JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
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Cont: Proof of Immortality, V for Very long discussion
- Thread starter Dancing David
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Jabba
Philosopher
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- So, let's give that hypothesis a try. What is the likelihood of your current existence if there is nothing non-physical?
godless dave
Great Dalmuti
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At what point in time are we calculating the likelihood?
Mojo
Mostly harmless
Mojo
Mostly harmless
Jabba,
- what is the likelihood of your current existence under the hypothesis that you have a soul?
- what is the likelihood of your current existence under the hypothesis that you have a soul?
You mean I can be the LCP even when I say he's wrong? Cool!That doesn't mean he still won't try to say you're on his side.
Belz...
Fiend God
1.
Loss Leader
I would save the receptionist., Moderator
Maybe as high as 1.
Don't forget that "nothing non-physical" may include the clockwork universe, where all occurrences are the necessary result of the starting conditions. That means that my likelihood of existing now was always 1.
From my mere existence, it is impossible to tell the chance that we are in a clockwork universe. In fact, it's impossible to test or prove in any way at all. So we cannot separate the wild odds that I might exist in a random universe with the certainty that I exist in a clockwork universe.
The actual odds cannot be computed without importing a raft of preconceptions.
In any case, the chance that I currently exist in materialistic universe must by definition be greater than the combined chance that I both exist AND that my corresponding soul exists in a dualistic universe.
And, in any any case, with no evidence of anything "non-physical," it cannot even be considered a possible option, no matter how wonderfully welcoming it might be.
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
Under H the likelihood of my current existence is 1. Or rather, currently the likelihood of my existence is 1. I am observed to exist and my existence under H is completely irrelevant to whether anything non-physical exists. Before my physical body existed, the likelihood of future existence is meaningless because "my" existence had no meaning until it did exist. The lottery analogy fails to comprehend this. There was no "me" prior to existence that won some lottery to get to exist. Similarly after I die the likelihood at that point of my existing will be zero because I will have ceased to exist. All that was previously manifest by my operating organism, including its sense of self, will cease to be observed -- or in that case, experienced. The means of experiencing it will have become inoperative.
You keep trying to reckon all this in probabilistic terms, Jabba, but you don't seem to grasp that this is not a probabilistic problem. You are trying to shoehorn it in because you set out from the start to use statistical probability. If the model doesn't fit the problem, you don't change the problem; you choose a different model.
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
Enjoy your stay. I'm guessing he's going to use your comment as a springboard from which to leap from his present "Here's my straw-man version of H" argument to his tedious, "I'm not trying to prove immortality, only immateriality" argument.
jond
Illuminator
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However unlikely it may be that your body exists (which is exactly the same as your "self"), it is far more likely than your scenario which includes:
1: your body existing, (this is where H stops)
+2: your "self" (you really mean soul) also existing,
+3: the two finding a way to merge.
We've been through this many times, and you have ignored it every single time.
Jabba
Philosopher
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Belz...
Fiend God
Given that you probably don't know the first thing about the big bang, you're not in any position to calculate probabilities from it.
godless dave
Great Dalmuti
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I don't know the exact starting position of every divisible piece of matter at the time of the Big Bang, so I can't compute the probability. If there is true randomness at the quantum level, then at the time of the Big Bang the current state of the universe would have been one of a very large number of possible futures. So the likelihood that I would eventually exist 13 billion years or so later would have been very small. As would the likelihood of a particular blade of grass existing, and pretty much everything else.
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Loss Leader
I would save the receptionist., Moderator
Jabba - What is the likelihood that this banana I'm holding would exist at the moment of the Big Bang? How is it different from the likelihood that I or anything else would exist?
Mojo
Mostly harmless
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
Why? So you can disingenuously use the inherent noncomputability of any probability to make it seem like your one cherry-picked event is negligibly probable?
You're so missing the point. Because all observations that would pertain to the kind of probability you're considering occur within the system that currently exists as a matter of fact, you have absolutely no basis for knowing or computing it. As Loss Leader would phrase it, what if the Big Bang were simply the initiation of a clockwork universe? You have no way of knowing that this isn't a clockwork universe. Pidgin cosmology isn't going to save your argument, Jabba.
The Sparrow
Graduate Poster
Banana.
It really is SUCH a fun word! What's the likelihood of such a fun word being created?
Loss Leader
I would save the receptionist., Moderator
John Jones
Penultimate Amazing
No. You try it first.
Let us know what you come up with after another 4 to 5 years of vacuous ompholoskepsis.
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