From my perspective, we're still passing in the night.
It's not meant to be a rendezvous. You're trying to say what the scientific hypothesis (H) is and you're just plain wrong. You seem to want to negotiate people into accepting your straw man. Do you understand that they are not irrational for not wanting to?
I just don't think that we have the same concept of "self" in mind when considering this issue...
You don't
think so? It has been explicitly told you so several times by at least me if not also by many other posters. You're trying to foist onto the scientific hypothesis (H) the notion of a self that, as has been recently reminded, is basically just the wolf of a soul in your sheep's clothing of pidgin philosophy and mathematics. Your concept of the self has nothing whatsoever to do with H.
When we humans consider the possibility of afterlife, or immorality, we're not usually considering the continuation, or recurrence, of anything physical.
Stipulated. And there's where you run aground, as science considers only the physical. Your attempt to falsify H boils down to trying to attach something non-physical to H and then pretend science can't explain it. That's the quintessential straw man.
The "thing" we have in mind is the specific example of consciousness that each of us (apparently) has...
Equivocation. When speaking about properties, language that sounds in possession is more accurately rendered as displaying or manifesting the property. We say colloquially that each of us "has" a sense of self, but it's more accurate to say we manifest or display a sense of self. That's the same thing as saying a car manifests the property of speed. It "has" a speed in a certain linguistic sense, but that doesn't make that speed an object you can count. Ditto the sense of self in H. It's a property, not a discrete countable thing.
which seems to most of us as primarily different than anything else we consider physical.
Your feelings are simply irrelevant as far as H is concerned. You have to prove it exists in the way you say it does. As we have told you numerous times, if you want to say you feel like you have an immortal soul, most skeptics here will just quietly leave you alone to your beliefs. But you say you can prove this mathematically. Your feelings aren't a lemma you can here rely on to help you do that.
It's the thing that the reincarnationists think keeps coming back. This is the self that the perfect copy would not exhibit, would not reproduce. This self is not determined by chemical cause and effect.
Yes, that's the self you believe in that's fundamentally the same as a soul. However, that's not anything like the self under H. It's not supposed to be.
does imply that nothing non-physical exists.
That is essentially correct under H. The sense of self under H is a subjective phenomenon that arises as the result of the processes of a fully functioning brain. If you insist on trying to count it, then it would have to be exactly the number of fully functioning brains.
And this self is not physically traceable past its own brain.
That is essentially correct under H. The span of space and time over which an object exhibits a property is exactly the space and time over which the object itself exists. That's fundamentally what it means to be a property. If the property is characterized as an emergent property, then the space and time over which it is manifest is inexorably tied to the space and time over which the object exists in its operative composition. When the brain dies, its physical matter remains but the processes that were dependent upon the whole of the brain operating cease to occur. At that point the sense of self is no longer manifest.
This is the sense of self
under H. Because it is traceable only to the existence of a functioning brain, there is no evidence it persists beyond the existence of the brain. Specifically under the formulation in H of the self as an emergent property, it
cannot persist beyond the existence of a brain. It is this formulation that you must use in P(E|H).
You're trying to pretend it is or should be something else. Specifically you're trying to pretend it is or should be fundamentally identical to what you believe under some member of ~H. This is where it becomes important to remember your confession of ignorance in what Bayes is meant to show. Your ongoing ignorance is no more evident than in your clearly naive attempt to formulate P(E|H). You clearly have no idea what this term is mean to express, while your critics clearly do.
