theprestige
Penultimate Amazing
How many "going 60mph" are there?
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Proof of Immortality, the IV league
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How many "going 60mph" are there?
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
People do, but it's rude to come back and try to start the discussion over instead of picking up where it left off. I'm sure you're well aware that your critics rightly blame you for the unnecessary repetition that results in the astonishing length of this thread without making any progress. Rest assured we all know what your argument is. You don't need to repeat it and restart it at every opportunity.
Wait a minute. If we skip to the end, we confirm what you're trying to prove:
First of all, there's no such thing as "OOFLAM." It's a silly acronym you invented and are trying to paste onto your critics. You variously define H, the name for the hypothesis in your Bayesian model, as "OOFLAM" or also as the scientific hypothesis for the self. These are not the same thing, and you've been told this many times. "OOFLAM" is simply about temporal extent. We have at most one life, and it extends over a finite length of time.
You contrived this to oppose the panoply of every possible mystical mcguffin you think might result in something like immortality, so that you could deploy the standard fringe argument by false dilemma. Not only is it a straw man, it has nothing to do with the argument you actually present. Even if "OOFLAM" were false by the argument you present, it does nothing to address either the immateriality requirement or the temporal extent necessary for your belief to hold. You're not making an argument for your proposition; you're simply casting as many aspersions as possible on what you think your critics believe.
Your critics are clearly arguing not for OOFLAM, but for the prevailing scientific understanding of the sense of self. It is this proposition that you must falsify with evidence, and even then you don't escape the false dilemma. But once again, quoting you, we look at your presentation: "So, my premises and conclusions." The problem is that these are your premises and conclusions, not the actual features of H. If you're going to falsify H -- specifically, if you're going to compute P(E|H) to be a very small number -- then you have to do it according to what H actually says, not to what your premises and conclusions are. You've simply traded one straw man for another.
And of course you keep formulating E according to the Texas sharpshooter's fallacy, but you didn't explicitly bring that up today.
How many times have you been caught in equivocal arguments on this forum, Jabba? Do you really believe they fool anyone? While it's nice to see evidence that you're at least reading parts of your critics posts (if not responding to them), it's dismaying that you're trying to co-opt the extremely important distinction they draw between what they actually believe and what you are frantically trying to pin on them, and pretend that they're all just words for the same concept. Shame on you, Jabba. You heed your critics' words but not their ideas. You told us you would present a mathematical proof, but instead you rely on lowborn legalistic trickery to try to fool people into accepting your argument.
Under H there is a certain property that emerges from the organism. That property is the neurological process, one of whose results is the subjective sense of self. Under H that is not an entity, not a "thing." You either don't know what a property or process is, even after copious explanation, or you simply don't care to respect the distinction. Either way, your argument fails here, hard.
No, the sense of self is a property. It doesn't have "particulars." Particular means, literally, existing as particles. That has specific meaning in natural philosophy. Not just in the sense of muons and gluons, but in the notion of something that is indivisible (without losing its character) and also discretely separate from other particles.
Neither of those conditions rightly applies to a process. You are desperately trying, via your typical word games, to establish that H must include the notion of the self as a "thing," and that it can be reckoned separately from the organism. This is exemplary question-begging. You may believe that the self is a particular awareness, but that's not what H says. You're not falsifying H; you're falsifying something you made up.
No.
And for so many reasons, no. The sense of self under H is not particular. It is not countable. It is a process. And you know that processes are not countable. Unless you have the entire forum in your ignore list, you cannot have missed the question everyone is asking:
HOW MANY "GOING 60 MPH" ARE THERE?
I trust that's large and clear enough for you to read. After so much repetition, including from your darling critic of the moment, it's safe for your critics to conclude you refuse to answer that question because you recognize its implications for your argument, and are desperately trying to pretend it doesn't exist. It's safe to conclude you realize a property is not countable, and that this is immediately and conclusively fatal to your argument.
Nor do you have a basis for limiting the quantity of current "selves."
No. First, this is absurd on its face (see below). Second, you really don't know how quantitative modeling works. The useful way to conduct quantitative reasoning is first to isolate the quantitative relationships into a valid model, then collect the required information, then apply the model and draw conclusions based on the results. You've done Step One by selecting Bayesian inference as your model. But you've screwed up everything else.
For instance, you didn't go collect data. You simply made up all the inputs to the model. You say Bayes lets you do this, but in fact it doesn't. It lets you offer a quantified subjective belief for some of the elements of the model. The rest must be factual.
