Proof of Immortality, the IV league

[godless dave]

Jabba, do you think anecdotes such as the ones in the book Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens can increase or decrease the prior probabilities of scientific hypotheses about extra terrestrial life?

 

[Slowvehicle]

Yes yes yes, Jay, but: do you love your wife or not?

Depends on how many legs she has.

So... it varies over time?

Marital metamorphosis?

I want to know if JayUtah loves my wife...(given that she hasn't a leg to stand on, maritally [or martially]).

 

[Squeegee Beckenheim]

I love my wife.

Please explain how this anecdote has zero truth value. Please explain how this anecdote 'cannot be evidence of what it is asserting'...????

I love my wife.

If this statement is evidence of what it is asserting then tell me this - how come I've just posted it, even though I'm not married?

 

[Jabba]

Do Bassian statistics provide optimal inferences for Count data?

jt,
- What would you have to say about annnnoid's argument?

 

[JayUtah]

What would you have to say about annnnoid's argument?

What do you have to say about my argument? Now that we know you're reading my posts -- you quoted me to someone else -- but not responding to them, what right do you have to demand that two of your critics engage in a debate amongst themselves? This isn't the first time you've tried to orchestrate such a cage match instead of actually participating in effective debate.

Shame on you, Jabba.

 

[Belz...]

jt,
- What would you have to say about annnnoid's argument?

It's crud.

 

[Loss Leader]

jt,
- What would you have to say about annnnoid's argument?

So, are we done talking to me?

 

[Jabba]

I'm not going digging for the quote, but I'll reaffirm it. I stand ready to believe anything that has testable, falsifiable evidence. I stand ready to believe that the moon is made of green cheese, if astronauts go there, analyze the moon and eat it.

This does not mean that I consider all things to be possible. In fact, it means the opposite. I consider all things to have zero truth value except those that are repeatably testable.

Do not confuse a willingness to believe with holding a belief. My computer's hard drive has blank space on it. It is waiting for anything to be written. But it has no beliefs about what might be written. Consider my brain to be a computer - available space for anything but utterly agnostic about what those things might be.

Once again, begging for agreement is sad. Accept that you have deeply held unevidenced beliefs. Enjoy them. But don't pretend they can be proven to others.

LL,
- I guess you can't provide an estimate of the prior probability that OOFLam is true? Maybe, 99.99999%?

P.S. Me getting back to you just after you asked the question above was actually just a coincident. This P.S. is an edit.

 

[Slowvehicle]

jt,
- What would you have to say about annnnoid's argument?

And here we see the finest flowering of the technique best called, "Let's You and Him Fight"...

 

[Sideroxylon]

jt,
- What would you have to say about annnnoid's argument?

What would you have to say about it?
What would you say about it's relevance to your claims?

Absolutely nothing becuase Truely Effective Debate is not about engagment with the ideas of others or considered examination of a topic but hunkering down on your existing position. It's dishonest and boneheaded.

 

[JayUtah]

I guess you can't provide an estimate of the prior probability that OOFLam is true? Maybe, 99.99999%?

Asked and answered. You can pick any number you want for P(H), as long as P(E|H) is undisputed. Conversely you can pick any number you want for P(E|H) as long as P(H) is undisputed. You're trying to put both of those values in play. You can't do that and still have a valid Bayesian inference.

As to whether Loss Leader should be asked to quantify the probability of your claim or some contrary belief, you clearly didn't pay attention to anything he or anyone else said to you about what actually constitutes the suspension of disbelief. And as I said before, you've tried this same trick twice before, just this year.

 

[MRC_Hans]

This is wrong in just about every way any conclusion could be.

An anecdote describes whatever subjective experience is occurring.

Which is what I said.

Tell me Hans…do you know of some other way that subjective experience can be explicitly expressed / adjudicated????

…no, didn’t think so.

Actually yes, but that is irrelevant for the discussion at hand.

As you seem to agree, an anecdote describes a subjective experience.

What I argued is that that the anecdote offers no information on what objectively happened.

As things currently stand, the most advanced scanning technology in the world can barely adjudicate the most elementary cognitive event with any definitive degree of fidelity.

