Cont: Proof of Immortality, V for Very long discussion

[JesseCuster]

Loss Leader,
- Immortality just seems to make the most sense.

Then perhaps the thread should be renamed from 'Proof of Immortality' to 'Immortality just seems to make the most sense to Jabba' if that's the angle you're going for.

 

[Loss Leader]

Loss Leader,
- Immortality just seems to make the most sense. If I have only one finite life (at most), my current existence is extremely unlikely. That being the case, my current existence is evidence that I have more than one finite life. The most likely conclusion of my current existence is that I always exist...

This is not a reason. You haven't presented any reasoning, Jabba. It's all just blind faith.

 

[Jabba]

Loss Leader,
- Immortality just seems to make the most sense. If I have only one finite life (at most), my current existence is extremely unlikely. That being the case, my current existence is evidence that I have more than one finite life. The most likely conclusion of my current existence is that I always exist...

This is not a reason. You haven't presented any reasoning, Jabba. It's all just blind faith.

LL,
- Which of the following do you disagree with?
1. If I have only one finite life (at most), my current existence is extremely unlikely.
2. That being the case, my current existence is evidence that I have more than one finite life.
3. The most likely conclusion of my current existence is that I always exist.

 

[jond]

LL,
- Which of the following do you disagree with?
1. If I have only one finite life (at most), my current existence is extremely unlikely.
2. That being the case, my current existence is evidence that I have more than one finite life.
3. The most likely conclusion of my current existence is that I always exist.

1. Doesn't matter. However unlikely it is, it is still more likely than your scenario. As you know and have agreed to.
2. Does not follow from 1. The reverse is true.
3. Does not follow from 1 or 2.

 

[Jabba]

Your existence, as an observable event, requires your body to exist.

Under H that is all it requires; under the hypothesis that you have a soul, it requires your body to exist, your soul to exist, and your soul to occupy your body. This means that it impossible for your existence to be more likely under the hypothesis that you have a soul than it is under H. You claim that there is an infinite number of souls and they are randomly allocated to bodies. This means that your current observable existence is impossible if souls exist.

You exist.

You argument, if it is valid, proves that souls don't exist.

Mojo,
- No. H requires that my possible one life not only does exist -- but, out of all time, it happens to exist right now.

 

[jond]

Mojo,
- No. H requires that my possible one life not only does exist -- but, out of all time, it happens to exist right now.

Under H, the only requirement is that your body exists, however unlikely that may be. As a consequence of the self being an emergent property of the functioning brain, when the brain stops functioning your self stops existing.

Under your scenario your body needs to exist right now, along with your soul and it requires a means of the soul connecting to the brain. It is impossible for your scenario to be more likely than H. Which you know and have agreed to.

 

[abaddon]

Mojo,
- No. H requires that my possible one life not only does exist -- but, out of all time, it happens to exist right now.

And your version of ~H requires that not only do you exist right now at this moment in time, but also that an infinite number of souls exist right now, that a mechanism exists for these infinite souls to exist in the first place, that one of those souls has glommed onto your body right now, that a mechanism exists for a soul to glom onto a particular physical body, that a mechanism exists to allow that soul to release one body and glom onto the next body and that unbelievably, it just so happens that your soul has glommed onto your particular body at this particular time.

Yet somehow, you think that is more likely than H. Because you just "feel" like it.

You don't see the obvious problem with this?

 

[Jabba]

Under H, the only requirement is that your body exists, however unlikely that may be. As a consequence of the self being an emergent property of the functioning brain, when the brain stops functioning your self stops existing.

Under your scenario your body needs to exist right now, along with your soul and it requires a means of the soul connecting to the brain. It is impossible for your scenario to be more likely than H. Which you know and have agreed to.

jond,
- How likely is it that my particular body would exist, and it would exist right now?

 

[JayUtah]

Mojo,
- No. H requires that my possible one life not only does exist -- but, out of all time, it happens to exist right now.

Nope, you equivocated. You just flipped over to your straw man version of H in order to avoid a very simple refutation.

Sent from my Nexus 6 using Tapatalk

 

[MRC_Hans]

Loss Leader,
- Immortality just seems to make the most sense. If I have only one finite life (at most), my current existence is extremely unlikely. That being the case, my current existence is evidence that I have more than one finite life. The most likely conclusion of my current existence is that I always exist...

Dear Jabba,

Except that your claim about your existence being unlikely does not work. This has been shown to you repeatedly.

So, I'm afraid your line of argumentation has broken down.

Hans

 

[MRC_Hans]

LL,
- Which of the following do you disagree with?
1. If I have only one finite life (at most), my current existence is extremely unlikely.[

That claim is false.

2. That being the case, my current existence is evidence that I have more than one finite life.
3. The most likely conclusion of my current existence is that I always exist.

And given that #1 is false, #2 and #3 become irrelevant.

Hans

 

[Mojo]

Mojo,
- No. H requires that my possible one life not only does exist -- but, out of all time, it happens to exist right now.

Would your current existence be an observable event if your particular body didn't exist right now, out of all time?

