoroughly open to the possibility that I do have a million pounds, and voilà! Now it is true, and I am just about to go out to buy a Veyron and some Louboutin shoes. I will explain to my bank manager that she/he just needs to keep an open mind, and follow the Bayes' theorem.

Bravo.

 

[Jabba]

Maths is maths whether your mind is open to D'Souza's utter nonsense or not. This is garbage in, garbage out. Or fantasy in, fantasy out.

There's no maths here, Jabba. You chose a number that 'felt right' to you with no supporting evidence whatsoever. You put it into a mathematical equation to try to give it an air of scientific legitimacy which it doesn't have.

It's dishonest, IMO, to take something (the probability of an afterlife or reincarnation) which has a complete lack of science or evidence, make up a number for the likelihood of it (that coincidentally works to 'prove it' when you misuse Bayes' theorem) and say that you have somehow shown evidence for it.

It doesn't matter whether every single person in the world believes in your ideas of an afterlife - and it is clear that D'Souza's ideas are very different from yours - appealing to popular belief is not evidence.

- The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.Bertrand Russell

Agatha,
- Don't you think that calling the opinion of a well-educated, intelligent person, "utter nonsense" sounds like something said by someone falling into Russell's first category?
- You're certainly not a fool, but almost everyone on this forum seems fanatically devoted to reductive materialism. That's why you're here.

 

[The Sparrow]

....but almost everyone on this forum seems fanatically devoted to reductive materialism. That's why you're here.

Wrong. I am here to discover truth based on facts and reasoning, not wild conjecture because one is scared of the dark.

 

[pharphis]

- The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.Bertrand Russell

Agatha,
- Don't you think that calling the opinion of a well-educated, intelligent person, "utter nonsense" sounds like something said by someone falling into Russell's first category?
- You're certainly not a fool, but almost everyone on this forum seems fanatically devoted to reductive materialism. That's why you're here.

Is a fallacious appeal to popularity not "utter nonsense"?

 

[John Jones]

Agatha,
- Don't you think that calling the opinion of a well-educated, intelligent person, "utter nonsense" sounds like something said by someone falling into Russell's first category?
- You're certainly not a fool, but almost everyone on this forum seems fanatically devoted to reductive materialism. That's why you're here.

Don't you think that calling the C14 scientists incompetent and dishonest, then scolding others for criticizing your source supremely hypocritical?

 

[JayUtah]

Don't you think that calling the opinion of a well-educated, intelligent person, "utter nonsense" sounds like something said by someone falling into Russell's first category?

Quite a lot of your critics are well-educated and intelligent, yet you have no problem casting all manner of aspersions upon them. Do not play the victim.

You're certainly not a fool, but almost everyone on this forum seems fanatically devoted to reductive materialism.

No, you are not the victim of fanatical devotion. You proposed to prove mathematically that humankind was immortal. Your proof was challenged on purely mathematical grounds, and your only defense has been to accuse your critics of being closed-minded.

Despite your determination to be butthurt about it, it is possible to disagree rationally with Dinesh D'Souza's statement, especially as it applies to your claims. You're trying to parlay his characterization into an argument that confidence equates to foolishness, in turn shaming your critics into withdrawing their rebuttals lest they be fools.

If there is one arena in which deductively strong confidence can thrive, it is mathematics. You were asked repeatedly to provide the basis of the crucial inputs to your inferential model. You resisted for some time, suggesting you knew it was your Achilles' heel. When you finally admitted you just pulled those numbers out of your backside, any claim you had to mathematical rigor flew right out the window -- just as you knew it would. Your critics are entirely correct that your "mathematics" is your nothing more than your preconceived beliefs dressed up to look like a number. Therefore they can very confidently and rationally level these rebuttals, and your insinuation that they are foolish to do so is very telling. True to form, when your actual argument is demolished, you resort to accusing your critics of being irrational, entrenched, and unfair.

You cannot simultaneously promise an argument that meets a mathematically strong standard of proof and then shame your critics into indulging your conjecture when you admit you are unable to meet the standard. Your failure, your shame -- deal with it.

 

[Agatha]

- The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.Bertrand Russell

Agatha,
- Don't you think that calling the opinion of a well-educated, intelligent person, "utter nonsense" sounds like something said by someone falling into Russell's first category?

I have no idea of D'Souza's intelligence or education, and it would be an ad hominem to discard his opinions merely because he's a convicted felon and a homophobic racist bigot. I did not dismiss his opinion on those grounds.

I dismissed his opinion because the quote you brought in about past lives contains an argumentum ad populum, an appeal to authority and absolutely no evidence.

I doubt everything, which is why I concentrate on evidence rather than what 'feels right' or on what is 'obvious', 'common sense' or what others believe. If that puts me in Bertrand Russell's wise category, then I would be honoured to be described so.

- You're certainly not a fool, but almost everyone on this forum seems fanatically devoted to reductive materialism.

No, I have to disagree with you there. Most people on this forum - by no means all - have no 'fanatical devotion' to anything. My devotion to my children, motor sport, tennis, sewing and my cat notwithstanding, obviously.

What we expect is evidence. If you were to show some evidence for immortality - direct, testable, evidence - people here would be falling over themselves to agree with you.

That's why you're here.

Am I? I wonder how you claim to know my motives better than I know them.

