Cont: Proof of Immortality, V for Very long discussion

[Belz...]

We now have the ludicrous situation that Jabba is trying to prove that immortal souls exist in order to use Bayesian statistics to prove that immortal souls exist.

Stop talking nonsense! There is no such thing as a circular argument in a Truly Effective Debate^tm.

 

[The Sparrow]

Someone wiser than me said:
the plural of "anecdote" is not "data"

 

[Jabba]

Mark,
- H (we each have Only One Finite Life at most) is my version of what I believe to be the consensus scientific opinion re human mortality.
- Certainly, I didn't mean "we" to simply represent our physical bodies. As far as I know, science has no issue at all about how many lives our bodies have. When scientists talk about the impossibility of immortality, they are not referring to our bodies -- they're talking about what we humans think of as our selves. H is about what we think of as our selves, and whether or not we might return, or never really go.

But that isn't the case Jabba. When scientists talk about the sense of self it is purely as a result of a functioning brain. You, or anyone else is free to believe in souls or whatever else you like but that has no impact on H. H is the idea that there is nothing in the sense of self that is non physical..

Mark,
- To me, it's obvious that by "we," scientists are referring to what we would call our "sense of self" or" identity." Most scientists seem to believe that everything is physical, including our identities, so they don't think that such identities can exist more than once, apiece. OOFLam is their hypothesis about our experience of identity that so many people think is non-physical and even returnable.

 

[Belz...]

Most scientists seem to believe that everything is physical, including our identities, so they don't think that such identities can exist more than once, apiece.

That might have something to do with the fact that there's no reason to believe otherwise.

Face it: your entire argument is based on sheer belief. Your belief has no justification or supporting evidence. It's just a belief.

As I told you, part of growing up is realising that our beliefs aren't true.

 

[godless dave]

Mark,
- To me, it's obvious that by "we," scientists are referring to what we would call our "sense of self" or" identity." Most scientists seem to believe that everything is physical, including our identities, so they don't think that such identities can exist more than once, apiece. OOFLam is their hypothesis about our experience of identity that so many people think is non-physical and even returnable.

OOFLam isn't some scientist's hypothesis. I've never heard of a scientist saying "We have only one finite life at most". That's your characterization of the consequence of the prevailing scientific view of human consciousness, which is that it's all physical.

 

[Jabba]

I'm saying exactly what I said: In H, that identity is part of the physical body. If the body is mortal than so is that identity.

- H is the popular scientific hypothesis about that identity that we (and they) experience -- and that so many of us suspect is more than mortal. H is not the reasoning behind the hypothesis.

 

[JayUtah]

To me, it's obvious that by "we," scientists are referring to what we would call our "sense of self" or" identity."

Maybe you should stop trying to put your thoughts and words in the mouths of scientists. Your straw-man romp is reaching epic proportions.

Most scientists seem to believe that everything is physical, including our identities...

That is essentially correct, and merely restates what Mark has said. A sense of identity is a property of a physical organism. As a property, it can exist only when the entity that manifests it exists.

OOFLam is their hypothesis about our experience of identity...

No, you're just throwing words around. You're not wrong about all the concepts you're raising, but you're just randomly trying to fit them together.

Our "experience of identity" (more unnecessarily vague and equivocal wording) isn't a magic thing. We have a sense of identity. It's experienced subjectively. That's not a problem for science.

It arises in a functioning human brain. We have ample evidence of that causality because affecting the brain mechanically, chemically, or electrically affects the subjective experience of identity. That's not a problem for science.

With that causality in place, it follows that the sense of identity -- being provably tied to the brain as an emergent property of it -- can have no separate existence. When the brain comes into being, so does the sense of self. When the brain stops being a brain, the sense of self goes away. None of this is a problem for science.

The fact that you want to believe in something else is fine, but you can't impose these beliefs on materialism as a means of disproving it. Materialism isn't wrong because it fails to explain your beliefs; that's just begging the question.

 

[JayUtah]

- H is the popular scientific hypothesis about that identity that we (and they) experience --

Not "popular," but "prevailing." It prevails because it answers the most observation with the least effort. You can provide no observation it can't answer. This is why you have to resort to imagining things and trying to make H responsible for your imagination.