Irrelevant. Nobody claimed it could. The anecdote is, at best, a valid account of what someone perceived.

Any subjective experience explicitly implicates relevant cognitive and neural issues….so…QUITE OBVIOUSLY (to just about everyone except all of you)…what is described / expressed / represented in and through any anecdote can provide vast amounts of information that is fundamentally relevant to understanding what is going on both cognitively and neurally.

Or in simpler words, the anecdote is purely subjective. Which is what we said.

IOW…anecdotal evidence is fundamentally relevant to generating hypothesis relating to why / how those same anecdotes occur. Whether those hypothesis occur in the cognitive domain, the neural domain, or both.

Non sequitur. The anecdote can only describe the subjective perception. It cannot distinguish between objective scenarios that fit the perception.

- Or, in the case at hand, the classic perception of NDE cannot distinguish beween a hallucination in an oxygen-deprived brain or a glimpse of a supernatural afterlife.


Hans

 

[MRC_Hans]

I don’t think I have ever heard anything quite so ridiculous! Tell me...when you tell your wife that you love her, does she respond 'I don't believe you!

Now you disappoint me. Do you really think every man who tells his wife that he loves her actually does? And do you really think every wife believes it. Then you are ... far ... more naive than I imagined.

If I took a poll of married couples and asked the question: “Do you agree, or disagree that the phrase ‘I love my wife / husband’ has zero truth value.”

…what percentage do you honestly think would agree???

We do not do science by polls. Tell me, if somebody tells his wife that he loves her, can you assume it is true?

If the statement has no truth value...what possible point is there in using it, or in saying anything at all ever?????

Straw man. You constructed the "no truth value" claim yourself. The statement has an unknown truth value. Which is why it cannot be used as scientific evidence. Which is what we are discussing here, in case you missed it.

Hans

 

[Loss Leader]

LL,
- I guess you can't provide an estimate of the prior probability that OOFLam is true? Maybe, 99.99999%?
.

No, Jabba. It doesn't work like that. I have no evidence that what you call OOFLam isn't true. The only evidence that has been presented is that cognition is a process of a functioning brain, and it stops when the brain does.

In order for me to doubt that, I'd need some evidence that contradicts it. You claim there's an immortal soul. You can't define its characteristics and you can't show a properly controlled study that found it. You can't show that any non-physical perception has ever taken place (though this would be far from evidence of an immortal soul).

So, I have no reason to assign a truth value of anything but 1. Does that mean I am closed to reevaluating this in light of new evidence? It does not. But being willing to be proven wrong is not the same as doubting that one is right.

Please stop begging for some fraction of a percent from some fraction of readers. Just show falsifiable evidence that should cause us to doubt OOFLam.

If you have no such evidence, admit that you have a belief that, while comforting to you, cannot be logically derived for others.

It's no shame. Billions of people have trillions of unevidenced beliefs and they get on fine.

 

[jsfisher]

Since the discussion of the value of anecdotes in supporting scientific hypotheses now has its very own thread, here, please be so kind to continue those discussions there, not here.

Thanks gobs.

Replying to this modbox in thread will be off topic  Posted By: jsfisher

 

[Hokulele]

Depends on how many legs she has.

Can we count a tail as a leg?

 

[Hokulele]

jt,
- What would you have to say about annnnoid's argument?

Why does that matter? What do you have to say about annnnoid's argument?

 

[Nonpareil]

We do not do science by polls. Tell me, if somebody tells his wife that he loves her, can you assume it is true?

This is one of annnnoid's favorite hobby horses, despite the fact that it has been beaten to death time and again in every thread that he brings it up in. "I love my wife", in and of itself, is not evidence of its own truth, no matter how much he wishes it was.

What is evidence is continuous examples of behavior consistent with the idea of him loving her. He then responds to this by saying that there is no definitive list of behaviors consistent with love, or even a concrete definition of "love" itself.

When it is explained that this doesn't actually impact the argument at all, because individuals and couples who are in love necessarily have at least some idea of what it means to them, and the lack of conscious formal definition does not mean that definition is impossible, et cetera, he devolves into incoherent rantings about how you know nothing, Jon Snow.