And you didn't let the model drive your conclusion. You are trying to shoehorn the model into the conclusion you already drew. Let's not mince words. You told us very clearly that you are heavily emotionally invested in the belief in immortality, and very heavily invested in seeing this proof succeed. It's for that reason, not any mathematical study, that you believe P(H) "must" be so very small. And this, not any defensible philosophy or evidence, drives you to search high and low for the Big Denominator that you can pretend lets you set P(E|H) to zero. You're trying very hard to make mathematics fit your belief. There's no other way to state it. You've made it almost as clear as if what I just wrote above came right from your mouth.
That hot mess has nothing to do with defensible quantitative reasoning.
Do we really have to go over again everything that's wrong with you trying to say life is like a lottery?
Under H it simply isn't. A lottery has winners and losers, all drawn from a pool of pre-existing contestants. There is no equivalent concept under H. There cannot be, as the sense of self comes into existence only as the organism does. No "potential" self exists under H in any operative sense.
And so do bananas and Mt Ranier and everything else that's susceptible to your "divided by the number of potential somethings" formula. All of these things manage both to exist without souls and to have infinite potential. This is a very simple reductio ad absurdum refutation, Jabba. Please understand that because of it, it's trivial to see that your argument can't hold.
You've already had four years to do that, but you obviously can't do it. As I said, one could get a college degree in philosophy or neuroscience, or even theology for that matter, in the time it has taken you to "fill in the blanks." But the real problem is that your argument doesn't just suffer from incompleteness. It's flat-out wrong. There is no augmentative remedy for this. And it's not as if your errors are nuanced, or haven't been thoroughly explained to you.
You're clearly cornered, and as you've done dozens upon dozens of times before over the past four years, you're trying to restart the debate in order to escape. You're trying to restart the same debate, using the same long-debunked arguments. Why on earth would you think it will work?
jond
Illuminator
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Why do you even pretend to be having a discussion if you are going to ignore literally every single thing everyone else has to say? Every single one of your points has been thoroughly demolished and yet here you are pretending no one has ever encountered this before. Jabba, you are wrong. If you want a detailed answer for why you are wrong, read JayUtah's excellent post above. Or any of the thousands of posts throughout these many years by so many people.
Most importantly, Jabba: just stop. You are wrong and if you refuse to listen to why you are wrong that's your problem, not ours.
Jabba
Philosopher
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- Yes.
- They would be.
- No. Their particular awarenesses would be different.
- Yes.
- Back to Mt Rainier and the Texas Sharpshooter...
- I'm claiming something to the effect that the target has to be "target meaningful" -- which you are -- and most likely, the times of existence for the banana, flame and match are not.
- If you can accept my logic so far (yeah, right), I'll try to explain target "meaningful."
godless dave
Great Dalmuti
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The only difference between the two particular awarenesses would be their times of existence.
So far you haven't given any difference between the situation with burning matches and living humans.
Please try to explain "target meaningful". But keep in mind that you still haven't in any way established that the number of potential X is relevant to the likelihood of a particular X appearing.
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Loss Leader
I would save the receptionist., Moderator
I was completely correct. I win 15 internets.
Jabba, your #1 is self-contradictory. A thing is not a process or a property. You have not shown the "self" to be a thing. As a process or property, it is uncountable.
Since your entire argument rests on this mistake, it fails right from the start.
Support the idea that the "self" is a thing and not a process of a working neurosystem.
How many "going 60 mph" are there?
MRC_Hans
Penultimate Amazing
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No. Under the theory of OOFLam, there is no such thing as potential selves and a self is not a particular awareness.
Now come on, Jabba, this has been explained to you innumerable times. You cannot keep ignoring it.
Hans
MRC_Hans
Penultimate Amazing
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In the interest of logic (but quite unconnected with the ongoing "discussion"), processes may be quite countable. If you walk into a plastic molding factory and ask how many processes and potential proces they have, they may answer that they currently have 24 processes running and 8 machines are idle, thus they have 32 potential processes.
Likewise, the number of "going 60 mph" can be defined in several countable ways:
- The number of ways you can travel 60 mph
- The number of cars going 60 mph on a given stretch of road on a given day.
- The number of times you go 60 mph on a given journey.
- Etc.
All of which is entirely irrelevant to Jabba's claims, because he is using a faulty definition of the materialistic position (what he calls OOFLAM). Once the correct definition is used, his whole argument falls to pieces.
Hans
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
Sounds like you're once again trying to grope for something else that makes humans "special" and mountains and bananas not. You always try to squeak out of appropriate analogies by begging this same question. Get it through your head, Jabba: you can't falsify H by supposing, under H, that humans have some magical quality that transcends the purely quantitative argument. You promised a mathematical argument, not a lengthy angst-ridden diatribe about how you feel that you're meaningful because you're alive and this life can't be it.
No, you don't get to ask for agreement first and then present your argument afterwards. Your "logic so far" turns on whether you can prove your latest made-up concept has any basis in fact.
