Cont: Proof of Immortality, V for Very long discussion

[JayUtah]

I do think that each of us humans involve something (a "process" is a "thing")

"Thing" is an ambiguous word, especially in your hands. You've been trying for months to suggest that a process is an entity, or variously that a property is an entity. They are not. We've asked you nicely to use the precise language we set out, with the precise definitions attached to them. Your ongoing insistence on ambiguity suggests you're trying to hide something.

...that continues to exist after the death of our brains (I assume that other animals do also).

Yes, that is your claim. That's ~H.

If that's true, we must involve something that we don't currently call "physical."

But when reckoning P(E|H) you must assume H is true. It doesn't matter that you believe in, or prefer, ~H. Therefore you don't get to use concepts from ~H. You don't get to use things that would follow if ~H were true. You don't get to attach the concept of a soul to H solely for the purposes of falsifying it, or to E for the purpose of saying H doesn't account for it.

Some day, science may discover such a thing and decide that it is, in fact, "physical"...

Mathematical proofs do not get to rely on "someday." When evaluating materialism, you don't get to speculate in what ways materialism may someday be different than it is now.

Apparently, we humans all experience something that we call "self," or "self awareness."

Yes, that observation is E.

This is what I think is immortal.

Yes that's what you think, but you're assuming that sense of self-awareness is immortal as part of your proof. E does not include any statement about the persistence of the experience of self, or in fact any statement on its dimension or nature of existence. It simply notes that we are each self-aware. You're trying to cram various soul-ish insinuations into E so that you can say H has to account for them, can't, and therefore that P(E|H) must be zero.

I've avoided using the term "soul" as it begs the question of immortality--

Not using it hasn't stopped you from begging the question of immortality. In fact, your statement above, "This is what I think is immortal," does exactly that. If anything, your obfuscations has made it slightly more difficult for a reader to tell that you're begging the question. That is, all your references to E and "self" are pretty much just the Christian concept of a soul. But by not calling it that, you make the reader do extra work to discover that you mean to include soul-like properties in E.

So far, I don't understand why assuming that we all experience this thing would make my argument circular.

What makes your argument circular is tacitly back-dooring the notion that E includes the concept of something like a soul. You seem to be equating "experiences a sense of self" to "has a soul."

 

[theprestige]

You didn't make any relevant argument yet. Again, you have a probability space with events H denoting "we do not have souls" and E denoting "Jabba exists".

H denoting "souls are an unnecessary to the explanation of consciousness", actually.

You're claiming that a universe with souls requires a specific soul to be attached, so which one?

Jabba's.

 

[SOdhner]

you have a probability space with events H denoting "we do not have souls" and E denoting "Jabba exists".

I didn't make that claim.

You're claiming that a universe with souls requires a specific soul to be attached

That wasn't my claim.

 

[abaddon]

I didn't make that claim.



That wasn't my claim.

It would appear that it matters not a whit. Apparently only his claims matter.

 

[caveman1917]

I didn't make that claim.

And I never said you did.

That wasn't my claim.

Sure it is, it's right here:

The universe with souls would also require a specific soul to be attached

So which one is it? Did Jabba get a red soul or a blue soul?

 

[theprestige]

Sure it is, it's right here:

That's Jabba's claim, actually.

So which one is it? Did Jabba get a red soul or a blue soul?

Jabba got whatever soul he observed after he got it.

 

[SOdhner]

Sure it is, it's right here:

Reading comprehension again. I'm not making that claim.

So which one is it? Did Jabba get a red soul or a blue soul?

You're mixing your metaphors a lot there. But to take Jabba (who is a real person and therefore doesn't have a soul) and the colors (which are from an illustrative example you failed to comprehend) out of it, the answer would be that it's just as irrelevant as (but in principle comparable to) what specific physical characteristics someone gets.

 

[caveman1917]

That's Jabba's claim, actually.

There's a name on the quote and it ain't Jabba's.

Jabba got whatever soul he observed after he got it.

So...which one is it? When playing with blocks as a substitute for mathematical argument we wouldn't have been kept waiting after an outcome whether a blue one or a red one was drawn, why are we kept waiting for the answer now? We did observe an outcome as defined in terms of the block-playing experiment, didn't we? It's not possible that we've actually observed an outcome of "having a soul" rather than "having a specific soul", could it? Because that would mean P(square + a colour) = P(square + red) + P(square + blue) = P(square), which one could even get by playing with blocks if one only bothered to do it correctly.

 

[theprestige]

There's a name on the quote and it ain't Jabba's.

It's not my fault you haven't really been following the thread.

So...which one is it? When playing with blocks as a substitute for mathematical argument we wouldn't have been kept waiting after an outcome whether a blue one or a red one was drawn, why are we kept waiting for the answer now?

Because that's how Jabba's argument works.

We did observe an outcome as defined in terms of the block-playing experiment, didn't we? It's not possible that we've actually observed an outcome of "having a soul" rather than "having a specific soul", could it? Because that would mean P(square + a colour) = P(square + red) + P(square + blue) = P(square), which one could even get by playing with blocks if one only bothered to do it correctly.

Since Jabba is not bothering to do it correctly, you should not be surprised that the results are nonsensical.

