Proof of Immortality III

[JayUtah]

Does this mean we can add Argument From Ignorance to the list of fallacies?

Yes, we can. He hasn't explicitly argued "You can't know I'm wrong," which is the typical expression of argument from ignorance. But his argument seems here to say that he can't be tied down to a specific proposition because the field in which the hypothesis would have to occur is too unknown and therefore too open-ended to do so. That's the same general failure of reasoning as argument from ignorance.

There's also a bit of straw man in there -- attempting to extend his own confusion and uncertainty to his critics. H, the hypothesis presumed by his critics as the null, does not entail such confusion and uncertainty.

Also, his failure to state an actual testable proposition for ~H, as described above, would constitute a defect in pleading in the legal sense: failure to state a cause of action. But I would have to defer to our resident lawyers to describe where such a defect would fall in taxonomies of error outside law. Failure to State is a fallacy on its own in some taxonomies. You make a lot of sound and fury, ask a lot of questions (e.g., like Bubba), and cast a lot of aspersion, but then never actually state and defend anything.

 

[Mojo]

I'm claiming that the existence of my self does not require the existence of a specific body.

If your body didn't exist, would you be posting on this forum?

 

[Mojo]

Also, his failure to state an actual testable proposition for ~H...

I think his failure to adequately define H is more of a problem. All he's provided so far is either "the scientific model", which doesn't say anything about the likelihood of Jabba, specifically, existing, and "OOFLam", which is begging the question and also giving the hypothesis he opposes a silly name, which I think is another fallacy (appeal to ridicule?).

 

[JayUtah]

I think his failure to adequately define H is more of a problem.

And his unsuccessful attempt to move the goalpost. He first said he thought he could prove immortality mathematically. Then recently he's said he doesn't want to try to prove that; he wants to first prove consciousness is the product of something immaterial. As you're well aware, Jabba's tactics rely significantly on softening his claims until agreement is reached, then re-establishing the original claim with full vigor as if it were identical to the softer forms.

...which I think is another fallacy (appeal to ridicule?).

Typically it goes by "horse laugh." Not always a fallacy, though. The horse laugh is employed in refutation to identify (and refuse to validate) a proposition that's absurd on its face. Pretty much anything said by Malbec can be appropriately horse-laughed away.

Look at the exchange above, where Jabba asks why it would matter whether an inference has one E or multiple Es. Bayesian inference is most robust when several Es are applied, each with an unambiguous likelihood ratio. jt512 and others pointed out how such a process could compensate for wildly variant prior probabilities and dilute the effect of errant priors. He really did ask a very naive question, and a horse laugh response was appropriate.

Coincidentally Jabba attempted a rejoinder that was essentially a horse laugh in return, mixed with a mild form of argumentum ad baculum and Red Herring. He tried to distract (red herring) by bringing up popular cinema, and tried to shame me away from criticizing him by claiming I must have deliberately mimicked a distasteful character.

 

[Mojo]

Coincidentally Jabba attempted a rejoinder that was essentially a horse laugh in return, mixed with a mild form of argumentum ad baculum and Red Herring. He tried to distract (red herring) by bringing up popular cinema, and tried to shame me away from criticizing him by claiming I must have deliberately mimicked a distasteful character.

I thought there might have been an argumentum ad baculum implicit in his suggestion that Thor wouldn't be around very long.

 

[JayUtah]

I thought there might have been an argumentum ad baculum implicit in his suggestion that Thor wouldn't be around very long.

That statement can be read either as prophetic or threatening, which is why I asked Jabba to clarify his meaning.

We can say a lot about tactics Jabba employs that seem aimed at discouraging criticism. He periodically excoriates his critics for their "analytical" thinking, but his overall approach seems calculated to frustrate his critics -- not because his arguments are so incisive, but because he refuses to engage on a reasonable adult level. He ignores most criticism and engages most often only to extend the flow of words and prolong a period in which he doesn't have to assert or concede anything. No wonder that he claims victory any time his critics flounce. This is a coup-counting exercise, not a debate. Jabba wants to see how many critics he can "confound" by simply playing dumb and letting them vent their frustration.

 

[jond]

If your body didn't exist, would you be posting on this forum?

This coupled with everything we know about how the brain and consciousness are intertwined means that even if there was a radio broadcast it wouldn't matter without the receiver. Jabba simply cannot eliminate the existence of his body from his equations.

 

[JayUtah]

This coupled with everything we know about how the brain and consciousness are intertwined means that even if there was a radio broadcast it wouldn't matter without the receiver. Jabba simply cannot eliminate the existence of his body from his equations.

True, but you can see the concept he's edging toward: the "self" is entirely a product of the immortal soul, and the body is just a meatsack suit it wears during its incarnate period.

