Proof of Immortality, the IV league

[Jabba]

Would you say the 1938 Brooklyn Dodgers are potential winners of the 2017 World Series?

Dave,
- No. But, I'm sure that's different...

How is it different?

Dave,
- I hate to say it (my father in law was a big dodger fan and gave up baseball when the Dodgers left Brooklyn), but the 38 Brooklyn Dodgers weren't any good -- and also, average Dodger weight in 38 was 181, while in 2015 (for instance) it was 225...
- But seriously, scientifically speaking, every possible combination of egg and sperm cell from the same species does represent a potential organism and (probably) sense of self. If a homosapien egg from 2000 years ago was, somehow, able to join with a homosapien sperm cell from today, the two should create a brand new human. Two particular time-stamped baseball teams do represent a potential game – so, I suppose it’s possible that the 38 Dodgers could beat the 2017 American League Champion, but then no one is claiming that they can only have one game over all of time -- and the Bayesian logic doesn’t apply.

 

[godless dave]

Dave,
- I hate to say it (my father in law was a big dodger fan and gave up baseball when the Dodgers left Brooklyn), but the 38 Brooklyn Dodgers weren't any good -- and also, average Dodger weight in 38 was 181, while in 2015 (for instance) it was 225...
- But seriously, scientifically speaking, every possible combination of egg and sperm cell from the same species does represent a potential organism and (probably) sense of self. If a homosapien egg from 2000 years ago was, somehow, able to join with a homosapien sperm cell from today, the two should create a brand new human. Two particular time-stamped baseball teams do represent a potential game – so, I suppose it’s possible that the 38 Dodgers could beat the 2017 American League Champion, but then no one is claiming that they can only have one game over all of time -- and the Bayesian logic doesn’t apply.

There will only ever be one 2017 World Series over all time.

If you define the potential to include the impossible, then "potential" loses all meaning.

 

[jond]

Dave,
- I hate to say it (my father in law was a big dodger fan and gave up baseball when the Dodgers left Brooklyn), but the 38 Brooklyn Dodgers weren't any good -- and also, average Dodger weight in 38 was 181, while in 2015 (for instance) it was 225...
- But seriously, scientifically speaking, every possible combination of egg and sperm cell from the same species does represent a potential organism and (probably) sense of self. If a homosapien egg from 2000 years ago was, somehow, able to join with a homosapien sperm cell from today, the two should create a brand new human. Two particular time-stamped baseball teams do represent a potential game – so, I suppose it’s possible that the 38 Dodgers could beat the 2017 American League Champion, but then no one is claiming that they can only have one game over all of time -- and the Bayesian logic doesn’t apply.

How long does a sperm live? How long does an egg live? The only possible combinations are those alive at the same time. This is a large but finite number.

Further, because the self is a process (which changes with every bit of information the brain receives), the only possible self you could be is you. *Unless you've had an operation severing your corpus collosum. There are cases of people demonstrating two different streams of consciousness post operation. Which is a further indication that it is indeed the brain generating the process.

 

[JayUtah]

But seriously, scientifically speaking, every possible combination of egg and sperm cell from the same species does represent a potential organism and (probably) sense of self.

No, that's not speaking scientifically. That's you, once again, foisting your homebrew notion of a countable set of "infinite potential" imaginary whatevers and attempting to sneak it under the radar by prefixing it with "scientifically..." Do you you really think that astute skeptics aren't going to see through the hundredth time you've attempted this stunt?

If an human organism arises, it has a sense of self. A sense of self is an emergent property of a functioning brain and nervous system. If there are two human organisms, each has a sense of self. That doesn't mean there are two senses of self. It means there is a sense of self that is a property of a functioning organism, and it is exhibited in each example of the organism. That it may said to be exhibited "differently" in each does not create two discrete things that you may count and therefore say are infinite in their "potential" cardinality.

A property is not a thing.

-- and the Bayesian logic doesn’t apply.

This isn't a problem with Bayes. This is a problem with your proposed use of Bayes. You have latched onto it as your savior in this and so many other contexts in which you've tried to prove your spiritual/religious beliefs. And in all those cases you try to use Bayes not to prove your point, but to disprove a straw man you think is your critics' belief. Then yours is insinuated to hold by default. In order to (mis)use Bayes to do this, you manipulate the likelihood ratio to suggest it is nigh unto impossible for the straw man to produce the observed results. Since the results are observed, it must mean that what you say your critics believe must be essentially impossible.