 

[MRC_Hans]

Mojo,
- No. H requires that my possible one life not only does exist -- but, out of all time, it happens to exist right now.

Wrong. Humans exist and have existed in considerable numbers for several hundred thousand years.

A considerable fraction of them/us have had existential thoughts. You are nothing special.

Hans

 

[MRC_Hans]

jond,
- How likely is it that my particular body would exist, and it would exist right now?

Wrong question. You particular body is just a body among billions. And, I have to tell you, your idea of being unique is not that special. Most of us consider ourselves unique.

The right question is: How likely is it that I would feel unique?
And the answer is: Very likely.

Hans

 

[JoeMorgue]

Jabba you have yet to explain... well anything actually but one of the things you haven't explained is the jump from a purely mathematical uniqueness to the sort of specialness your idea requires.

If I well shuffle a standard deck of 52 playing cards chances are mathematically that I've created a totally unique combination of cards, that is a unique "deck" which has never been seen before in this universe and very well might never be seen again.

Have I just imbued this standard deck of cards with a soul via its state of uniqueness? It's as unique as me or you, the only one in the universe just like me and you.

Why? Why do you have a soul but the deck of cards doesn't?

 

[jond]

jond,
- How likely is it that my particular body would exist, and it would exist right now?

However unlikely it is, it is absolutely more likely than your body existing and your soul existing and them finding a way to merge.

Also, given that the self is an emergent property of the brain, the likelihood of you being you once your parents conceived you is exactly 1. You couldn't have been anyone else.

 

[Loss Leader]

LL,
- Which of the following do you disagree with?

Jabba - I am very happy to answer you.

1. If I have only one finite life (at most), my current existence is extremely unlikely.

I've never really agreed with this. As far as I know, we live in a clockwork universe where everything that happens is a necessary consequence of its starting conditions. If that's the case, then the chance that you'd exist would be 100%.

Assuming we live in a somewhat randomized universe, I don't know the chance that you personally would exist right at this moment. But I'm not sure it matters. Any sentient lifeform at any time in the life of the universe might question the durability of its sense of self. And that lifeform at that time would find the chance that it existed right then to be very small. So I think the proper likelihood is whether any sentient life would exist anywhere at any time in the life of the universe. I don't know how to calculate those odds. The universe may be crowded with life, in which case the odds are very, very good.

2. That being the case, my current existence is evidence that I have more than one finite life.

No, I'm sorry. I do not agree with this. The only evidence we have is that you exist now. We have absolutely zero evidence that it is even possible to have more than one life, for a soul to switch bodies, or for anything of the individual to survive death. In fact, all the evidence we have indicates that processes of a working brain create the illusion of a self in order to integrate sensory data in a manner that allows the organism to survive. We can change the way someone thinks, remembers, even acts. We can change the way a person tastes things. We can shoot a tamping rod through their skull and make them addicted to gambling.

I think that you have the positive responsibility to define exactly what a durable, unchanging soul is - is it memories? loves? hates? What exactly is it? What are its characteristics? If I die right now, what exactly does my soul take with it? What if I'd died 20 years ago? Would it be the same?

You then need to show that the thing can survive death. Evidence of that should be inconsistent with any other interpretation.

3. The most likely conclusion of my current existence is that I always exist.

Oh for the love of Anne Hathaway's Oscar, no. This is the fallacy of the excluded middle. "If the car isn't red, it's most likely blue." There are an infinite number of other explanations:

The soul lives 100,000 years.
The soul lives 100,003 years.
Only the souls of people below the age of 40 reincarnate.
Some people are born without souls.
The soul dies with the body but then is reincarnated on Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld.
Female souls live for 60,000,000,000 years while male souls live for 20,673,000 years.

Now you may say to me, "But Loss Leader, once we reason that a soul outlives the body, what mechanism could there be for it to die after a certain number of lives or years or whatever?"

And that's just the point. We have no mechanism for a soul to outlive its present body. As long as we're imagining such a thing could happen, we might as well imagine anything. We're not using evidence. It's just pure faith.

 

[JoeMorgue]

Indeed.

Jabba you arguing, such as it is, under the assumption that special "quality" you keep referring to (which again I need to point out we all know very well is a soul) is both self evident and self defining.

But as noted all you are doing is added an unnecessary complication to an argument made out of poorly constructed probability. You're trying to prove your existence is so unlikely as to have to have an outside special factor by added in that outside special factor, but since you refuse to define the outside special factor it just makes it by definition more improbable. It's insane.

 

[JimOfAllTrades]

jond,
- How likely is it that my particular body would exist, and it would exist right now?

About the same as the odds that a particular blade of grass, Mt. Rainier, any number of three-legged dogs, and Volkswagen Beetle would exist.

 

[abaddon]

About the same as the odds that a particular blade of grass, Mt. Rainier, any number of three-legged dogs, and Volkswagen Beetle would exist.

Unclear. In the Jabbaverse that could also be a cat or a coffee table. Since I possess neither dog, cat nor coffee table, the Jabbaverse is unknown to me.