I'd actually really like to see this one answered. If any potential self could make the same argument, doesn't it invalidate this whole line of reasoning?
Cont: Proof of Immortality, V for Very long discussion
- Thread starter Dancing David
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I'd actually really like to see this one answered. If any potential self could make the same argument, doesn't it invalidate this whole line of reasoning?
I've read this probably ten times. I cannot figure it out. Why are you introducing a ham sandwich into a conversation about no ham sandwich?
Mojo
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John Jones
Penultimate Amazing
OMFG! If there has ever been a more ironic statement in the history of the internet, it must have been made by Jabba.
jsfisher
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Right, and misunderstandings and mistakes should to be treated with disdain and ridicule because that is the key to effective communication.
Be that as it may, this is an aside to the thread topic, so I will stop here lest it grow into a full derail.
caveman1917
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The key to effective communication is to use precise argumentation and some level of formalization. Refusal to do such should definitely be met with disdain. If such refusal is then also coupled with incorrigibility, even despite careful refutation, then ridicule is indeed an option. After all, if it doesn't respond to refutation then you can at least have some fun with it.
@Jabba
Define body* to be the human body but without the left leg. Let X be all the factors that have to be true for a specific existence in a body* universe, ie (specific head) * (specific torso) * (specific arms) etc. Then the probability for your existence including your left leg is X * Y < X, with Y < 1 because there are many specific left legs that you could have.
Do you agree that your existence with a left leg is thus less likely than your existence without a left leg?
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Jabba
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SOdhner,I'm suggesting that you're suggesting that.
If souls exist, that would be one of the variables that give you a big number of "potential selves". If they don't exist, obviously they wouldn't be.
While I don't think that your specific unlikeliness to exist is a good argument for anything, the fact remains that if we do choose to use how unlikely a specific set of characteristics is as our basis you should note that your particular 'self' existing is actually more likely in a materialistic universe.
- This is sort of exciting. For the moment, I think I'm on your page -- I think that I understand your question and know where you're coming from. If so ... I'm not sure that I have a good answer (it's complicated)... I think that I do, but at this point, I'm not sure...
- But, I'll be back.
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
Standard Jabba brush-off #26: "It's complicated."
While you mull that over, take a crack at any of the several dozen other rebuttals that have been posted recently.
Filippo Lippi
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Best man in the fight
jond
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And yet, the whole point is that it is very simple: under H, your brain is all that is required for the existence of your self. And under not ~H you still have to account for your brain, and you need to account for the soul connecting with your brain. It is not possible for your ~H to be more likely than H.
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
"It's complicated" and "There's more to it than that" are the typical ways Jabba has brushed off this very simple concept. If there is a plethora of souls vying in a lottery to be incarnated, then the chance of a body getting a particular soul is clearly less than 1. And from the soul's perspective, there is a less-than-one chance that it will get a body -- any body. (We surmise that, in Jabba's model, the number of present souls exceeds the number of bodies that will arise to receive them.) So no matter how you slice it, the probability of a certain self (i.e., unique composition of body and soul) is always less than the probability merely of a certain body. Under H, the body alone determines self. Under Jabba's model of immortality, the body and soul together determine self, and that event is necessarily less probable than H.
Jabba fudges this by saying that E is not the self-awareness as an abstract observation, but that E (self-awareness) is the outcome of a composition of body and soul (i.e., what happens under ~H). In order to disguise that he's begging the question, he rewrites the terminology (but not the concept) of his gimmicked E when talking about H. Instead of "soul" he writes "a particular self," then converts the concept of a pool of pre-animate souls (i.e., as under Christianity) into a pseudo-mathematical concept of "potential selves."