This in turn requires a Big Denominator. In order to make the numbers come out in the way you've preordained them, you need to compute a probability that has as big a number as you can get away with for the potential outcomes, so that any finite number of outcomes is insignificant if those outcomes are detrimental to your belief. You've tried and failed a number of times to do this. All your trials consist of inventing some new concept you insist must have infinite cardinality and further insisting it must be part of the scientific hypothesis of self. For months you've been peddling this notion of "infinite potential X," whose error has been shown to you more times than I can count.

Stop trying to insist that science must accept your foisted imaginary concepts. It's never going to work.

 

[The Sparrow]

...
- But seriously, scientifically speaking, every possible combination of egg and sperm cell from the same species does represent a potential organism and (probably) sense of self. If a homosapien egg from 2000 years ago was, somehow, able to join with a homosapien sperm cell from today, the two should create a brand new human. Two particular time-stamped baseball teams do represent a potential game – so, I suppose it’s possible that the 38 Dodgers could beat the 2017 American League Champion, but then no one is claiming that they can only have one game over all of time -- and the Bayesian logic doesn’t apply.

Just.......stop.
We all know what you are going to do now. Just like the dog with 3 legs you will try to spin this off into 100s of posts, and then convince yourself there is a 'gap' and you are almost almost there to proving something.

You have nothing. You have always had nothing. Give it up.

 

[Dancing David]

Dave,
- Wouldn't you say that one of Cleopatra's ova and one of my sperm cells would represent a potential self that never had a chance? And, in determining the number of potential selves, shouldn't we count potential selves that never had a chance?

Does that mean we should count people not being able to crossbreed with dogs as well?

 

[JayUtah]

We all know what you are going to do now. Just like the dog with 3 legs you will try to spin this off into 100s of posts, and then convince yourself there is a 'gap' and you are almost almost there to proving something.

Indeed this speaks to what was said above about the vagary of language. Jabba always complains that he lacks the words to accurately express his ideas. The problem is that when others entertain his circumspect verbiage and succeed in pinning it down, he flees to a whole new nomenclature. "These are hard concepts" is his mantra, but what he's really saying is, "I need these to seem like hard concepts so that I can continue waffling about and never get to any testable point." Jabba thinks people can't tell the difference between grappling with philosophy and avoiding accountability. He wants the argument to stay vague because as long as it's vague, he doesn't have to admit he's lost.

 

[Loss Leader]

Grape Nuts is a silly name for a cereal that contains neither grapes or nuts.

And the commercial's attempt to justify the name of the cereal is even more absurd than the name itself.

- But seriously, scientifically speaking, every possible combination of egg and sperm cell from the same species does represent a potential organism and (probably) sense of self.

Jabba, you're just wrong. You keep trying to equate a DNA sequence with a "self." But the self is not a thing. It is not continuous even within one person. Twins share the same DNA but tend to be different from each other. Jabba today does not have the same cares, loves, taste in food, or memories of Jabba 30 years ago. The self is not a thing. It isn't. Every time you start to suspect it is, you should stop yourself and remember that it isn't.

 

[ferd burfle]

-But seriously, scientifically speaking, every possible combination of egg and sperm cell from the same species does represent a potential organism and (probably) sense of self. If a homosapien egg from 2000 years ago was, somehow, able to join with a homosapien sperm cell from today, the two should create a brand new human.

Jabba, if you think you're speaking scientifically you're fooling only yourself. Impossible scenarios are not evidence of anything or even meaningful.



Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

 

[The Sparrow]

.... But the self is not a thing. It is not continuous even within one person. .....

True dat.

Those of us who have dabbled in buddhism, and probably many other folks as well, can even become fairly efficient in dropping the egos futile attempt to preserve some sort of continuous distinct, unchanging "self".
On a good day, I can sit, and within 20 minutes or so, completely and willfully change my interior climate away from the bitchy mood I was in.
Very often I fail, but occasionally I get it right. The "self" I arrive at is most certainly not the "self" I left behind.

No.

It isn't.

No, really, it isn't.

 

[godless dave]

Jabba, if you light a match does it draw from a pool of potential flames?

After the flame burns out, can you ever get the same flame again?

 

[JayUtah]

Jabba, if you light a match does it draw from a pool of potential flames?

He's already answered this with a paradox he hasn't resolved. He says there is no pool of "potential selves," therefore there are an infinite number of such "potential selves." In his model a pool would only provide a limit on the number of potential such souls. He doesn't agree with the limit, so he repudiates the notion of a pool. He doesn't see that there is no significant difference between his concept of a "pool of potential selves" (which he says doesn't exist) and the ordinary mathematical concept of a set. And so he wants to discuss the cardinality of a non-existent set.

That's a mathematical non-starter.

 

[John Jones]

Dave,
[...]
- But seriously, scientifically speaking, every possible combination of egg and sperm cell from the same species does represent a potential organism and (probably) sense of self. [...]

