Proof of Immortality II

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Jabba said:
Dave,
- Sorry. I used the wrong word. The self appears to be an immaterial emergent property somehow connected to the material brain.
Click to expand...

Your model, then, takes "self" as some sort of non-material entity that is assigned (and you hope can be reassigned) to a biochemical existence. Your H is that this self is assigned only once.

Nothing at all scientific about that, and it does create a serious problem for your efforts, Jabba.

~H includes far more than you'd like. Show H to be improbable, and you have then strengthened the probability this "self" is an emergent property of the brain with no separate or re-assignable existence.

That would be the opposite of your goal, but carry on.
 
Jabba said:
Dave,
- Sorry. I used the wrong word. The self appears to be an immaterial emergent property somehow connected to the material brain. William James argued that the brain doesn't produce the mind; it transmits the mind.
Click to expand...


Maybe, but that most certainly isn't the "scientific model" you claim to be trying to disprove.

So far your argument includes a strawman, a false dilemma, the Texas sharpshooter fallacy, equivocation... ETA: and the prosecutor's fallacy...

And that's before you even start torturing Bayes.
 
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Jabba said:
Dave,
- Sorry. I used the wrong word. The self appears to be an immaterial emergent property somehow connected to the material brain. William James argued that the brain doesn't produce the mind; it transmits the mind. (Just a thought, but I wonder if that could be how emergent properties work in general...)
- Anyway, I shouldn't have restricted the connection to producing the mind. The brain could be transmitting something non-physical into the physical world.
- And as strange as such might seem, it seems to pale in comparison to recent discoveries in physics.
- And then if the self is not restricted to one, finite, life at most (as the math seems to require), the basic self must be what we would call "non-physical."
Click to expand...

"Appears". "Somehow connected". "Just a thought". "Could be".

Emergent properties are "transmitted" from somewhere, somehow.

Just empty hand-waving.

What "recent discoveries in physics" are you referring to? And how do they pertain to the question at hand?
 
Jabba said:
Dave,
- Sorry. I used the wrong word. The self appears to be an immaterial emergent property somehow connected to the material brain. William James argued that the brain doesn't produce the mind; it transmits the mind. (Just a thought, but I wonder if that could be how emergent properties work in general...)
- Anyway, I shouldn't have restricted the connection to producing the mind. The brain could be transmitting something non-physical into the physical world.
- And as strange as such might seem, it seems to pale in comparison to recent discoveries in physics.
- And then if the self is not restricted to one, finite, life at most (as the math seems to require), the basic self must be what we would call "non-physical."
Click to expand...


OK, then H isn't the scientific model for consciousness. That means ~H would include, among other things, models where immaterial selves are immortal, but also models where immaterial selves don't exist at all.
 
godless dave said:
OK, then H isn't the scientific model for consciousness. That means ~H would include, among other things, models where immaterial selves are immortal, but also models where immaterial selves don't exist at all.
Click to expand...


~H includes the very situation that his false dilemma relies on disproving.

Given that Jabba's argument boils down to his existence being too improbable to have happened by chance, all he is really arguing for is 'Intelligent Design'.
 
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This thread is running slowly so I have split to a new thread, which can be found here.
Posted By: Agatha
 
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