 

[jond]

True, but you can see the concept he's edging toward: the "self" is entirely a product of the immortal soul, and the body is just a meatsack suit it wears during its incarnate period.

Even if that were true, the fact that the self is distinctly changed by injury to the brain, chemical changes, etc, means that there really is no way eliminate the connection to the meat sack. No matter how much he wants to. And, the incarnate period is the only thing we have to deal with, so it must be dealt with.

As an aside, I linked to "The Tell-Tale Brain" by VS Ramachandran the other day. It really is a compelling read. Jabba would do well to read it and try to understand how much we really do know about the role of the brain in all of this.

 

[JoeMorgue]

True, but you can see the concept he's edging toward: the "self" is entirely a product of the immortal soul, and the body is just a meatsack suit it wears during its incarnate period.

It's like Jabba is trying to re-invent the entire religious concept of a soul from scratch because he feels he has to convince us (and himself) that it is somehow intellectually viable instead of pure blind faith.

As I've pointed out to Jabba (and been ignored, as is tradition) multiple times literally billions of people believe what he is "arguing," that there is a some non-physical aspect of ourselves that survives our physical death.

Congratulations Jabba. You've invented the concept of a soul and a mystical afterlife with is completely evidenceless and requires faith. Stop pretending you've done something new or special or unique.

 

[JayUtah]

It's like Jabba is trying to re-invent the entire religious concept of a soul from scratch because he feels he has to convince us (and himself) that it is somehow intellectually viable instead of pure blind faith.

Yes. If he can prove that immortality is a concept that has an analytical foundation by being provable via mathematics, he can show that it should therefore appeal to skeptics. And if skeptics still reject it, even with a mathematical foundation to it, then it shows that skeptics are ideologically entrenched, hypocritical, or some other combination of undesirable traits. He has made little secret of his disdain for ISF's regular cadre of skeptics, and he wrote elsewhere how he was going to come over here and show those "godless skeptics" what for. This, the Shroud thread, and all his other antics -- including his insinuation that the Randi prize was rigged -- bespeaks a motive not especially tied to any one topic of discussion here; it's an overall agenda.

 

[Mojo]

True, but you can see the concept he's edging toward: the "self" is entirely a product of the immortal soul, and the body is just a meatsack suit it wears during its incarnate period.

I'm positive that it's the meatsack that is doing the typing.

 

[Loss Leader]

It's like Jabba is trying to re-invent the entire religious concept of a soul from scratch because he feels he has to convince us (and himself) that it is somehow intellectually viable instead of pure blind faith.

As I've pointed out to Jabba (and been ignored, as is tradition) multiple times literally billions of people believe what he is "arguing," that there is a some non-physical aspect of ourselves that survives our physical death.

Congratulations Jabba. You've invented the concept of a soul and a mystical afterlife with is completely evidenceless and requires faith. Stop pretending you've done something new or special or unique.

The ironic thing is that most believers point to "faith" as a positive thing. Faith in the absence of evidence somehow makes one's connection to God stronger. So Jabba is, at least the way I understand religion, actually less devoted than the person who accepts nonsense unequivocally.

 

[JayUtah]

The ironic thing is that most believers point to "faith" as a positive thing. Faith in the absence of evidence somehow makes one's connection to God stronger.

It goes further than that. Faith in blatant contradiction of evidence makes one's connection to God even stronger. In the most Fundamentalist circles, Satan fakes scientific evidence in order to deceive uncommitted believers. This leads to the anti-science sentiment in such circles, where scientists are agents of evil who help Satan destroy faith in God by developing evidence that contradicts religion.

Not everyone is so dogmatic, however. There are plenty of people who, despite their faith, recognize that if religion alleges an ordinary testable fact, then it stands to reason there should be secular evidence to facilitate the test. That's why, for example, you have Mormon archaeologists scurrying all over the Americas trying to find evidence of the Book of Mormon. If you find secular evidence in favor of your belief, you trumpet it to the world. If you find evidence that contradicts it, then you fall back on faith and say there must be some nuance that's yet undiscovered, that lets both the evidence and your belief coexist. If you find no evidence either way, then your faith at least has no secular contradiction you need to explain away. This is how some people reconcile religion and science.

While it's easy to see that Jabba's persistence manifests a religious style of faith, it's only been in a few cases I can recall where he has professed any sort of faith. And it wasn't faith in any particular tradition; it was just a vague expression of belief in mysticism and miracles. It's hard to tar Jabba as any sort of dogmatic believer based solely on his posts here. But his desire to prove, according to secular principles, propositions generally found only in religion is consistent with at least one expression of religious belief.

 

[jt512]

jt and caveman,
- From Vizzini of The Princess Bride: "I'm waiting...!"

No, your lottery problem is not analogous.

Mojo explains why here, using almost the exact words I would have. (I would have said "personal friend of God" rather than "related to the controller of the Universe.")