Hold it right there. You are no spokesperson for the discipline of science. You have gone on record as saying that scientists are incompetent and liars.

 

[MRC_Hans]

*snip*
- But seriously, scientifically speaking, every possible combination of egg and sperm cell from the same species does represent a potential organism and (probably) sense of self. If a homosapien egg from 2000 years ago was, somehow, able to join with a homosapien sperm cell from today, the two should create a brand new human. *snip*

No, that is false. The key is in the word "possible".

Obviously, a combination of two people who have never met is not possible.

Two cars going in opposite directions in the same road during the same time hold a potential collision, but if they are on different roads or at different times, they are not. Not for any meaningful definition of 'possible'.

Not that it matters because, although you choose to ignore it, the number of possible people has no relevance. What HAS relevance is the actual number of people. How they turned out or which of them you happen to be has not.

Hans

 

[aleCcowaN]

I see many have decided to jump with Jabba into the fringe...

 

[zooterkin]

- But seriously, scientifically speaking, every possible combination of egg and sperm cell from the same species does represent a potential organism and (probably) sense of self.

Even if you take every possible DNA sequence that would produce a recognisable human, regardless of whether the gametes that would give rise to them were available at the same time, what you would have would be a very large number, it would not be infinity.

Even if you then multiply by the environmental factors that might affect development (explaining why twins are different individuals, for example), you have an even bigger number, which is still not infinity.

The self is an emergent property (could you favour us with your understanding of that term, please, Jabba?) of a functioning human brain. It is not a thing, but a property of a thing.

 

[aleCcowaN]

A 2,000-year old spermatozaurious and a teenage virginal ovum would certainly conceive Godzilla.

The latter Jabbasic epistemological gambits are to be call off, not to play with.

Jabba's pseudo epistemological algorithm works this way:

• He has a pre-conclusion he wants others to positively confirm for him.
• He offers some infantile evidence and some clumsy analysis
• He gets a lot of disapproving posts
• He skims those posts and quickly shoves to his mental recycling bin those who are not convenient for him. He also puts their authors in his quarantine zone which is located about his blind spot. No need of ignore function to do this. That part of his intellect is firing all cylinders.
• He select one or two posters who are: a) nice, and b) apparently giving him an acknowledgement of receipt of some random element he argued.
• He continues his dialogue only with those posters.
• If there is no poster matching the above description, he takes some element of some suitable poster -someone either nice, or who condescended once or twice before- and says to them "But you agree that such and such is such".
• He sieves out all the responses saying "tit and tat is squat" and continues with replies that match the above criteria.
• If nothing and nobody match those criteria, he takes some element of one pacific poster and says "I don't understand this ... are you saying (insert anything Jabba wants, related or unrelated)
• In the event everything goes against Jabba's wishes, a fringe reset is made, meaning something like "I hear what you say about eternity but let me fix you some of this Mococoa drink, all natural cocoa beans from the upper slopes of Mount Nicaragua, no artificial sweeteners!"
• As his fringe resets have increasingly being called off, he has recently discover some interesting Alzheimer-inspired techniques. One of them is object-oriented-BS, which consists in mixing up an object, one of its properties and one of its methods. For instance: a die has a colour and can be thrown to read the value in its upper side. Jabba will say that "red is eternal because throwing it may give you 6, 5, 4 ... which is convergent to 0".

This Alzheimer-inspired techniques are the only breakthrough of this long-winded chain of threads.

 

[Jabba]

...
If you define the potential to include the impossible, then "potential" loses all meaning.

Dave,
- That sounds right, but not under the circumstances we're talking about...
- Nothing is possible that doesn't happen. In that sense, there is no such thing as potential. If my parents hadn't had intercourse MY day, I would NEVER be here. Something is either going to happen, or it isn't. In neither case is it potential. If something doesn't happen, it was impossible (for some reason). In the case of Cleopatra and myself, there were NUMEROUS reasons -- but, that's the case for most everything that doesn't happen...

 

[godless dave]

Dave,
- That sounds right, but not under the circumstances we're talking about...
- Nothing is possible that doesn't happen. In that sense, there is no such thing as potential. If my parents hadn't had intercourse MY day, I would NEVER be here. Something is either going to happen, or it isn't. In neither case is it potential. If something doesn't happen, it was impossible (for some reason). In the case of Cleopatra and myself, there were NUMEROUS reasons -- but, that's the case for most everything that doesn't happen...

If that's the case, we can drop the whole idea of potential selves from the calculation, since the only things that were possible were the things that happened.

 

[The Sparrow]

...
- Nothing is possible that doesn't happen....

BZZZZZZZZT WRONG.

I for example have never drank my own urine, and likely never will.