Cont: Proof of Immortality, V for Very long discussion

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Jabba said:
(in fact, I'm beginning to think that you already told me that...)
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Jabba -

Irrespective of any argument being made, can't you see how rude this is?

Last night, I went to the grade school science fair and I introduced myself to the Principal, even though we'd met once or twice. But I would have been fairly put out if my son's teacher didn't recognize me.
 
godless dave said:
In my case I can trace a chain of causality back to 1763, and could go farther if I were willing to give Ancestry.com more money.
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Good for you. I go back a hundred years and then the answer just keeps coming up, "somewhere in Poland."
 
Toontown said:
You are not the only regular participant in this thread who does not understand the formula.
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As you conveniently demonstrate:

The formula, in plain English:

The probability that I would have come to exist given H is equal to (the probability that I would have come to exist given H times the probability that H is true) divided by (the probabiliity that I would have come to exist given H plus the probability that I would have come to exist given something other than H times the probability that something other than H is true)
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:eek:

You're right. That is wrong. It should begin with "The probability that H is true given the fact that I exist is equal to..."
 
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MRC_Hans said:
It is irrelevant. Suppose you have a lottery with an infinity of numbers and you draw 7 billion tickets. What is the likelihood that each of the holders of those tickets is a winner?

That is the question.
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Not really. Your proposal immediately raises the question: what proportion of the infinity of numbers are winning numbers?

I'm pretty sure you're attempting to commit the Texas Horse Race Fallacy, but I can't be sure until you flesh out your analogy.
 
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JayUtah said:
Because you're both committing the Texas sharpshooter fallacy.
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I protest this false interpretation of my position.

I tend to disbelieve an interpretation of reality which implies that I have beaten giganogargantuan odds.

I tend to go with the default anthropic assumption that what I am experiencing is typical, rather than ludicrously anomalous or "special".

Neither of the above considerations has any relation to selectively drawing a circle around a data cluster and then claiming to be special. In fact, the opposite is true, and those who see things the opposite way are the real fallacy criminals.
 
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236
Jabba said:
- But, it wouldn't exhibit your particular self-awareness. "You" would not be reincarnated.
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239
godless dave said:
For exactly the same reason it wouldn't be my particular brain. It would be a copy.
If two separate brains could produce the same self-awareness that would mean the scientific explanation for self-awareness is wrong.
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241
Jabba said:
- Which is why our particular self-awarenesses are not cause and effect traceable -- and whose current existences are, therefore, as subject to calculations re chance as is winning the lottery.
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242
godless dave said:
I don't see how that follows. It's exactly as cause and effect traceable as the brain that produces it. If someone made a copy of your brain you could trace the causality that led to that copy existing, and thus to the copy of your self-awareness existing.
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254
Jabba said:
- But, you agree that my particular self-awareness is not reproduceable. How can we 'trace' it if we can't reproduce it? We have no idea what physicality brings about a particular self-awareness. Saying that a particular brain is the cause would seem to make it traceable only one step back...
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256
godless dave said:
I don't agree with that at all. To reproduce something is to make a copy of it. Just like the last time you tried to tell me I agree with that statement.
A copy is identical to the original.
If something is capable of experiencing self awareness, a copy of that thing would experience self-awareness in exactly the same way. There doesn't have to be a difference between them for them to be two separate things.
We know exactly what physicality brings about a particular self awareness - a human brain. And we understand the causes of a human brain existing. In my case I can trace a chain of causality back to 1763, and could go farther if I were willing to give Ancestry.com more money.
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Dave,
- In 239 above, you agree that your particular self-awareness would not be exhibited in your copy. In 256, you say that my particular self-awareness would be reproduced in my copy. Those two claims seem to conflict.
 
Jabba said:
Dave
- In 239 above, you agree that your particular self-awareness would not be exhibited in your copy. In 256, you say that my particular self-awareness would be reproduced in my copy. Those two claims seem to conflict.
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They don't. A reproduction of something is not that thing; it is a second identical thing. You are effectively trying to equivocate between singular and plural, and since pretty much everyone here is capable of distinguishing between these concepts your attempt is doomed to failure.
 
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Jabba said:
236

239

241

242

254

256Dave,
- In 239 above, you agree that your particular self-awareness would not be exhibited in your copy. In 256, you say that my particular self-awareness would be reproduced in my copy. Those two claims seem to conflict.
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To reproduce something is to make a copy.
 
Jabba, have you ever gone to the store, bought three cans of the same kind of soup, then tried to convince the cashier that you should only be charged for one because they are the same can of soup?
 
Toontown said:
I tend to go with the default anthropic assumption that what I am experiencing is typical, rather than ludicrously anomalous or "special".
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I think it would be better and more accurate to say that the default anthropic assumption is that what you experience (ie your actual observer-moment) is randomly sampled from the class of all possible experiences (observer-moments).

This is probably what you meant, but I think the language of "typical" or "special" can lead to confusion. Consider a sequence of 100 coin tosses, resulting in a string of heads and tails. This specific sequence is special in the sense of being ludicrously unlikely, it has a probability of 2^{-100}, but it is not special in the sense of not being randomly sampled from the class of all possible such sequences.

The real question here, after all, isn't the ludicrous unlikelihood of Jabba's specific experiences (they are ludicrously unlikely) but whether his specific experiences can be considered to have been specially rather than randomly selected from the class of all possible experiences (they can not).

Neither of the above considerations has any relation to selectively drawing a circle around a data cluster and then claiming to be special. In fact, the opposite is true, and those who see things the opposite way are the real fallacy criminals.
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I agree. I'd challenge anyone who sticks to this Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy explanation to explain what is wrong with the following argument (or any other such argument) where I condition on my own existence in the second statement:

If my parents hadn't met then I wouldn't exist.
I exist.
Therefor, my parents have met.
 
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caveman1917 said:
I agree. I'd challenge anyone who sticks to this Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy explanation to explain what is wrong with the following argument (or any other such argument) where I condition on my own existence in the second statement:

If my parents hadn't met then I wouldn't exist.
I exist.
Therefor, my parents have met.
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And how about your parents parents? your grandparents? Were there not four of those?
 
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