 

[SOdhner]

So...which one is it? When playing with blocks as a substitute for mathematical argument we wouldn't have been kept waiting after an outcome whether a blue one or a red one was drawn, why are we kept waiting for the answer now?

You've misunderstood literally this whole thing.

It's not possible that we've actually observed an outcome of "having a soul" rather than "having a specific soul", could it?

That was never, at any point, relevant to any part of this.

 

[SOdhner]

And caveman1917, note that while theprestige and I have different responses for you they're actually both correct.

 

[caveman1917]

It's not my fault you haven't really been following the thread.

Since Jabba is not bothering to do it correctly, you should not be surprised that the results are nonsensical.

It's actually Jabba who made an argument about drawing coloured blocks from bags? Can you back this up with a quote?

 

[caveman1917]

You've misunderstood literally this whole thing.

If you think you've been misunderstood, you've been given plenty of opportunities to explain your argument properly, which you've consistently refused.

That was never, at any point, relevant to any part of this.

Really? Well, then we can just substitute "have a soul" for "have a specific soul". Let's do that...

You keep talking about probability, specifically how unlikely it is for your specific 'self' to exist, and you're doing this to prove that there's a form of immortality (or soul, or whatever). Setting aside the problems that others are discussing with you already, can you please address the fact that the odds of a specific 'self' existing in a materialistic universe would actually be greater than the odds of a specific 'self' in a universe with souls?

Both would require a specific set of physical characteristics, with a certain low but non-zero probability.

The universe with souls would also require a specific soul to be attached, which would also have low but non-zero probability have probability 1.

That means the odds would not by definition be lower in the universe with souls.

Oh no, it all falls apart...

Do you have any notion of probability theory, or mathematics in general, which is more than imagining playing with blocks?

 

[theprestige]

It's actually Jabba who made an argument about drawing coloured blocks from bags? Can you back this up with a quote?

I don't need to back it up with a quote. I've been following the thread.

 

[SOdhner]

Well, then we can just substitute "have a soul" for "have a specific soul". Let's do that...

That doesn't make any sense. If your want to act like having anything at all is the point of this rather than having one specific thing out of a larger number of options, you are having an entirely different conversation than the rest of us.

Part of me wants to try to explain this to you in more detail, but the fact is if you had any interest in following the conversation instead of just deciding what we're saying you would have figured it out already.

 

[John Jones]

[...]

Do you have any notion of probability theory, or mathematics in general, which is more than imagining playing with blocks?

I was wondering the same about you.

 

[jsfisher]

Sure was impressive all in red and large font, though, wasn't it? Especially after demanding mathematical precision of others

Luckily, this is not a discussion and not a confrontation, right? So, yeah, meh.

Fine, you want precision....

There is a typo near the end of my post. For that I apologize. The last part was supposed to read, "Luckily, this is not a discussion and not a confrontation, right? So, yeah, meh."

That misplaced "not" wasn't supposed to be there. Its presence completely altered the meaning, which was intended to be a plea that a less aggressive posting style might be more effective. Yes, it was heavily steeped in sarcasm, but still a suggestion for a change in tone.

And, for the absence of doubt, posted not as a mod.

 

[abaddon]

I was wondering the same about you.

We wonder alike. It's almost as if the block analogy passed by unnoticed. I don't get that. It seemed pretty clear to me.

 

[carlitos]

(body) and (body + not soul) are the same thing.

body = body + not soul
=> body + soul = body + not soul + soul

I'm not getting this either. I subtract "body" from both sides of the above equation and I get:

soul = soul + not soul

Putting it another way, life with (not ham sandwich) seems to be the same as regular old life to me. Where am I wrong?

 

[caveman1917]

That doesn't make any sense.

You claimed that it was irrelevant whether the outcome observed was "has a soul" or "has a specific soul". Are you now retracting that claim?

Part of me wants to try to explain this to you in more detail, but the fact is if you had any interest in following the conversation instead of just deciding what we're saying you would have figured it out already.

A: "In experiment 2 the block must be square and a specific colour."
B: "Which specific colour?"
A: "I don't know, either red or blue."
B: "P(square + either red or blue) = P(square + red) + P(square + blue) = P(square) = 50% and not 25%".

I've figured it out just fine, it's you who still has to figure out that unless the observed outcome (Jabba's existence) shows which specific soul he has, like how it shows which specific body he has, your argument fails.

Your block analogy fails because with the blocks we can observe whether the outcome is red or blue. If we can't observe which it is (ie square + red and square + blue are indistinguishable) then what we have is...P(square + red or blue) = P(square) = 50%.

So I'll ask you yet again, which soul was Jabba required to get? Remember, you can't say "I don't know" or "the one he got" or something like that, because that makes your argument fail. You must denote the specific soul, out of the set of possible souls, that Jabba actually was required to get.

Or of course you could just make a proper argument, in the probability space given, and you'd immediately see that (let E1, E2, ..., En be "Jabba exists with soul 1,2, ..., n") the relevant factor is not, as you seem to think, say P(E1 | ~H), but P(E1 u E2 u ... u En | ~H) = P(E | ~H).