...and that so many of us suspect is more than mortal.

Your suspicion doesn't give rise to something H has to account for. You suspect your sense of identity is caused by a soul that persists after death. You're trying to make that sense of identity, E, include your proposed explanation and make H attempt to account for that explanation. H has its own explanation that doesn't require or allow for souls.

Your chosen method of falsifying H -- asserting P(E|H) is very small -- requires you to evaluate H as it is, and E without your fanciful suspicions and additions. To date you can't seem to figure out that this is what you need to do. You admitted you didn't know how that formula worked. Your critics saw this long before you admitted it. It's time to given them their due.

H is not the reasoning behind the hypothesis.

Nonsense. H is a hypothesis to explain data, an event, E. The reasoning behind the hypothesis is crucial to describing how that explanation works. I have no idea where you're getting these wonky concepts, but you should probably stop trying to cram words into your critics' mouths. It has never worked.

 

[John Jones]

Mark,
- To me, it's obvious that by "we," scientists are referring to what we would call our "sense of self" or" identity." Most scientists seem to believe that everything is physical, including our identities, so they don't think that such identities can exist more than once, apiece. OOFLam is their hypothesis about our experience of identity that so many people think is non-physical and even returnable.

Citation in comtext or its another lie.

 

[Belz...]

- H is the popular scientific hypothesis about that identity that we (and they) experience

No it isn't. It's the current conclusion based on the entirety of human experience, ever.

Stop trying to redefine terms to help your cause. You fail every time to distract us with it.

 

[JayUtah]

I am shocked. SHOCKED! that Jabba ignored your analysis of his reference...

And he will continue to ignore it because he has a history of not reading his sources. In the Shroud thread he had a habit of referring to long lists of arguments or "scientific" conclusions put together by other people. He could never get more than one or two items into the list before being having to abandon it. His critics read and understood the source material and could therefore argue competently against it. Jabba had not. He had expected everyone to be dutifully impressed by walls o' text or walls o' citations assembled by others, conclude that it probably said what he characterized it as saying, and that it was probably unassailable.

I have called Jabba's bluff on this sort of tactic every time. And he will just keep pretending otherwise.

 

[Filippo Lippi]

I suppose it's easier to twist the words of imaginary scientists so that they agree with you than it is to twist the words and intentions of real people participating in the thread.

 

[JayUtah]

I suppose it's easier to twist the words of imaginary scientists so that they agree with you than it is to twist the words and intentions of real people participating in the thread.

Of course. Why do you think he has to write his "maps," his fictionalized accounts of how debates with him go? The other characters in the drama he's trying to write, starring himself as the holistic Jedi master of Effective Debate, don't seem to be following his script. So he has to refer to a Greek chorus of unnamed offstage scientists to move his plot along.

 

[Hokulele]

- H is the popular scientific hypothesis about that identity that we (and they) experience -- and that so many of us suspect is more than mortal. H is not the reasoning behind the hypothesis.

And under H, it is not a thing.

Certainly not a soul.

 

[Waterman]

Waterman,
#1. I would argue that anecdotes do constitute evidence -- it's their relative strength that's the issue. I would then argue that the University of Virginia Division of Perceptual Studies has done exactly what a research organization should do in trying to evaluate anecdotal strength.

This is a fundamental disagreement in many of the longer threads here. Anecdotes by their very nature can only be used to evaluate the characteristics of a set of beliefs or potential avenues of further study. They cannot be used to assess the truth value of any claim because the events they describe cannot be independently evaluated or repeated. Plus they often are filtered through the peoples perceptions based on a desired conclusion by the person reporting it. UFOs and Bigfoot are other examples where this is common practice.

#2. Sorry, but I have very little 'tilt' in regard to this area -- other than what I've already tilted...

OK… but memories of a past life as a critter could explain the ‘furry’ phenomenon.

 

[JayUtah]

They cannot be used to assess the truth value of any claim because the events they describe cannot be independently evaluated or repeated.