 

[jt512]

- In effect, I'm claiming that we are all "special cases."
- If we're here, we're special cases.

And it has repeatedly been explained to you that you are employing the Texas sharpshooter fallacy when you claim this.

Yep. Sampling from the universe of winners (to paraphrase JayUtah).

 

[Thor 2]

Yo, Thor. The sci fi notion of housing a mind in a machine (or another body or such) is of course an old 'un. But it's not immortality. Eventually, the machine or whatever will meet its end, and with it the mind's end. That's not immortality, that's death later on.

Immortality means life everlasting, living FOREVER. I use all caps to try to express the horror of that idea: existence for ETERNITY. No escape, no surcease, no blessed oblivion, just playing solitaire until the heat death of the universe -- and still continuing helplessly, not even to be saved by madness.

Natch, I've spelled all this out for Jabba, as have others. You can see how much good it's done.

We can posit a non-material eternity, of course: floating on a cloud with simpering jezuss & overbearing god, and a crowd of catholic saints twanging their harps. For eternity. Would that be any less horrible?

Hey a like minded soul mind. I share your horror about the idea of eternal life, and mentioned it before on another thread, but didn't seem to strike a cord with anyone else.

 

[Thor 2]

He does; I've participated in other threads alongside him. Don't mistake him for a theist, however. Further, his mind is no more open than any of your critics. All of us have accepted the possibility that an immortal soul may exist, but as discussed ad nauseam that's just the necessary suspension of disbelief required to let you present your case.

In your rush to find a friend, you seem to have overlooked some points he made, such as on the point of duplication. You forgot to take issue with his interpretation of that, which is the same as that offered by your critics.


Explain what you mean by this.

True enough, a theist I most certainly am not and I don't plan on leaving anytime soon.

 

[caveman1917]

jt and Caveman,
- I haven't figured it out yet.
- As far as I can tell, you guys haven't either.
- But then, I'm known to miss a lot...
- Do you have more to say about this? Is my claimed lottery analogy not analogous?

To be honest, I'm not really following the specific debate on your claims all that closely, I'm just here for the probability stuff. But since you asked, I took a look through the past couple of pages, and here's my 2 cents:

Mojo's quest for finding fallacies is counter-productive. When playing that game, at some point you just see what you want to see. The one that I can see to be well-supported is that you are assigning a lower probability to a compound hypothesis including a simple hypothesis to which you, on its own, assign a higher probability (ie body vs body + soul). The other ones seem to be pushing it a little, increasingly so as increasingly more are "discovered".

I find that Texas Sharpshooter/special case/HARKing argument unconvincing. One can certainly make deductions based on one's own existence, even probabilistic, and even after the fact.

For example, suppose I have an electrical wire in front of me. If I touch it and the wire is live then I die, if it isn't live then I survive. I touch it, and I survive. I conclude that the wire wasn't live. Perfectly fine deduction. Making it probabilistic doesn't change this. Suppose that if it's live that I have a 99% chance of dying and 1% chance of surviving and vice versa for it not being live. I conclude that the wire likely wasn't live. Also a perfectly fine deduction. Even coming up with this after the fact doesn't change this. Suppose I remember now that, indeed, 10 years ago I touched such a wire and survived, then I can still reach the same conclusion, based on my current existence, regarding that wire from 10 years ago.

I think that the problem rather is that your conditional likelihoods are in fact equal, contrary to what you claim. Yes, the odds of you existing under the - as you call it - scientific explanation are pretty damn small. Out of the insanely large number of potential people which could have been created under the scientific explanation, it's a very small chance that you would have been among the actual people who got created. But then, the same argument applies for the immortal soul. Out of the insane number of potential immortal souls which could have been created, it's a very small chance (the same small chance) that you would have been among the actual immortal souls which got created.

Hence, I think the error is simply your claim that P(E | H) =/= P(E | ~H) whereas they are, in fact, equal. Given that the relative likelihood is 1, all you're getting out of this exercise is your own prior beliefs getting reflected back at you. As I've said much earlier here:

As far as I know there is no evidence either way for mortality or immortality, so that discussion is pointless - you just leave with whatever preference you started with.

You can believe in immortality as much as you want, it is not a priori better or worse than to believe in mortality. But you're not doing what you seem to think you're doing, ie providing an argument as to why people should adopt your belief in immortality - and you sure ain't proving it mathematically.

Then on the other hand, people who self-identify as skeptics in this thread have a tendency to claim that science supports their case for mortality, forgetting that just because evidence is consistent with one hypothesis doesn't mean it is necessarily any less consistent with another. If I really had 5$ every time someone made that error I'd be rich now.

All in all, this thread is a huge exercise in futility, but the tangents on probability theory every once in a while are interesting though.

 

[zooterkin]

Dave,
- I have no idea

QFT