Proof of Immortality, the IV league

[Mojo]

- How about the following case?

...

And when she woke up, she described her operation as if she had been on the ceiling.

She was present during this operation.

Not only that, she also described the operation that took place in the next theater,

It's not much of a guess that an operation was going on in an operating theatre.

...the amputation of a leg.

This could just be a lucky guess, or she could have known by other means that someone else was due to have a leg amputated.

She saw the leg; she saw them put the leg in a yellow bag.

That merely requires that she knew what colour bags the hospital used for surgical waste. Waste from her own operation, at which she was present, should have been put in the same colour bag.

She couldn’t possibly have invented that and she described it as soon as she woke up.

She didn't need to invent it. She could have acquired all this information before her operation.

I checked afterwards and the operation had indeed taken place in the next theater. A leg had been amputated at the very same time that she was under anesthetic, and thus totally disconnected from the world.

Rather an odd comment to put in a book devoted to showing that people having NDEs can have awareness of their surroundings. And note that it is now Jabba who is relying on an insistence that people can't be aware of their surroundings when under anaesthetic, and all the closed-minded skeptics who are accepting that the received information could be wrong.

All Jabba really has here, at best,is a successful guess that the operation was the amputation of a leg. Note that I am not casting any doubt on the veracity of the doctor's, or even the patient's, account.

As with all these anecdotes, all Jabba has is evidence that people under anaesthetic may have awareness of their surroundings. That's all it is; there's no evidence here that they have awareness because their soul leaves their body. Jabba is falling into an error that he often makes, of assuming that because something is consistent with what he wants to prove it is evidence of what he wants to prove. But it isn't, because it us equally consistent with competing hypotheses. And furthermore, these other hypotheses don't involve inventing an unnecessary entity.

 

[Nonpareil]

Mojo,
- The 7 billion doesn't decrease the likelihood of my existence given OOFLam. It would increase my likelihood of existence if it wasn't being divided by infinity

And this still means nothing, because the die is still thrown, and it has to come up on something. That all outcomes are individually incredibly unlikely does not alter the fact that one of them is still going to come up.

This has been explained to you at least a dozen times at this point.

 

[JayUtah]

The 7 billion doesn't decrease the likelihood of my existence given OOFLam. It would increase my likelihood of existence if it wasn't being divided by infinity

How does this address what Mojo said? You have a term in your formula that is N/∞, and you use this to turn any proffered prior into absolute certainty. Mojo is not quibbling over your value for N alone, although there's certainly room to do that. He's pointing out that this term taken together has no basis in reality, and serves only to create a "proof" that invariably proves any hypothesis that's given to it.

Having wrongly hair-split his clear post, you then proceed to ignore everything he said following that.

Get with it, Jabba. This is embarrassing even for you.

 

[jond]

Mojo,
- The 7 billion doesn't decrease the likelihood of my existence given OOFLam. It would increase my likelihood of existence if it wasn't being divided by infinity

What does the next line (after the one you highlighted) say? It's very important.

SNIP

Edited by Locknar: 

Edited, breach of rule 12.

 

[Loss Leader]

LL,
- Thanks.
- I don't guess you could encourage jt to say something?

That depends. Could you encourage Laura Bell Bundy from the musical Legally Blonde to contact me?

 

[jond]

Welcome to the Jabbaverse. In it, he is obliged only to read the first line of any post and to ignore entirely posts he finds too challenging. But he can petition the moderators to suggest that other posters pay attention to him. I've met drag queens with less ego that this.

So you agree that Jabba's argument has four legs?

 

[Slowvehicle]

So you agree that Jabba's argument has four legs?

...and, by his own rules, contains not a single iota of evidence for the existence of a "soul", much less for its "immortality".

 

[jond]

...and, by his own rules, contains not a single iota of evidence for the existence of a "soul", much less for its "immortality".

Oh, sure, that's true. But I still think science is missing a dog somewhere.

 

[Mojo]

Mojo,
- The 7 billion doesn't decrease the likelihood of my existence given OOFLam. It would increase my likelihood of existence if it wasn't being divided by infinity

But you are dividing it by infinity, aren't you. That's the factor you are using. And it doesn't belong in an expression of your existence under a hypothesis in which your consciousness is produced by your brain processes, as I said in the part of my post to which you were unable to respond.

And by the way, the figure of seven billion is wrong because you don't have seven billion bodies.

 

[Fudbucker]

Annnnoid, Fudbucker, sphenisc, jt512, caveman 1917, Nick Terry, and Dani,
- Is it possible that OOFLam is wrong?
- If none of you guys answer me, I will assume that your answers are, "Yes."

