Cont: Proof of Immortality, V for Very long discussion

[JayUtah]

You can't just make up numbers and then use them to justify your made up numbers.

This is how most people misuse Bayes when they want to suggest it supports their subjective beliefs.

This is the short version of the degrees-of-freedom essay I wrote some time ago. Bayes, like any model, provides various "knobs" you can turn to affect the output. The number of knobs you can turn speculatively is the number of "degrees of freedom" in the model. The number of knobs you have to set to accommodate the real world subtract from your degrees of freedom. Overconstrained models don't let you fiddle with enough knobs to produce anything but the one answer. Underconstrained models don't predict reality because you can fiddled with too many knobs; the model is grounded in enough reality to produce useful results.

Jabba is essentially trying to fiddle with all the knobs. He wants to be able to make up essentially all the values in the model and then purport that the model describes reality.

 

[Pixel42]

I'm just never going to get a fair hearing here.

You've had a very fair hearing here, evidenced by the fact that there are still people patiently explaining where you're going wrong after nearly 5 years of being rudely ignored.

I sincerely doubt that I'll ever convince any of you guys that I have a reasonable case...

Of course you won't. That's because you don't have a reasonable case, as has been patiently explained to you literally dozens of times.

 

[Jabba]

First of all, you're making up your own prior probability without first showing that anything different from materialism is ever possible, let alone reasonable.

Second, you resort to the fallacy of popularity. The fact that some or even most people believe something is not evidence of its truth. The world isn't flat and it's not the center of the universe.

Last, by assigning any prior probability to immateriality, you are claiming something. You're claiming that materialism might be incorrect. But you're doing it without any evidence. You can't just make up numbers and then use them to justify your made up numbers.

LL,
- There is plenty of evidence -- it's the weight of the evidence that you guys dismiss. Also, there are plenty of intelligent, well-educated people who disagree with your appraisal. Might you guys be biased?

 

[JayUtah]

I'm developing my map...

Irrelevant to my point. It's consummately unfriendly for you to tell someone you don't have time for his argument when you're spending time repacking the debate for your own benefit. If you have time to rewrite this argument to soothe your ego, you have time to address the people who are participating in it. No excuses, Jabba.

for the sake of getting a mixed audience for my jury -- and consequently, getting a fair hearing...

Nothing you've done here provides evidence that you're looking for a fair hearing. Nothing you've presented provides evidence you aren't getting a fair hearing here. I propose that you simply don't like being proven wrong, and you're taking steps to assuage the emotional impact of it. Recall that you admitted a very strong emotional investment in achieving your proof. You have an emotional stake in the outcome of this debate. Given that admission, are you really going to argue that your critics have been biased and unfair to you? Is that really where the evidence points?

Currently, my jury consists of maybe 50 devoted skeptics -- and, I'm just never going to get a fair hearing here.

You provide no evidence that you're not getting a fair hearing here. In fact, all the evidence points to your "map" as nothing more than a method for you to ensure that your critics don't get a fair hearing. When you did this before, you liberally misrepresented your critics, admitted that you had done so, solicited corrections, and then never made them. You are proven not to be a trustworthy reporter and editor.

I sincerely doubt that I'll ever convince any of you guys that I have a reasonable case...

You don't have a reasonable claim, and this is not the only forum you've consulted that has patiently shown you why you don't. Further, this is not the only forum that has noted you aren't interested in a fair hearing, but apparently only a pulpit from which you can hear yourself speak. Since ample evidence plus your own admissions support the accusation that you simply ignore what your critics say, there doesn't seem to be much evidence to support the hypothesis that you will be a particularly well-informed and impartial reporter. You aren't an authority on whether you have a reasonable case. You aren't an authority on whether your case has been effectively or fairly refuted.

As I wrote above, the time is now passed when you can just blame your critics for you not having a convincing argument.

That's my story, and I'm stickin to it!

No evidence supports your story.

 

[Belz...]

- Yeah.

Don't you see the problem with your calculation of probability, then? If drawing cards from a deck in a particular order is both entirely mundane and monstrously improbable, then your 7 billion over infinity claim is not indicative of anything supernatural or scientifically problematic.

 

[Belz...]

- There is plenty of evidence -- it's the weight of the evidence that you guys dismiss.

No, no there IS no evidence. If there were you would've presented it already. When pressed for evidence you change the subject.

I'm developing my map for the sake of getting a mixed audience for my jury -- and consequently, getting a fair hearing...

Please, Jabba. You're developing your map for the sake of presenting this discussion in a way that favours you. How is that fair?

 

[godless dave]

When pressed for evidence you change the subject.

That's not entirely true. Once Jabba linked to the Amazon page for a book of unverified anecdotes of out of body experiences, and another time he linked to a website of unverified anecdotes of people remembering past lives.

