Cont: Proof of Immortality, V for Very long discussion

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- It has been argued to me ad nauseum. I haven't nswered ad nauseum -- but I have answered more than once.

The Texas Sharpshooter drew the circles after the shots were fired. Just as you are after you were born. You are using fallacious reasoning.

Any questions?
 
Can anyone understand what Jabba means by the term 'Under the Texas Sharpshooter, we are all targets'.

It's like he doesn't understand the concept of logical fallacies, and just parrots terms he's heard before.

//Slight hijack//

I've argued a few times that skeptics and rationalist did themselves, and argumentatives in general, a disservice by how they used logical fallacies in arguments for so long and sort of created a monster.

As soon as arguing on the internet became a thing pointing out logical fallacies became common but it soon reached a point, and one could argue we're still at the point, that the most common way of using them in the argument was simply to quote to argument in question and respond with a throwaway comment that only pointed out what logical fallacy was used, as often as not literally just responding with the name of the logical fallacy used and nothing else, no explanation of why or how the logical fallacy was used.

It's not surprising given that that the people who have a... let's be charitable and call it a unique relationship with how to properly form an argument started to simply see logical fallacies as magic words to invoke when you're losing an argument.
 
...but, they are still meaningful.

No. Every time you're asked in what way are they meaningful, you have to beg the question. The only way in which there exist potential selves is exactly the way in which there exists potential Volkswagens or potential anythings. When you try to slice selves free of that, you beg the question that a potential self is somehow magically different than every other object's potential.

One way to try to begin to describe them is to say that they are represented by every combination of every past sperm cell that ever existed and every past ovum that ever existed.

And throwing more newly minted language at the problem doesn't solve it, Jabba.
 
- It has been argued to me ad nauseum. I haven't nswered ad nauseum -- but I have answered more than once.

And your answer is always to try to claim that the Texas sharpshooter fallacy isn't a fallacy. Denial isn't an answer, no matter how many times you do or don't give it. The reason the subject comes up repeatedly is in the hope you will have some answer that isn't just yet another foist.
 
- Potential selves aren't even processes -- they are potential processes -- but, they are still meaningful. One way to try to begin to describe them is to say that they are represented by every combination of every past sperm cell that ever existed and every past ovum that ever existed.

Potential things aren’t THINGS they are merely potentials. As such they not countable. Processes aren’t things that can be counted. Any attempt to do so is folly. How many ‘dancings’ can there be? How many ‘errands’ are there? How many ‘potential meals’ are there?

As to counting all that ever existed… Can I count a roasted dodo bird leg and some bok-choy from 3rd century BC china and a potato from South America that will be ripe <in> 10 years with a Stout from my local brewery as a potential meal? Can I claim infinity potential meals too and conclude each meal is somehow ‘special’ in a non-mundane way? Even if it is chicken, tater tots and green beans.
 
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- If I understand what you're saying, you're talking about Bayesian inference. Bayes takes something that has happened and estimates its likelihood to have happened given a specific hypothesis...


You are simply wrong. Something that has happened has a likelihood of 1. Bayesian inference can help determine the likelihood of various hypotheses, but not the likelihood of the actual event. This is what multiple people have tried to get across to you, but you just aren't listening, or do not understand, or simply do not realize just how wrong you were to begin with.
 
Originally Posted by Waterman
...False and this has been explained to you ad nauseum. TEXAS SHARPSHOOTER is the name for a logical fallacy. It is claiming amazing precision when the target is undefined...

- It has been argued to me ad nauseum. I haven't nswered ad nauseum -- but I have answered more than once.

You have denied it without plausible support other than incredulity.

In order for something to be a legitimate ‘target’ it must be predetermined by the one ‘shooting’. The scientific consensus is that there are no targets and no shooter, what occurs is what results from the combination of the biology and experience.

In your scenario there must be a pre-determined target and a shooter. Are you claiming that there was a 'Jabba Bucket' on the shelf (a potential ‘self’) that that someone ‘chose’ to bring into existence?
 
I'm looking forward to Jabba taking his honest debate to his own website and then "forgetting" how to authorise posts that are critical of his arguments and his modus operandi, because he did that before.
 
- I just think that we're heading for a bunch of dead ends, and I want to map them for us -- and for others -- to see.


Jabba, the reason that you repeatedly head into dead ends is that you keep on repeating the same arguments that you have already seen demolished. The dead ends are already mapped out, repeatedly, in this forum for everyone to see.
 
The previous "map" you tried to write up about one of these debates was a blatant lie. You were finally persuaded to withdraw it on those grounds. What assurances do you offer that this latest will not be just another blatant lie?

<-- snipped for brevity -->

Jabba agreed to withdraw his map? Shucks, I missed that. Can anyone point me to it, if it's not too much trouble?

By the way, I ran across this by accident.

It's Jabba giving his "virtually proving immortality through Bayesian statistics" spiel at a statistics forum in early 2015, and people, it ain't pretty.

Among other things, they point out a mistake I don't recall Jabba making in this thread. Possibly he did take away one lesson.

Has anyone seen and/or linked to this before?
 
Jabba agreed to withdraw his map? Shucks, I missed that. Can anyone point me to it, if it's not too much trouble?

By the way, I ran across this by accident.

It's Jabba giving his "virtually proving immortality through Bayesian statistics" spiel at a statistics forum in early 2015, and people, it ain't pretty.

Among other things, they point out a mistake I don't recall Jabba making in this thread. Possibly he did take away one lesson.

Has anyone seen and/or linked to this before?

It's deja vu. He keeps getting clobbered over there, but keeps promising "I'll be back".

To answer your question, I haven't seen that before.
 