And it's a fundamentally flawed argument to begin with. Remember, he's trying to establish that anecdotes have value as evidence, but the entire form of his argument is just one giant appeal to consequence. Even if anecdotes having no value as evidence on their own did mean that we couldn't prove that love existed due to insufficient data, it wouldn't change anything. Anecdotes would still have no value as evidence.

Even if we did have insufficient evidence to prove claim X, it wouldn't justify any attempts to pull fabricated evidence out of our collective bungholes to try and fill the void.

 

[annnnoid]

I am busy now so…fortunately for me…I don’t have much time to waste on this stupid thread.

…but I have to say…the level of argument by those disputing my position is almost embarrassing. Actually …correction…it IS embarrassing.

Anecdotes / personal accounts / self report…whatever you want to call them…BY DEFINITION…have evidential relevance. For quite a number of reasons, but I’ll confine myself to what should by now be blindingly obvious to anyone with even a fraction of a brain.

Every single one of you who posts on this forum implicitly subscribes to this FACT (the [at the very least] potential evidential legitimacy [‘truth’…in some way shape or form] of the content of anecdotes / personal accounts / self-report / self-expression). You expect the content of your posts to convey meaning that is relevant to this discussion. The content of your posts describes what you are thinking / feeling. It is evidence…presumably credible, legitimate, relevant evidence of what you are thinking / feeling.

…and if it is not (evidence) …as just about all of you keep arguing (personal accounts / self-report / anecdotes have NO evidentiary legitimacy)…WHY ON EARTH ARE YOU MAKING THESE POSTS !?!?!?!?

You are all basically arguing…that what you are saying / writing / expressing (here, there, anywhere) has no meaning and can be ignored not only by everyone else (because it is evidence of nothing) but also by you who are expressing it. A first-week psychology undergrad would immediately indentify this as a recipe for insanity (…”what I am writing / saying right now has no meaning…”)!

And why are all of you sooooooooo desperate to confirm this dumb argument????... because otherwise you have to acknowledge that NDE’s OBE’s (whatever etc. etc. etc.) have some manner of legitimacy. And you’d rather stick poison darts in your eyes and proclaim your own insanity than do that (and …congratulations…you are all succeeding!).

…that none of you are capable of recognizing the inherent idiocy of your own argument is…like I said…embarrassing, but I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.

 

[Belz...]

I am busy now so…fortunately for me…I don’t have much time to waste on this stupid thread.

…but I have to say…the level of argument by those disputing my position is almost embarrassing. Actually …correction…it IS embarrassing.

Anecdotes / personal accounts / self report…whatever you want to call them…BY DEFINITION…have evidential relevance. For quite a number of reasons, but I’ll confine myself to what should by now be blindingly obvious to anyone with even a fraction of a brain.

Every single one of you who posts on this forum implicitly subscribes to this FACT (the [at the very least] potential evidential legitimacy [‘truth’…in some way shape or form] of the content of anecdotes / personal accounts / self-report / self-expression). You expect the content of your posts to convey meaning that is relevant to this discussion. The content of your posts describes what you are thinking / feeling. It is evidence…presumably credible, legitimate, relevant evidence of what you are thinking / feeling.

…and if it is not (evidence) …as just about all of you keep arguing (personal accounts / self-report / anecdotes have NO evidentiary legitimacy)…WHY ON EARTH ARE YOU MAKING THESE POSTS !?!?!?!?

You are all basically arguing…that what you are saying / writing / expressing (here, there, anywhere) has no meaning and can be ignored not only by everyone else (because it is evidence of nothing) but also by you who are expressing it. A first-week psychology undergrad would immediately indentify this as a recipe for insanity (…”what I am writing / saying right now has no meaning…”)!

And why are all of you sooooooooo desperate to confirm this dumb argument????... because otherwise you have to acknowledge that NDE’s OBE’s (whatever etc. etc. etc.) have some manner of legitimacy. And you’d rather stick poison darts in your eyes and proclaim your own insanity than do that (and …congratulations…you are all succeeding!).

…that none of you are capable of recognizing the inherent idiocy of your own argument is…like I said…embarrassing, but I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.

Credible as always.