The body of research pointed to -- but evidently unread -- by Jabba purports cursory efforts to validate some of the anecdotes that form the basis of their evidence, some 2,500 at the writing of many of the papers. These efforts fall generally into two categories: statistical integrity and external verification.

The statistical methods seem superficially impressive but are entirely unprobative. The quantizations upon which the analyses are based are essentially ad hoc. They are based on prior art conducted only by Stevenson and lacking any universal validation in the field or use outside his own research. They are applied to samples either blatantly biased or entirely uncontrolled. The conclusions drawn from these analyses purport strength based on such things as consistency over time, or correlations to events whose purported relevance is unclear. The unspoken nulls in these studies would be such notions as detectable changes in the way reincarnation claims are presented. The unspoken assumption is that if the claims had no factual basis, they would change markedly in character from generation to generation.

Similarly for external verification, other studies in this group purport to eliminate potential sources of false credit for the past-life information. However, we find that the purported empirical control is not at all based on external objective fact, but upon testimonial data from sources the researchers simply accept as above reproach. These sources are in almost all cases parents and relatives of the subjects.

Plus they often are filtered through the peoples perceptions based on a desired conclusion by the person reporting it.

The overwhelming majority of subject pools from this body of research come from Eastern countries were reincarnation is a common belief and a desirable aspect of the societal structure. The assumption that testimonial evidence would be unbiased is unsupported. While the authors undertook one study to attempt to correlate the "strength" of the anecdotal evidence to social factors, the study inexplicably considered only internal consistency factors as the dependent variable. What it showed, in effect, was that reincarnation anecdotes coming from a cultural context that favored reincarnation tended to have a high degree of consistency among themselves, as the authors chose to measure consistency. In much of their research they consider consistency synonymous with strength.

As I summed up my comprehensive analysis of Jabba's purported evidence, what we have here is a large body of self-contained, self-referential pseudo-science. While it will fool non-scientists, it is clear there is no actual science being done. It is an exercise evidently designed to convey the semblance of rigor without achieving it. The responses of the researchers to well-founded criticism is especially telling: their answers often boil down to, "Shut up, we know what we're doing."

 

[sackett]

This is the thread where we repeat ourselves (following the example of the immortal Jabba), so I'll repeat this:

Jabba, have you really thought through the implications of immortality? Do you genuinely and truly, as an adult, not as your 14-year-old self, want to exist forever? Didn't your priest manage to scare you by lecturing on the awfulness of eternity?

I predict that you won't respond to this, but maybe, conceivably, you will at least reflect maturely on the unendurable horror of eternal existence.

Time's getting short for you and me, Jabba. Which of us enjoys greater peace of mind, I wonder?

 

[godless dave]

We now have the ludicrous situation that Jabba is trying to prove that immortal souls exist in order to use Bayesian statistics to prove that immortal souls exist.

I think Jabba wants us to accept that souls exist, and then he will use Bayesian statistics to prove that they are immortal.

 

[JayUtah]

I think Jabba wants us to accept that souls exist, and then he will use Bayesian statistics to prove that they are immortal.

That assessment is consistent with a number of statements he's made. But to fully appreciate them you have to frame them in his various fallbacks and false dilemmas.

He said he could "essentially" (now "virtually") prove immortality using Bayesian inference. He quickly turned that around into falsifying materialism. He admits this doesn't get him to immortality, but his rationale was that immortality would require an immaterial component. We stipulated. If materialism is true, there can be no immortality. If materialism is false, then there might be an immaterial component to life. That component is a necessary premise to his primary proposition.

At some point, he admitted he could not prove immortality. He asked if he could merely prove immateriality instead.

He doesn't understand the principle of converting the conditional. "Convert" in this case means to render the converse, not to transform. If materialism is true then there can be no soul. "Converting" that into saying if materialism is false then there must be a soul, is that fallacy. Jabba sort of concedes this. He tries to equivocate the lack of falsification to some sort of affirmative "support." Sadly that is the essence of the fallacy. There is no "support" for an otherwise unevidenced affirmative claim in the mere failure of some line of reasoning to refute it.

 

[carlitos]

....... scientists ....... OOFLam is their hypothesis