Jabba agreed to withdraw his map? Shucks, I missed that. Can anyone point me to it, if it's not too much trouble?

I'm sorry; I was unclear. The "map" he put together for his debate on the Shroud of Turin (thread q.v.) was at shrouddebates.com, which is now obviously defunct. Too many people complained about being misrepresented, and he claimed he was unable to keep up with the revisions necessary to make it accurate.

By the way, I ran across this by accident.

Jabba has presented his proof to several statisticians, including academics of his own choosing. So far they've all told him he's wrong. We don't hear too much about them anymore in the thread. Jabba is trying very hard to maintain the illusion that people don't accept his argument only because they don't understand it. Clearly the professional statisticians he has consulted can't be accused of that, so now they simply no longer exist in the Jabbaverse.
 
...
You are still mixing up the relationship between the prior probability and post probability. If I roll a die and a number 6 comes up. The prior probability of the number rolled is 1:n based on the number of sides. What is the probability that once the die is rolled and reads 6 what is the probability that the number actually is a 6. 1:1 You can see the 6. How does the number of sides on the die effect that probability that you are now currently looking at a 6...
- If I understand what you're saying, you're talking about Bayesian inference. Bayes takes something that has happened and estimates its likelihood to have happened given a specific hypothesis...

<sigh> Ok let me admit that I am not an expert on Bayes Theory but I have learned a lot by reading this thread. You are misunderstanding a fundamental principal here.

Bayes takes something that has happened and estimates THE likelihood OF FUTURE EVENTS given a specific hypothesis...
It looks forward from known data and established probabilities for future events. It does not look backwards to establish probabilities of events that have already happened. I will defer to the resident experts if I have mischaracterized this.
Waterman,
- It looks backwards to establish the probability of an hypothesis, given that a certain event has occurred. We're not trying to establish the probability of an event; we're trying to establish the probability of the hypothesis, given new information.
 
- I don't think I'm in a corner -- IMO, you guys either aren't listening, aren't understanding or realize that it's you who's in the corner...

Sheer delusion.

- If I can get a mixed participation on my website, we might get a better indication of who is in the corner.

Yeah if you get people who believe in souls they might be more willing to agree with you. That's why coming here, given your unwillingness to learn, was a stupid move.
 
Waterman,
- It looks backwards to establish the probability of an hypothesis, given that a certain event has occurred. We're not trying to establish the probability of an event; we're trying to establish the probability of the hypothesis, given new information.


And this is the root of where you go wrong. There is no new information between your H and ~H. P(E)=1, regardless of how you got here. There is no way to tell which of your choices is more or less probable, simply based on the observation of your existence. You can believe H is wrong with all your blessed little heart, but that won't change the math.
 
Waterman,
- It looks backwards to establish the probability of an hypothesis, given that a certain event has occurred.

Nope, try again. It determines the probability of a hypothesis relative to another hypothesis, given that a certain event has happened.

E is our data, our event. It is that you exist and have a sense of self. H is the materialist hypothesis that E is an emergent property of the organism. ~H is all other hypotheses that aren't materialism. You wrongly believe ~H to be "immortality." But as so many statisticians have told you, ~H is not a single hypothesis. It is a set of hypotheses, not all of which can be true -- in fact, only one of which can be true -- and which don't all lead to immortality.

Two answers come out of Bayes: P(H|E) and P(~H|E). While these must sum to one, you wrongly consider P(~H|E) to be the probability that you have an immortal soul, given that you exist and have a sense of self. That is wrong. The probability of a specific claim like that is P(K|E), where K is one of the individual hypotheses that isn't materialism. K is a member of ~H, but it is not all of ~H. You have no basis for claiming P(K|E) is even an appreciably large portion of the vast outcomes you calculate must be ~H. You arrive at the conclusion that P(H|E) is very, very small, but you never compute P(K|E). You just assume it must be very large because it comes from a very large set. In fact it could be even smaller than P(H|E), but you wouldn't know that because you didn't compute it.

We know you know this.

There was a time when this lesson sank in, at least partially. There was a time when you took a stab at trying to formulate P(K|E) and P(L|E) and P(M|E) and basically all the individual, contradictory hypotheses that together make up the set ~H. But because you don't fundamentally understand how Bayesian inference works, you couldn't figure out how to formulate the model of all those individual theories. So in true fringe fashion, you just ignored it and simplified the problem down to where it fit your understanding whether that resulted in a correct model or not.

But wait, there's more. Bayes' theorem is not the only statistical relationship that holds here. We know P(K|E) must be smaller than P(H|E) because it requires everything that H provides, plus more -- that soul, and its ability to hook up with a particular body. We proved earlier that such a hypothesis K can never be more probable than H if it subsumes H. It can ever only be just as probable.

We know you know this.

Sadly, just at the point where you exhausted all your equivocations and variable-switching and realized your critics had you "dead to rights," you sent Befuddled Old Man out to apologize for not understanding. And just like that you excused yourself from responsibility for discussing it further.

See, here's the problem with that. A few days ago you said that the reason you couldn't make headway in this debate is because your critics just didn't understand what you were trying to claim. But you can't hold that position and then also put on Befuddled Old Man's costume and apologize for your shortcomings in a folksy, disarming manner as a means of cutting off a debate you're losing. If you're going to play at being confused or befuddled, you don't get to tell your critics they're the ones who don't understand or the ones who are being discourteous.

Admitting you don't understand your critics' rebuttals doesn't mean they aren't true and doesn't mean they don't refute your claims. It means you lose the debate and have no one to blame but yourself.

We're not trying to establish the probability of an event; we're trying to establish the probability of the hypothesis, given new information.

Except that in your formulation E isn't new information. You reckon P(E|H) as if E were assumed to be improbable before it happened.
 
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