I've only been involved in the epistemology side of things. What is "OOFlam"?

 

[Belz...]

It's the sound you make when the enormity of Jabba's nonsense hits you in the gut.

 

[Mojo]

Having wrongly hair-split his clear post, you then proceed to ignore everything he said following that.

Get with it, Jabba. This is embarrassing even for you.

What does the next line (after the one you highlighted) say? It's very important.

I realize that you are incapable of reading more than one sentence at a time, but this should be easy for you to find.

He didn't even manage to read the sentence he highlighted properly, and also appears to have forgotten the defining point of his own argument. Both clearly included the "over infinity" bit.

 

[Mojo]

I've only been involved in the epistemology side of things. What is "OOFlam"?

A strawman.

 

[MRC_Hans]

LL,
- Thanks.
- I don't guess you could encourage jt to say something?
- May I send personal messages to the others asking them to stop by?

Ahh. Hey Jabba! Sure, you are right. OOFLAM (or something) is indeed wrong, and you are immortal! Happy now?

Good, then go away.

Hans

 

[JayUtah]

I've only been involved in the epistemology side of things. What is "OOFlam"?

Only One Finite Life At Most, the straw-man hypothesis Jabba has set up in a false dilemma between it and what he aims to prove in this thread: that there is life after death. He thinks that by showing "OOFlam" to be statistically unlikely, he will have proven immortality by default.

 

[JayUtah]

He didn't even manage to read the sentence he highlighted properly, and also appears to have forgotten the defining point of his own argument. Both clearly included the "over infinity" bit.

It's just a knee jerk now. He's responding erratically to whatever he latches onto in a post, if only to keep up the semblance of participation without supplying any actual content or argument.

 

[Belz...]

Only One Finite Life At Most, the straw-man hypothesis Jabba has set up in a false dilemma between it and what he aims to prove in this thread: that there is life after death. He thinks that by showing "OOFlam" to be statistically unlikely, he will have proven immortality by default.

...which is nonsense, of course. Something can be incredibly unlikely and still happen when the dice are rolled. Sharpshooter fallacy and all that.

 

[aleCcowaN]

Sorry I wasn't able to follow the last thousand posts. Did this thread go beyond the use of Bayes for amazement and credulity?

I don't really post image reactions all that often, but I have to admit that I was sorely tempted to slap this down.

I find it infinitely more satisfying than the laughing dog, personally.

... if you can skip the convulsions while watching it

 

[jt512]

and that's where we differ! for p(live|God)=1, you not only have to assume God exists, but that He told that person where to find the water.

You've lapsed back into misunderstanding what a conditional probability is.

here we disagree. I would posit that there's no difference between having God's help and finding water randomly as there is no evidence that would distinguish God's help from randomly finding water.

Again, misunderstanding conditional probability.

 

[Jedi]

ok, I realized after leaving for lunch that I was going after your prior when my intention was to go after the data you're using. I understand the prior is subjective, and that's fine. I still strongly believe you're overestimating the probability of living|God, but nonetheless, my main issue is with your data. so...

Our data consist of 2 explorers, both of whom got lost, but found water and lived. Thus n=2 and y=2. Plugging those values into the above expression and carrying out the integration, we find that the (marginal) likelihood under H1, L(Y|H1) = .34013.

Thus the ratio of the marginal likelihood under H1 and the likelihood under H2, customarily called the Bayes factor, is .34013 / .0004 = 850.

Thus, the weight of the evidence in favor of H1 over H2, where H1 reflects our uncertainty about God's helpfulness, is 850, about a third of that for our omnipotent God, but still strongly favoring H1 over H2.

you're using the 2 observations from explorers who claim they survived due to God.

1. these are anecdotes. they suffer from all the problems I (and others) have stated... self-reported (non-randomized), no control (placebo effect), etc.

2. you only have 2 observations. that doesn't seem anywhere near enough to overcome any prior. so if you start with a high prior in favor of the God principle and add 2 observations that are in favor of the God principle, you have a high posterior prob favoring the God principle. if you added 2 observations that contradicted your prior God principle, you would still have a high posterior prob favoring the God principle as 2 observations would not be enough to overcome such a high prior. in other words, you prove the God principle either way. head you win, tails I lose.

you not only need more observations, you need observations that are a lot more objective than self-reports.

which brings us full circle back to the only point I (and others) have been making. you can't use self-reported anecdotes to prove God led these people to water. you have to somehow show these anecdotes are not biased.
you're assuming what it is you're trying to show.