E doesn't include souls, or necessitate anything following from a soul. The self-awareness we call E is merely the observation that self-awareness has occurred, not theories for where it came from or what its underlying nature might be. Since the notion of incarnation is not part of E, but part of Jabba's theory, his theory has to reckon the probability of whatever mechanism he theorizes results in a specific incarnation. Incarnation depends on the generation of a body, which has its own probability irrespective of anything that might later happen or not happen. That generation alone satisfies H. So Jabba's theory starts off immediately with that basic probability, which in his model then combines with the probabilities we guess at in the first paragraph above for how incarnation might happen. This turns out to make incarnation at best only ever as probable as a body, and likely significantly less. Never more.
Jabba probably sees this, which is why he always brushes off this particular argument, stays away from it for a while, then claims later that he answered it when it's inevitably brought up again.
Belz...
Fiend God
If it's too complicated, why don't you answer my simple question: Why do you "assume that there is an infinity of potential souls"?
Mojo
Mostly harmless
Well at this point I think he's acknowledging it, and if he doesn't that's fine but it would raise further questions.
For example, if the immortal soul comes into existence as a result of the physical self he could get out of saying it's an independent variable, BUT it would make the whole thing inconceivably messy - he would be saying that bodies have the power to create souls (which there's no mechanism for) and it makes it almost impossible to justify souls being required in the first place, and depending on when the souls appear you get into a real tangle with identical twins, conjoined twins, kids that are too young to have a soul, etc.
So I think he'll agree that the soul is another variable in the mix, the alternative is actually just as damaging to his theory just in a different way.
jt512
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Dave, write down the sample space for the problem. Is "absence of a soul" an event with positive probability in the sample space?
godless dave
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No. That was my point.
Jabba
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SOdhner & Jond,
- I'm going to address Jond's version of the issue for now, due to its minimalism.
- When I was 14 it occurred to me that the probability of my current existence -- given the one finite life conclusion of science -- was just about zero. That pretty much convinced me that I (and everyone else) must be immortal... And, science was wrong.
- I wasn't able to convince anyone else at the time, but that didn't quell my enthusiasm. Now, I think that I can virtually prove that the scientific conclusion is wrong using Bayesian Statistics -- but I still haven't really convinced anybody...
- Anyway, the "Me" to which I'm alluding is a specific self-awareness that I experience (and, I assume that everyone else experiences), and which I wish to continue. I certainly don't want it to be discontinued forever.
- I accept that for our selves to be immortal, we need that something exist that is not what we would currently call physical. Apparently, we do need a physical organism, and something else. Obviously, something that requires both is less probable than something that requires only one. But that issue, I claim, is covered in the prior probabilities that I've suggested: P(H)=99%, and P(~H)=1%...
- I didn't mean to imply that a specific self requires a specific physical specimen as well as a specific non-physical specimen. That would make my particular existence even less likely (if mathematically possible) under H, and decrease the posterior probability of H -- except that it would be increasing the prior probability of H by an unknown amount...
- Anyway, I think that my answer to the possibility that my existence requires a totally specific physical body as well as some other specific something is so improbable as to have no significant weight in our calculations...
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godless dave
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H doesn't include any non-physical specimen.
jond
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But your specific body/brain do exist. Under H, your brain generates the specific sense of self. You have continually refused to acknowledge the word generate, and it is important. You keep using phrases like "brings with it" which imply that the self is a separate item. Under H, it is not. It is an emergent property of the brain, which means when the brain stops functioning, the emergent property also ceases.
Further, to the numbers: under ~H, your current body still exists. So you need to somehow account for it. Whether your "self" requires your specific brain, or another, only makes your situation worse. Because that makes all the more bodies from which your self has to somehow choose to attach itself. There simply is no getting around it, Jabba. However unlikely your existence, under H it is vastly more likely than ~H.
Pixel42
Schrödinger's cat
We were all making silly mistakes like that at that age, Jabba. There's no shame in it.
There is shame, however, in presenting the same faulty logic to a sceptics board decades later, and then repeating it over and over again for the next 5 years whilst ignoring dozens of patient explanations as to precisely where the faults in it are.
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