Cont: Proof of Immortality, V for Very long discussion

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Jabba said:
- I assume that no one will volunteer to help me with the map, so I'll just have to review your responses and use what I consider to be the best. I'll plan on continuing my responses here, but use my blog/map as my "murder board."
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It's funny how the beffudled old man routine goes away sometimes, eh?

- If anyone wishes to volunteer, and take the onus off of Jay, I'll be happy to change horses.
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What for? You have made no effort in five years to engage with your critics honestly and with the intention to learn and adapt to reality. Why should any of us bother?
 
JayUtah said:
Not quite true. He explains it, but his explanation assumes something that's not true. When that assumption is made plain to him, he ignores it.



Yes, but let's simplify. You have a fair deck and you shuffle it thoroughly. Now simply turn over the top card.

Now if, ahead of time, you said you'd turn over the three of clubs, and you do, then that's admirably improbable -- p = 1/52. Obviously the probability of any preselected card being at the top of the deck is 1 in 52. What Jabba does, however, is turn over the top card, note that it's the jack of diamonds, exclaim post-draw that it's the card he needed, and marvel at the tremendous luck. The card he needed was whatever card he drew. Some card has to be at the top of the deck. Drawing it establishes the certainty that we'll be talking about some card. The probability that some card will appear is 1.

(We could here talk about an infinite number of "potential" cards, but that would drive us to drink.)

Now here's Jabba's false dilemma expressed in casino terms. Take the fair, shuffled deck. Preselect a card -- as before, the three of clubs. But instead of turning over the top card, draw one from the middle of the deck. It's the nine of spades. Since you didn't draw the preselected card from the middle of the deck, the preselected card "must" be the top card. Right?

In card terms the false dilemma is obvious. If you want to know what the top card is, just draw the top card. You can't infer what one hidden card "must" be just because you know what one other one is. Yet that sort of inference is at the heart of most fringe claims.

Here's how Jabba hides it in his formulation.

Take the proposition "People are immortal." The converse of that is that "People are not immortal," of which one possible condition is that "People have at most one finite life." Jabba formulates immortality as ~H (i.e., "not" some other condition), and that other condition as H, meaning "one finite life." That formulation requires that the union H∪~H is the universe -- all possible conditions. In probability, it means that P(H) + P(~H) = 1. If you can know either P(H) or P(~H), you can compute the other.

Arbitrarily say that P(H) is very small. That's what Jabba does. From that it follows inevitably that P(~H) must be very large, to take us up to 1. The equivocation central to the false dilemma is what ~H exactly is. If ~H is Jabba's singular propostion, then H must be every other proposition. But in determining P(H), Jabba only considered one proposition -- materialism. It's as if he drew only one card from the middle of the deck and proposed that it should represent all the rest of the deck except the top card.

If, on the other hand, H is materialism, then ~H must be the set of all conditions -- hypotheses -- that aren't materialism. And not all of those will lead to immortality. P(~H) may indeed be very large, but Jabba's desired probability really comes from some unknown subset of ~H.

So his argument constantly equivocates between whether H or ~H is the singular, elemental hypothesis, just as the card-deck example flip-flops between whether we're drawing the top card or some other card as the singular card we're going to discuss. You'll notice him variously redefining H and ~H throughout the debate as his critics corner him.

Then there's the notion of preselection, which is what you were really trying to get at. You are just as likely to be dealt a royal flush of spades as you are any other hand. The only reason you have to stifle your tells when dealt a good hand is that we've preselected those hands arbitrarily to have special significance. Jabba doesn't preselect. As you've noticed, he considers himself (or, variously, all seven billion living people) the "target." He doesn't seem to get how that's still the Texas sharpshooter fallacy.

He pulled the same stunt in the Shroud of Turin debate. He tried to Bayes his way through a false dilemma between "Shroud is the burial cloth of Jesus" and "Shroud is a medieval forgery." It was just as amusing back then as it is now. He was trying to argue that the "event" of having stone dust on a piece of cloth that's spent hundreds of years in medieval and modern Europe, in stone buildings, was more probably explained by the cloth having spent a night in Jesus' tomb.
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Jay, I'm going to install a program on my computer to auto-nominate your posts from now on. A great post, as usual.
 
Jabba,

You are way ahead of yourself. If order for there to be a ‘murder board’ you first have to have evidence of a murder. You have looked in the window and seen a red stain on the carpet and have jumped to looking for murder suspects. You haven’t even established that there has been a crime! You haven’t produced a body or established that the stain is actually blood and not wine or paint or human.

In a cop show ‘model’ that you are invoking, a dead body is located. The all indicators are that the death is due to natural causes. However the hero notices a bit of evidence which leads them to dig further and uncover the mystery. Without that bit if evidence there is no case no mystery and no murder board.

What evidence (not speculation or wishful thinking) do you have that indicates that the current scientific consensus is insufficient to explain the self as an emergent property of a functioning healthy human brain?