It is a pity you chose to address that part of my post addressing the D'Souza quote rather than the point that you made up a number based on what felt right to you, with no evidence, then misapplied Bayes' Theorem to give this number a veneer of science which it does not have.

 

[Slowvehicle]

- The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.Bertrand Russell

Agatha,
- Don't you think that calling the opinion of a well-educated, intelligent person, "utter nonsense" sounds like something said by someone falling into Russell's first category?
- You're certainly not a fool, but almost everyone on this forum seems fanatically devoted to reductive materialism. That's why you're here.

My Dear Mr. Savage:

Agatha did not, in fact, call the "opinion of a well-educated, intelligent person" utter nonsense. She was referring to the दिनेश जोसफ डिसूज़ा quote you provided.

I remain baconically yours, &ct.

 

[carlitos]

Agatha,



- i just had carpal tunnel surgery, so im going to skip caps and things.

It's not really cute how this poster continues to pretend that he can't work things. A very annoying trait of special people here on these forums is that they have special formatting. Affordable voice recognition has only been around for ... 20 years or so?

It took me about 60 seconds to say this post, look at the screen to see that it was spelled and formatted correctly, fix a few errors and hit send with my thumb. Capitalization and punctuation were added by my device.

 

[Mojo]

- I'll be back with more reasons for keeping an open mind about life after death.

But you aren't asking us to keep an open mind: you are claiming that you can prove that you are immortal. And you really aren't keeping an open mind yourself. here, for example, you are claiming that if the probability that we don't have one finite life is accepted to be 0.01, or even 0.0000000001, then it is certain that the idea that we have one finite life is wrong. This degree of certainty makes you look rather closed-minded. It also requires you to demonstrate that 0.0000000001 = 1, which might cause you some problems.

And, an open mind about the issue is all you need in order to make the math work.

Nope. See above.

 

[Slowvehicle]

<respectful snip for focus>

It also requires you to demonstrate that 0.0000000001 = 1, which might cause you some problems.

<respectful snip for focus>

Ya think?

 

[Belz...]

Agatha,

- Can you show me your source defining the null hypothesis?

You've never been witness to someone being dead?

 

[Belz...]

I too am getting to sub-issues as quickly as possible...

In your case I think we could call them fractal issues.

- Can you be sure that we would have memories of previous lifetimes?

Oh, so you have seen people die but you think they're still immortal by not being their bodies. Do you have any evidence for souls? Of course you don't. All you have is a silly logical delusion about how this works.

 

[Belz...]

what makes you think that those two consciousnesses are one?

Convenience?

 

[Belz...]

Agatha,

- I didn't really "calculate" it...

Of course you didn't. You decided it.

an open mind about the issue is all you need in order to make the math work.

I think this might be the most wrong statement I've ever read or heard.

 

[Belz...]

- The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.

Guess what? You're the certain one, and we're the ones doubting.

 

[JoeMorgue]

- The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.Bertrand Russell

The ability of Woo Slingers to read that quote and somehow reach the conclusions that it means "The side that is able to support their argument with evidence, data, logic, reason, and logical consistency must be the wrong one" is breathtaking.

 

[Slowvehicle]

The ability of Woo Slingers to read that quote and somehow reach the conclusions that it means "The side that is able to support their argument with evidence, data, logic, reason, and logical consistency must be the wrong one" is breathtaking.

If nothing else, one wonders that they do not consider who it is that is being quoted...

 

[Lucian]

- The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.Bertrand Russell

Agatha,
- Don't you think that calling the opinion of a well-educated, intelligent person, "utter nonsense" sounds like something said by someone falling into Russell's first category?
- You're certainly not a fool, but almost everyone on this forum seems fanatically devoted to reductive materialism. That's why you're here.

You quoted D'Souza making a fallacious appeal to popularity. Now you are making a false appeal to authority. D'Souza may be a well-educated and intelligent person and also be completely wrong. As it happens, he is a conservative Christian ideologue, and everything he writes is colored by his beliefs. As for well-educated, he has a B.A. in English literature. I am not sneering at this: I have a B.A. in English literature myself; however, that degree does not make me an expert in the evidence for life after death. For my dissertation, though, I did do quite a lot of research into beliefs about life after death (primarily medieval beliefs), so I suppose I actually have more formal expertise on the subject than D'Souza. I'm still not an expert on life after death, and it really never occurred to me to assume that any of the wide variety of beliefs on the subject must necessarily be true. I am unconvinced, for instance, that the soul is naked and in the form of a child or that bad souls are as green as some form of vegetation in the onion family, possibly either a chive (Old French/Anglo-Norman) or a leak (Old Norwegian/slightly less Old Icelandic). I don't think that bad souls hung around their dead bodies to bitch at them for their naughty behavior in life or that some bodies launched a...uh...spirited counterargument. In verse.

By the way, I wouldn't trust anything D'Souza says even about the subject area of his degree. He said some awfully dumb things about English literature and the way it is taught in his book Illiberal Education. For instance, he quoted Christopher Clausen, former chair of English literature at Penn State, as saying, "I would bet that Alice Walker's The Color Purple is taught in more English departments today than all of Shakespeare's plays combined." He treated this quote as a reasonable opinion rather than an absurd bit of hyperbole. Other conservatives treated as fact.