Cont: Proof of Immortality, V for Very long discussion

[JimOfAllTrades]

Bringing a dead person back to life is some kind of red herring in this discussion; we were talking about replicating a living person.

But what if we do bring someone back to life?

Everyone (including Jabba) seems to agree that if we could somehow exactly duplicate a person and their brain, that person would think they were the original person and have an identical, although separate, sense of self.

But if that were possible we could also "fix" someone who had died. Suppose someone dies of heart failure. A year later we fix everything that was wrong with their heart and body including restoring the brain to it's last state.

That person is now alive again, and has the exact same sense of self they had before dying including continuity of memory and possibly even remembering dying. Have we resurrected that person? I think we may have.

 

[Monza]

Using our analogy of identical Volkswagens, think of the movie Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo. This VW was filmed driving through the streets of the principality and was driven by legendary actor Dean Jones. Now make an exact perfect copy of that VW. Would there be any way to tell this wasn't the same VW piloted by the likable Mr. Jones? By definition (i.e. a perfect copy), no there wouldn't. We could never tell this copy apart from the original by any means possible. However, this copy is missing something: it was never driven by Dean Jones. It is not the the original. But this is a meaningless differentiation because by definition of the thought experiment the second VW can never be the original, it is a copy.

You are trying to make a meaningless differentiation meaningful. You are asking us to consider a thought experiment where there is a perfect copy of Jabba, and then marvel that the copy is not the original. Please understand that the definition of copy means it is not the original. You wouldn't be brought back to like in the sense that you are the original. But the copy, in his mind, would consider himself as Jabba brought back to life. He would have the same sense of self as you do now in that he has all of the same memories, feelings, thoughts, etc. The only difference is that he is not the original, though he could never know that.

Have you seen the movie The Prestige, starring Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale? Spoiler Alert: This entire thought experiment of copies and originals is the basis for the ending of this movie.

 

[Mojo]

- If H is true. But, I'm trying to show that H is not true.

No, you aren't: you're asserting that it isn't true. I see no signs of any attempt to do anything beyond that.

And showing that H is not true still wouldn't allow you to include souls in your calculation of the likelihood of your existence under H.

 

[Belz...]

But what if we do bring someone back to life?

Everyone (including Jabba) seems to agree that if we could somehow exactly duplicate a person and their brain, that person would think they were the original person and have an identical, although separate, sense of self.

But if that were possible we could also "fix" someone who had died. Suppose someone dies of heart failure. A year later we fix everything that was wrong with their heart and body including restoring the brain to it's last state.

That person is now alive again, and has the exact same sense of self they had before dying including continuity of memory and possibly even remembering dying. Have we resurrected that person? I think we may have.

Perhaps. But as I told Jabba earlier, the "self" has no continuity with its previous state. It thinks it does, but it doesn't. And it doesn't from moment to moment either. It's just material processes.

 

[theprestige]

- If H is true. But, I'm trying to show that H is not true.

If H is true, then it explains the things you claim are unexplained.

You have to show that there's something unexplained by H. Not just claim it.

 

[JayUtah]

No, you aren't: you're asserting that it isn't true. I see no signs of any attempt to do anything beyond that.

And showing that H is not true still wouldn't allow you to include souls in your calculation of the likelihood of your existence under H.

Jabba has admitted he doesn't understand how this sort of model works. It is evident from his posts that he misunderstands it at a fundamental level, a conclusion that has been confirmed by every statistician he has consulted. There remains no rational question whether Jabba's method is sound.

When theorizing under the auspices of materialism, Jabba simply tries to equivocate every expression of the sense of self under that hypothesis to in some way describe the attributes of the soul he believes exists, despite every effort to correct him and despite the inherent circularity of his reasoning. He is largely indifferent to rebuttal.

Except Jabba has recently made two salient admissions. First, he admits he can't prove his case. While he refuses almost entirely to engage critics, he is not impervious to the effect of the rebuttals. And second, he admitted months ago that this was entirely an emotional argument for him, and that he couldn't bear defeat. So having admitted failure, Jabba still insists he must be right based on emotional ties to the outcome.

I think the only rational conclusion to draw at this point -- and it has been drawn before -- is that this debate was over years ago and Jabba lost. We can take his admission at face value and suppose that, knowing he's lost, all he's doing now is trying to find some way to soothe the emotional impact of it. His arguments no longer have even the semblance of cogence. They're just daily autonomic repetitions of his cherished beliefs.