Dancing David
Penultimate Amazing
I would have to say the 'potential' is very high they will do so!
Slowvehicle
Membership Drive , Co-Ordinator,, Russell's Antin
...How many "going 60 mph" are there?
Loss Leader
I would save the receptionist., Moderator
I think the difference is really just in the definition of "process." In your example, "process" is shorthand for "one run of one machine."
theprestige
Penultimate Amazing
"Target meaningful"? Is it possible to beg the question and affirm the consequent at the same time?
Not to mention Texas sharpshooter, special pleading... How many fallacies can you pack into a single premise? You've defended the idea that people are special via appeal to popularity and appeal to authority, as well.
Hokulele
Deleterious Slab of Damnation
John Jones
Penultimate Amazing
You haven't demonstrated any command of logic as the term is commonly understood, nor have you shown any reason why we should accept your hollow appeals to convenient definitions of "meaningful".
Can you think of any reason why we should after all these years?
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Loss Leader
I would save the receptionist., Moderator
Okay, I've given this a little more thought. Let's say your plastic molding factory produces little dashboard Jesus statues. We can count the dashboard Jesuses, we can count the number of machines making them. But what we can't count is the degree to which any amount of liquid resin during the process is a dashboard Jesus. Is it when it's injected into the mold, when the mold is opened, when cooling is complete, when the little sticky part on the bottom is added, etc.?
If we were to freeze time, we would have plastic at every stage from resin to boxes ready for shipping. In that frozen moment of time, could we count how many Jesuses we have? Would the one that only halfway has the bottom sticky part on count as a Jesus? Would the one just popped out of a mold be one?
The process is uncountable, even though it may be occurring in countable machines or creating end-products that are countable in themselves.
Similarly, we can count people and we can count people who are done living. We cannot count the sense of self because it is not static.
Going further, Jabba marveling at his own existence is like some bit of resin in the tank marveling that it was made into Jesus #435,228. The process worked as expected. Even though your machines could run forever if the time and material existed, it doesn't make any one dashboard Jesus infinitely unlikely to have been made.
n.b. The below image is attached because I found it and thought it was funny.
[IMGw=300]http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/picture.php?albumid=681&pictureid=11141[/IMGw]
caveman1917
Philosopher
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Meaning that the set of potential self-aware substrates is finite.
A set is either countable or uncountable. You said that one needed to define the self as "separate" from the brain so as to make the set of potential selves countable. If the set of potential brains was countable then one wouldn't need to do anything to make the set of potential selves countable, therefor the set of potential brains is uncountable.
Mind you, I disagree with this (I think the set of potential brains, and by extension potential selves, isn't just countable but finite) but it seems to follow from what you said.
No I wasn't counting things that exhibit the property red, I was counting reds. As in: light red, dark red, etc, but more precisely in terms of counting frequencies.
caveman1917
Philosopher
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If you remember, by my example of the two-year old failing to articulate GR, I argued that just because Jabba can not or will not properly define a "set of potential selves" doesn't mean that the notion of "set of potential selves" is problematic. Given that my interlocutors seem to be going back to a sort of "but that's not what Jabba is doing!" I consider my claim sufficiently supported and will now stop to bark up any tree.
Loss Leader
I would save the receptionist., Moderator
Can you define "self" in any manner that distinguishes it from a material body? Can you define "self" in any way that remains unchanged throughout a person's entire life?
I don't mean to force you to take up Jabba's position, but you are arguing that "selves" are countable. If the "self" doesn't even have a definition, it cannot exist. If it is a process, constantly changing throughout one's life, then it is infinite even within a single person (or, if not infinite, then however many planck units are in a person's life*).
I agree that Jabba's inability to explain a concept doesn't mean he's wrong. I can tell you that my car has a transaxle. I can't define it, support my statement or even point to a picture of it. But I could still be right. Do you agree that if the "self" is indistinguishable from a living body, then Jabba must be wrong?
*The computer says there are 5.85 x 1052 planck units in 100 years.
Which does not make everything countable. Limited does not equate to countable set.caveman1917 said:
You are equivocating brains and selves. If self is not separable from brain then one is counting brains.caveman1917 said:
I think you are reading what is not there, though I grant it is possible my ability to articulate it isn't up to the task.caveman1917 said:
If you wish to keep it technical then frequencies are not red; they are merely frequencies. It is only the perception of frequencies that makes them red, and not all perceptions of the same band of frequencies end up with red -- color blind people, etc. So now you're at the pointing of counting "those potential perceptions of frequencies which can be equated to red." Define them as an event and perhaps it is possible they are countable in the same way one can count "those potential moments of eating biscuits & gravy," but that is as meaningless as as counting potential perceptions of red when defined as a process.caveman1917 said:
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