abaddon
Penultimate Amazing
And how about your grandparent's parents? were there not eight of those?
Cont: Proof of Immortality, V for Very long discussion
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abaddon
Penultimate Amazing
And how about your great-grandparents? Must there not have been sixteen of those?
John Jones
Penultimate Amazing
... therefore Jabba weighs as much as a duck. No wait.
abaddon
Penultimate Amazing
By now, I assume you know where this goes. If one rolls back the generations to the time of jesus, you have more ancestors than people that have ever lived over all time.
Can you explain that?
Can you explain that?
abaddon
Penultimate Amazing
If the duck has four legs it must be a table. Or a dog. Or something.
jt512
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The argument is valid. What it has to do with the validity of Jabba's argument or the Texas sharpshooter counterargument is unclear.
It really is just that simple, and I cannot comprehend how Jabba can fail to understand that that is the fallacy he is committing. However, I do see the relationship with the Texas sharpshooter fallacy. In the Texas sharpshooter fallacy, we have a lot of observed random data, and we arbitrarily single out some data that we like. The only difference between the coin analogy and the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy, is that in the coin analogy, the relevant random events that are being ignored (and make the reasoning fallacious) are potential events, rather than realized ones.
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caveman1917
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The Texas Sharpshooter (TS) argument attacks Jabba's argument on the basis of conditioning on his own existence, yet that is not the problem with it. There is nothing wrong, in and of itself, with conditioning on one's own existence. If there were then it would also invalidate my argument above about my parents having met. Just because I chose to condition on my own existence doesn't mean I committed the TS fallacy or consider myself a "special snowflake" or whatever other form the counterargument has taken so far.
I think the problem with Jabba's argument is that he is committing the fallacy for one hypothesis but not for the other.
Suppose we observe such a coin toss sequence, and want to use it to differentiate between whether it was produced by someone tossing a coin while saying "souls are mortal" or doing it while saying "souls are immortal". Jabba's argument would then go like this:
If the person was saying "souls are mortal" while tossing the coin then it is extremely unlikely that this specific sequence would have been produced. Therefor, the person was saying "souls are immortal" while tossing the coin.
The first statement is true, and this negates the counterarguments based on his existence purportedly not being unlikely. The problem with the conclusion is that it ignores that the specific sequence produced is equally unlikely irrespective of whether the person producing it was saying souls are mortal or not. The correct argument would be:
If the person was saying "souls are mortal" while tossing the coin then it is extremely unlikely that this specific sequence would have been produced.
If the person was saying "souls are immortal" while tossing the coin then it is equally unlikely that this specific sequence would have been produced.
Therefor, observing this specific sequence of coin tosses does not allow us to differentiate between the hypotheses about what the person was saying while tossing it.
I guess it depends on how one understands the TS fallacy. In my understanding it is the fallacy of failing to distinguish between producing an outcome consistent with a given target and producing a target consistent with a given outcome. A person is a sharpshooter if they can do the former, while anyone can do the latter.
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AdMan
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And he was, of course. With the exact same nonsense.
Why do people keep trying to argue with him? I think it's maybe just some weird trolling experiment to see how long it can last, and how long he can keep others arguing.
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Jabba
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- This is getting really exciting -- I just wish I could keep up...
- Re Dave's argument, I think we're sort of tripping over two sub-issues: how many potential selves are there -- and, how am I different from Mt Rainier?
- I'm claiming that there is an infinity of potential selves in the same way that there is an infinity of potential Volkswagons. I say that because recycling your brain would not recycle your particular self-awareness -- it would not bring reincarnation. In that sense, this new brain/self would be different; it would be somebody else.
- I say that I am different from MT Rainier because while the characteristics of my brain are traceable, my particular self-awareness is not.
- There is a sub-sub-issue here. What can we count as potential selves? Dave says, for instance, that we can't count potential merging of ova from Cleopatra with sperm from my dad. (JT and Caveman, how would you respond to that?)
- Then, re the arguments of JT and Caveman: so far I sort of agree with them. I see this as the weak link in my case... But then, I do think that we can each be considered "special" (I think I can explain why), but that we hardly need to be special if our likelihood of currently existing is 7 billion over infinity...
- Re Dave's argument, I think we're sort of tripping over two sub-issues: how many potential selves are there -- and, how am I different from Mt Rainier?
- I'm claiming that there is an infinity of potential selves in the same way that there is an infinity of potential Volkswagons. I say that because recycling your brain would not recycle your particular self-awareness -- it would not bring reincarnation. In that sense, this new brain/self would be different; it would be somebody else.
- I say that I am different from MT Rainier because while the characteristics of my brain are traceable, my particular self-awareness is not.
- There is a sub-sub-issue here. What can we count as potential selves? Dave says, for instance, that we can't count potential merging of ova from Cleopatra with sperm from my dad. (JT and Caveman, how would you respond to that?)
- Then, re the arguments of JT and Caveman: so far I sort of agree with them. I see this as the weak link in my case... But then, I do think that we can each be considered "special" (I think I can explain why), but that we hardly need to be special if our likelihood of currently existing is 7 billion over infinity...