 

[JesseCuster]

- Not the way that the selves are.

This is just question begging that there's something special and magical about selves.

- The emergent property of consciousness produces a kind of identity that the VW's don't have.

VWs have their own properties. If you perfectly duplicate a VW then you perfectly duplicate its properties.

Arguing that a perfect duplicate of you is "missing" "YOU", is like arguing that a perfect duplicate of a VW is missing its shape. Sure, it's got it's own shape that is utterly identical in every way to the original, but it's "missing" the original shape because it only has a copy of that shape. Does that make any sense?

Of course it doesn't. Arguing that a perfect duplicate of a person is "missing" its sense of self because it's only got a perfect copy of the sense of self of the original makes just as little sense. It's only your misguided belief that the sense of self is somehow categorically different and has its own Jabba set of rules that allows you to treat it different. Under H, the situation you're trying to disprove, the sense of self as a property is no different that other properties. So you can't just make up your own rules about how it operates under H in order to disprove H.

There's nothing about H that says a perfect copy of you will either share your sense of self if you're both alive at the same time, or will be a continuation of your self if you're recreated after your death, so all this is just railing at a gigantic strawman.

The stuff about perfect copy selves being somehow random and drawn from infinitely sized pools is just non-sequitur nonsense piled on top of this strawman.

 

[Jabba]

Now, that's dishonest. You're discussing a hypothesis under H. Now you're switching to a different argument and hoping no one will notice.

In order to argue for something under H, you have to assume that H is true. You tried to show that H is inconsistent but only succeeded in showing that you don't understand H or what it implies.

- I don't understand your claim. I am trying to disprove that we each have only one, finite, life (at most). I'm claiming that my current existence virtually proves that I have more than one, finite, life because it is so unlikely that I would be here now (out of all time) if I only have one, finite life (at most).

 

[jond]

- I don't understand your claim. I am trying to disprove that we each have only one, finite, life (at most). I'm claiming that my current existence virtually proves that I have more than one, finite, life because it is so unlikely that I would be here now (out of all time) if I only have one, finite life (at most).

Then why do you ignore the numbers that show your additional soul is far less likely?

 

[abaddon]

- If H is true. But, I'm trying to show that H is not true.

How dishonest.

 

[JayUtah]

I don't understand your claim.

And this is a huge problem because it goes to the root of the method you proposed for proving your point.

I am trying to disprove that we each have only one, finite, life (at most).

But you propose to do so by means of a statistical inference that requires you to compute the likelihood ratio P(E|H)/P(E|K), where H is materialism and K is your theory.

...because it is so unlikely that I would be here now (out of all time) if I only have one, finite life (at most).

You have concluded that your current existence is "unlikely" because you have purported to reckon P(E|H) in your model as being "virtually zero." But you have blatantly not conditioned this on H. You have admittedly and evidently conditioned it upon a straw man that bears no resemblance to H.

In order to conclude that P(E|H) is "virtually zero" you must reason as if H were true. That is how the method works. It doesn't matter whether you believe H is true or whether you have objective reasons to believe P(H) is very small. You must reckon P(E|H) as if H were true arguendo, otherwise your computation is garbage.

The fact that we have to belabor this against your (at this point, willful) ignorance only illustrates the bankruptcy of your claim. You are demonstrably no good at this kind of reasoning, and rather dishonest about it.

 

[Waterman]

The problem of resurrection

But what if we do bring someone back to life?

Everyone (including Jabba) seems to agree that if we could somehow exactly duplicate a person and their brain, that person would think they were the original person and have an identical, although separate, sense of self.

But if that were possible we could also "fix" someone who had died. Suppose someone dies of heart failure. A year later we fix everything that was wrong with their heart and body including restoring the brain to it's last state.

That person is now alive again, and has the exact same sense of self they had before dying including continuity of memory and possibly even remembering dying. Have we resurrected that person? I think we may have.

OOH this brings up another complication. Say we succeed in our 'resurrection' as described.

Assuming the given H the person is the 'same person'. With a sense of continuity.

Given Jabba's hypothesis the disembodied portion of the person would have to
1. know that the body it used to be in was revived
2. be able to reconnect to it
If it were not able to do so because it was in another body another 'free agent' would inhabit the body and it would be a 'different person' even though there would be no detectable difference and they would have the same sense of continuity.