 

[JayUtah]

There is plenty of evidence --

No. You don't know what constitutes evidence.

it's the weight of the evidence that you guys dismiss.

No, it's its validity. When you provided the NDE evidence, we delved into it and showed how it is scientifically untenable. It appeared you had done nothing like that before posting it. When you provided reincarnation evidence, I dissected it point by point, listing its methodological and other scientific errors. You didn't even acknowledge the analysis, much less deign to respond to it. Once again it appears you had not actually looked at the evidence you provided.

You are not an authority on why your critics reject your evidence. You simply threw a lot of mud against the wall, hoping some of it would stick just out of sheer quantity. You tried this same shameful "wall of citations bibliography" stunt in the Shroud thread and it didn't work there either. What your critics here demonstrate beyond any doubt is their willingness to actually read and consider your evidence when you won't.

Also, there are plenty of intelligent, well-educated people who disagree with your appraisal.

Name three.

Might you guys be biased?

That's for you to prove, if you can. You haven't show any evidence of bias on our part. You're just throwing out the accusation because the course of the argument seems to be in one of its "desperate" phases. Let's hope the veiled accusations pass quickly so we can get you focused back on your claims.

Might you be biased? Let's look at the evidence. Your argument consistently insinuates the deficiency of your critics. You tell people ahead of time that you're going to go teach those godless atheist skeptics a thing or two. You admit you have a strong emotional stake in the belief that you can construct a mathematical proof for immortality. I have accused you of bias. I have provided the evidence that supports my accusation. Answer it.

 

[Loss Leader]

- Currently, my jury consists of maybe 50 devoted skeptics

Is there any reason to believe that skepticism isn't the right approach to evaluating an idea?

 

[SOdhner]

- And while I still feel sure that there is a flaw in your logic, describing the flaw isn't easy.

Hopefully we can both agree that 'feeling' like there's a flaw and actually identifying a flaw are different in a quite vital way. I think the most important thing if we want to come to an agreement on this is to examine it without a lot of distractions - this is a really mathematical thing so we don't need to muddy the waters with your larger formula to discuss it.

And basically, you're claiming that the likelihood of my current existence under OOFLam is even smaller than what I'm claiming (in the sense that 7 billion over infinity times a positive number, or even times infinity, is smaller than 7 billion over infinity.)

That's not really what I'm saying, but also if we're going to do any math we should avoid using infinity like it's an actual number.

Okay, let's try this again and for the first few questions I would ask that you forget your theory entirely. I don't want you to get distracted by it. Just evaluate the following and tell me which points you do or don't agree with.

1. I have a bag of wooden shapes. There are two squares, and two triangles. The only variable we are working with is the shape, so for a specific result I have a 50% chance of getting it. Right?

2. Okay now one of each shape is painted red. If I am looking for two characteristics (both square AND red) then I've got a 25% chance - that's 50% (square) times 50% (red).

3. Every time I add more criteria on the same thing happens. Adding another thing I'm looking for means I multiply the odds together, and since each of those odds are less than 100% the overall odds must go down.

PLEASE confirm if you agree with the above before we try to apply this to your specific theory. I've been in too many discussions on these forums where people (not you specifically ) sidestep the logic part and then dive right back into their specific theory. Establishing this logic is really vital to having a productive conversation. Okay, assuming you've done that and moving on...

4. Since you are trying to establish that we have an immortal part of ourselves (I'm going to call this a soul because it's easy, I'm not trying to put words into your mouth or anything) by referring to probability, we can't just assume the existence of a soul in all cases. That would make your argument circular.

5. So we have to look at the possibility of a materialistic explanation - no soul. We could make a big list of things about each unique person (brain configuration, DNA, whatever - again I'm not trying to put words in your mouth and the exact physical properties you do or don't count don't really matter for this part) but we don't need to do that here. We know that any one specific configuration is extremely unlikely but not zero.

6. I could write out an actual long number with lots of zeros, but since we're just examining the underlying logic and we both know that in the real world this is some extremely small percentage to make the math and typing easier let's just treat it as 20%. As demonstrated above, the principle here works the same way as long as it's less than 100% chance.

7. Having a soul, on the other hand, would not remove all of the factors above. Meaning, whether or not we have a soul we still have a body with DNA and a particular brain configuration or whatever physical properties.

8. You presumably believe that there's more than one soul we could get, so again getting a specific soul is less than 100% chances. Let's call it 50% just to keep it simple, even though it would presumably be at least one in eight billion or so.

9. Since we need to have both a physical configuration (20%) and a soul (50%) we would multiply those together and get 10%.