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JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
You can. You just don't want to. You tell us it's because you don't have time to read all the posts, but that's simply not credible. I can read all the daily posts in this thread in under ten minutes. Remember the part last year where you let slip that the real reason was because you found some poster's comments too difficult to address? If you ignore people because you have no answer to their questions and statements, that means you lose the debate. That's what losing means.
Statistically it doesn't matter how many "potential selves" you think there are. It's not a concept that gives you the Big Denominator you need in order to work the equation you admit you don't understand. Part of that lack of understanding to which you allude is the mistaken notion that "potential" anythings have the slightest to do with the likelihood of anything existing.
Scientifically, your individuality bears as much on the likelihood of your existence as that of Mt Ranier bears on its existence. Your sense of self is a product of electrochemical processes in your brain. It is an emergent property of a functioning nervous system. It is no different than the shape of Mt Ranier being an emergent property of the ordinary -- although highly complex -- natural forces that shaped it. It's clear you desperately want your sense of self to have a more mystical or profound explanation than that, but that desire doesn't compel science to invent things for which there is no evidence, in order to address your subject sense of wonder at your own consciousness. You don't get to falsify the scientific hypothesis on the basis that it doesn't address all the crap you make up and try to paste onto it.
Correct -- it would bring about two brains that have an identical sense of self-awareness. Science has no problem with this because "sense of self-awareness" under the scientific hypothesis is not a thing that existed prior to your biological birth, or in any sort of enumerable form. It's not a thing at all. It's a process, and you still stubbornly refuse to think of the sense of self-awareness under the scientific hypothesis as anything different than the soul you're trying to prove exists.
No, it wouldn't be different. It would just be an identical copy. You're trying to argue that difference and cardinality are the same thing. The new brain would be separate from the first, but not different. Its sense of self would be expressed separately from the first, but it would not be different. But of course we already explained several times why the cardinality-only argument fails. You simply don't care. You're too "busy" to debate effectively.
Under the scientific hypothesis, everything that creates your sense of self-awareness is traceable as the product of a functioning nervous system. Merely claiming repeatedly over and over to the contrary does not change anything. After more than four years, you need to have an argument that gets a better toehold than just repeating your desired beliefs over and over.
Keep in mind that the part of the equation you're discussing is P(E|H), which requires you to address H as it is actually formulated, not as you wish or demand it to be. If you want to introduce the mystical "something" that you think is your soul, that goes under ~H and has no bearing in this computation.
You can't. You've had nearly five years to show evidence of a thing that makes you "special" in that particular way, and you can't do it. You just repeat your claims and beg the question. Then you beg for more time under the insinuation that you don't "understand" the argument. Quite obviously you do, as evidenced by how you selectively ignore the most important parts of it. And what you style as your attempts to improve your understanding by beating the dead horse of 'sub-issues" indefinitely are really just thinly veiled excuses to play the same debate over and over again.
godless dave
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And you still haven't said why your particular self-awareness is not traceable. Your self-awareness is part of your brain. If we know where your brain came from, we know where your self-awareness came from, because the latter is part of the former.
This sub-issue is irrelevant because the number of potential selves over all time has nothing do to with the likelihood of a particular self awareness existing.
Above you said there are an infinite number of potential Volkswagens. But you have no problem accepting that the likelihood of a potential Volkswagen existing is not some number over infinity. What's the difference?
godless dave
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And he's gone.
HighRiser
Graduate Poster
Don't fret. He'll be back.
John Jones
Penultimate Amazing
Go back and read the threads.
jt512
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Don't know; don't care. My only interest in this thread is understanding the pathological use of probability.
caveman1917
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Maybe the problem is the implicit expectation that the probabilities have to add to 1. So given that one possibility (sequence produced by person saying "souls are mortal") can be established to have an extremely low probability there is the implicit conclusion that the other possibility (sequence produced by person saying "souls are immortal") must have a high probability. The error then being that likelihoods, unlike priors or posteriors, don't have to add to 1 or anything else in particular.
Loss Leader
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Jabba
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- In other words, there is a "thing," or process, that is exhibited in you that would not be exhibited in a perfect copy of you (see 232-239, above). I've been calling that your particular self-awareness. Do you have a name for it?
- In most humans, this process "cares, and it "senses, or imagines, a continuation that it would like to continue. You seem to be saying that such care is just an illusion and nothing to be concerned about -- i.e., it needn't be considered in our ethics.
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Dave,
- In other words, there is a "thing," or process, that is exhibited in you that would not be exhibited in a perfect copy of you (see 232-239, above). I've been calling that your particular self-awareness. Do you have a name for it?
- In most humans, this process "cares, and it "senses, or imagines, a continuation that it would like to continue. You seem to be saying that such care is just an illusion and nothing to be concerned about -- i.e., it needn't be considered in our ethics.
theprestige
Penultimate Amazing
Five years of trying to work your soul into the scientific hypothesis, and this pathetic non sequitur is the best you can do?
And you can't even own it yourself, but have to dishonestly impugn Dave, to get it out there?
jond
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This might be a good time to consider actually reading the many responses you've had in this thread. Including the ones that point out that "thing" and "process" are not the same.
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