A ‘hinky feeling’ doesn’t count.
 
There isn't even a red stain on the carpet, there is only Jabba's burning need for there to have been a "murder.."
 
Waterman said:
Jabba,

You are way ahead of yourself. If order for there to be a ‘murder board’ you first have to have evidence of a murder. You have looked in the window and seen a red stain on the carpet and have jumped to looking for murder suspects. You haven’t even established that there has been a crime! You haven’t produced a body or established that the stain is actually blood and not wine or paint or human.

In a cop show ‘model’ that you are invoking, a dead body is located. The all indicators are that the death is due to natural causes. However the hero notices a bit of evidence which leads them to dig further and uncover the mystery. Without that bit if evidence there is no case no mystery and no murder board.

What evidence (not speculation or wishful thinking) do you have that indicates that the current scientific consensus is insufficient to explain the self as an emergent property of a functioning healthy human brain?
A ‘hinky feeling’ doesn’t count.
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Waterman,
- I guess that logic could be termed "speculation," but my claim is that my current logic/speculation (that given that I am, in fact, a legitimate "target," my current existence is significant evidence that I am immortal) is correct, and not wishful thinking.
 
Filippo Lippi said:
There isn't even a red stain on the carpet, there is only Jabba's burning need for there to have been a "murder.."
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"I can't find my girlfriend. When I got home the kids were gone and all her furniture had been removed. There was no sign of struggle, but I'm convinced that someone killed her and the kids, and specifically stole only her stuff."
 
Jabba said:
Waterman,
- I guess that logic could be termed "speculation," but my claim is that my current logic/speculation (that given that I am, in fact, a legitimate "target," my current existence is significant evidence that I am immortal) is correct, and not wishful thinking.
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"I think I'm right" is not an argument, nor is it evidence for your claim.
 
Jabba said:
Waterman,
- I guess that logic could be termed "speculation," but my claim is that my current logic/speculation (that given that I am, in fact, a legitimate "target," my current existence is significant evidence that I am immortal) is correct, and not wishful thinking.
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It is, as has been amply demonstrated in this thread, nothing other than wishful thinking.
 
Jabba said:
Waterman,
- I guess that logic could be termed "speculation," but my claim is that my current logic/speculation (that given that I am, in fact, a legitimate "target," my current existence is significant evidence that I am immortal) is correct, and not wishful thinking.
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logic could be termed "speculation"

NO!

See this is why we have struggled over the last several years you can’t even formulate a coherent problem statement.

You are NOT, in fact, a pre-selected target. If order for that to be the case there would have to be a predetermined result available for selection. This is the crux of the TSS Fallacy. A result does NOT imply that it was predetermined or inevitable.

Take for example the path of a GPS enabled rubber duck in a stream. Do we know the path it will take with any certainty? No! But after the fact we can get the GPS data and marvel at the amazingly complex path that is likely never again to be repeated no matter how many GPS ducks follow. That in no way indicated that it was predetermined. To claim that it is special is exactly the TSS and exactly what you are doing.

If the world is a clock-work you could claim to be a legitimate target but still only have a single life span. To imply you are immortal is exactly wishful thinking.

What evidence (NOT SPECULATION or WISHFUL THINKING) do you have that indicates that the current scientific consensus is insufficient to explain the self as an emergent property of a functioning healthy human brain?
 
Jabba said:
I guess that logic could be termed "speculation," but my claim is that my current logic/speculation (that given that I am, in fact, a legitimate "target," my current existence is significant evidence that I am immortal) is correct, and not wishful thinking.
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Your answer is crap, Jabba.

First, you were specifically asked for evidence, not speculation. In response you tried to equivocate "speculation" and conflate it with other concepts. If you have nothing but speculation, and you're asked for something besides speculation, the correct and complete answer would be, "I'm sorry, I don't have what you are asking for." Instead you try to tap-dance around that failure.

Second, you were specifically asked about what you could identity as a deficiency in scientific materialism. You didn't address materialism at all; you just reasserted your statement of belief in a contrary conclusion. Proof that something is false or incomplete doesn't come in the form of your fervent desire to believe in something else. That's denial, not proof.

Third, you once again committed the Texas sharpshooter fallacy, and -- as usual -- didn't address the fallacy except to say that you don't think it should be a fallacy. This is one of several fatal flaws I identified in your argument. If your argument is built around a blatant fallacy, it fails. That's how arguments work.

Very shameful, Jabba. You owe Waterman an answer to the question he actually asked. Something besides simply repeating your beliefs for the thousandth time and committing the same old errors you've been committing for years. As I have said before, the question of whether your proof is valid has been settled long ago. You are simply in long-standing denial. So the question becomes, under these circumstances, why any serious person should waste his time trying to debate you? Can you please address that? After all these years of ongoing failure, what do you have left to offer? Waterman gave you the opportunity to go into that, and you gave us this disgrace.
 
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