 

[Belz...]

- I don't understand your claim. I am trying to disprove that we each have only one, finite, life (at most). I'm claiming that my current existence virtually proves that I have more than one, finite, life because it is so unlikely that I would be here now (out of all time) if I only have one, finite life (at most).

Why did you follow up your admission that you don't understand what I said with a repeat of your claim? Your claim has been proven wrong.

It's very simple: if you're working under a specific scenario, you have to respect that scenario. H doesn't work the way you pretend it does, and I think you know this.

 

[JimOfAllTrades]

Perhaps. But as I told Jabba earlier, the "self" has no continuity with its previous state. It thinks it does, but it doesn't. And it doesn't from moment to moment either. It's just material processes.

I agree completely. Under materialism, a functioning brain has the emergent property of consciousness. Create a functioning brain and consciousness results. Cause and effect traceable, to use one of Jabba's terms.

But Jabba says duplicating the brain is different because it creates a second consciousness, identical but separate. In his terms it's not him, but someone else identical to him. I think the thought experiment of resurrecting someone shows an instance where it would "be" him. Since consciousness is not continuous, the fact that his particular consciousness did not exist for a while and then existed again is no more significant than if the person were in a coma or asleep for an extended period.

It's just another way to show that materialism accounts for the appearance of a sense of self which is traceable to purely physical processes. We would have in fact "resurrected" someone by any measure that I can think of; someone who would be looking out of their own pair of eyes long after Jabba's mythical soul would have moved on.

 

[JimOfAllTrades]

OOH this brings up another complication. Say we succeed in our 'resurrection' as described.

Assuming the given H the person is the 'same person'. With a sense of continuity.

Given Jabba's hypothesis the disembodied portion of the person would have to
1. know that the body it used to be in was revived
2. be able to reconnect to it
If it were not able to do so because it was in another body another 'free agent' would inhabit the body and it would be a 'different person' even though there would be no detectable difference and they would have the same sense of continuity.

Exactly. Materialism explains the phenomenon simply: a functioning brain has a sense of self. Jabba's various scenarios require a bunch of extra hoop jumping to explain the same observations.

 

[MRC_Hans]

- I don't understand your claim. I am trying to disprove that we each have only one, finite, life (at most). I'm claiming that my current existence virtually proves that I have more than one, finite, life because it is so unlikely that I would be here now (out of all time) if I only have one, finite life (at most).

You are trying, but failing. The hypothesis H does not involve any of the factors you try to push into it.

- No potential selves.
- No predetermined result.
- No mystical "ME" other than the product of a functioning brain.

In other words: You don't have a case. Sorry.

Hans

 

[Mojo]

- I don't understand your claim. I am trying to disprove that we each have only one, finite, life (at most). I'm claiming that my current existence virtually proves that I have more than one, finite, life because it is so unlikely that I would be here now (out of all time) if I only have one, finite life (at most).

But you're doing it by trying to insert something into your calculation of P(E|H) that doesn't belong there. Even if you could demonstrate that H was untrue it would still not belong there.

Here's a simpler example.

Say we have a six-sided die. We throw it, and it comes up as a 3 (event E). I form the hypothesis (H) that all six sides of the die have a 3 on them. The likelihood of the observed event under this hypothesis is 1, right?

You have an alternative hypothesis (let's call it J), that the six sides are numbered 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. The likelihood of the observed event under this hypothesis is 1/6.

Then you pick up the die, and demonstrate that the sides are indeed numbered 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.

What is the likelihood of the the observed event if H is true?

 

[Hokulele]

- I don't understand your claim. I am trying to disprove that we each have only one, finite, life (at most). I'm claiming that my current existence virtually proves that I have more than one, finite, life because it is so unlikely that I would be here now (out of all time) if I only have one, finite life (at most).

That's not how Bayes' works. At least, not how you formulated it.

 

[John Jones]

- If H is true. But, I'm trying to show that H is not true.

No. You begging the question and assuming H is not true.

 

[John Jones]

- I don't understand your claim. I am trying to disprove that we each have only one, finite, life (at most). I'm claiming that my current existence virtually proves that I have more than one, finite, life because it is so unlikely that I would be here now (out of all time) if I only have one, finite life (at most).

Do you think there is anyone on this thread who doesn't already know what you have been claiming these last five years?