10. We can replace those percentages with any number we want (such as 0.0000000000000000000000000000001% or whatever) and as long as they're both less than 100% combining them will make the result smaller.

11. Therefore, the odds of a specific self in a materialistic universe are always going to be greater than the odds of a specific self that also has a soul.


I hope breaking it down step by step was helpful to you.

 

[sackett]

How many legs do you have?

Three.

And now shame on your vulgar, vulgar mind.

 

[The Sparrow]

Don't you see the problem with your calculation of probability, then? If drawing cards from a deck in a particular order is both entirely mundane and monstrously improbable, then your 7 billion over infinity claim is not indicative of anything supernatural or scientifically problematic.

Jabba, what Argumemnon said.

 

[Belz...]

Is there any reason to believe that skepticism isn't the right approach to evaluating an idea?

Well yeah: we're not reaching the same conclusion as jabba. Clearly we're doing something wrong.

 

[Mojo]

Jabba, if someone else existed instead of you, would your argument for immortality be valid if they presented it?

 

[Mojo]

Also, there are plenty of intelligent, well-educated people who disagree with your appraisal.

Name three.

What's the likelihood he says jt512, caveman1917, and Toontown?

 

[JayUtah]

What's the likelihood he says jt512, caveman1917, and Toontown?

Yes, those were the three I expected. Note how Jabba carefully says there are people who disagree with our analysis, equivocating between whether his critics are wrong and he's right. Both jt512 and caveman1917 have said they dispute Jabba's findings. Note how he specifies the criteria as "inteliigent" and "well-educated" without caring about "make cogent arguments."

In any case we'll wait until he names his three. When he made this same argument in the Shroud thread and people asked for specifics, he just linked to the bibliography of some Shroud web site, as if any of those people knew or cared who he was.

 

[Mojo]

Both jt512 and caveman1917 have said they dispute Jabba's findings.

Toontown has also stated that he disagrees with Jabba.

 

[Mojo]

Yes, those were the three I expected. Note how Jabba carefully says there are people who disagree with our analysis, equivocating between whether his critics are wrong and he's right. Both jt512 and caveman1917 have said they dispute Jabba's findings. Note how he specifies the criteria as "inteliigent" and "well-educated" without caring about "make cogent arguments."

In any case we'll wait until he names his three. When he made this same argument in the Shroud thread and people asked for specifics, he just linked to the bibliography of some Shroud web site, as if any of those people knew or cared who he was.

It's entirely consistent with the rest of Jabba's arguments: either the cloth is a 14th century forgery or it is the true shroud, if his OOFLam strawman is false he is immortal, if they disagree with us they must agree with him.

 

[Filippo Lippi]

The prize is a place on Jesus's right hand, why would you not take a few shortcuts to the "truth?"

 

[caveman1917]

Jabba,
Please consider very seriously what you are requesting, here.

Your founding premise has been that you can proof yourself immortal using Bayesian statistics. Bayesian statistics has its origin in Bayes' Theorem. Anyone familiar with Bayesian statistics is intimately familiar with Bayes' Theorem.

Even someone who had, let's be polite, forgotten the exact formulation of Bayes' Theorem could still perform the trivial and obvious Google search with the terms "bayes theorem".

I'd have to google the exact formulation. Why would you not forget it? There are much better forms to put Bayesian inference in so as to think about it. My favourite:

Let H_i be the hypotheses and E_i the pieces of evidence considered, both finite sets with cardinality |H| and |E|.
Let Ev_{i, j, k} = P(E_k | H_i} / P(E_k | H_j}
Let Prior_{i, j} = P(H_i) / P(H_j)
Let Post_{i, j} = P(H_i | E) / P(H_j | E) = Prior_{i, j} * Prod_k Ev_{i, j, k}

Then the result of Bayesian inference given a set of hypotheses and pieces of evidence is determined by the set of equations, for all j <= |H|, k <= |E|, i < j
{
Post_{1, 2} = Prior_{1, 2} * Prod_k Ev_{1, 2, k}
Post_{2, 3} = Prior_{2, 3} * Prod_k Ev_{2, 3, k}
...
Post_{i, j} = Prior_{i, j} * Prod_k Ev_{i, j, k}
}

The advantage being that it gets rid of a lot of extra "fluff" you get by using Bayes' theorem in its standard form (like that term you corrected). I also find that it makes useful properties more obvious, such as the Prod terms directly showing the commutativity of the pieces of evidence considered. In other words, if your reasoning relies on the order in which the evidence is given then you've made a mistake.

Furthermore, you can usually set the Prior terms to 1 (assumption of maximum entropy) which makes them drop out in this form, reducing Post_{i, j} to Prod_k Ev_{i, j, k}.

ETA: Sum and Prod are the standard summation and repeated multiplication.