Proof of Immortality, VI
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Jabba
Philosopher
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Dave,
- I may have always existed in one form or another...
- I couldn't have known I existed if, and when, I didn't exist (in one form or another).
- If there was a time before I existed, there might as well have been nothing during that time, and if I never existed, there might as well have never been anything.
- But then, I suspect that asking these questions of a human is like asking a chicken for the square roots of 3, and 7, and even 2.
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godless dave
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There's no evidence of that.
From your perspective, which didn't exist yet.
Before you existed there was nothing specifying you as a target. So your existence, when it happened, was not a case of hitting a pre-existing target.
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
You have presented no evidence that you have. But that's what you would have to prove in order to prove your case. Specifically, if you're right now laying out the line of reasoning to support your claim that P(E|H) -- H being materialism -- is very, very small, then you have to show that you always existed according to H. And since materialism doesn't contain the notion of "potential existence" that you're trying so very hard to paste onto it, or any sort of operative pre-existence, that line of reasoning fails fairly quickly.
Solipsism in this case is equivalent to trying to assign meaning not from the sample space but from the outcome space. That's like trying to say there was no such thing as any winning poker hands before you sat down to play, and that the only winning poker hands that count are the ones you make up according to the cards you were dealt.
Once again, if you tried to explain the Texas sharpshooter fallacy in your own words, then perhaps you would understand why your argument quite obviously fails. It's not like there's a legitimate controversy over whether it's valid or not; it's obviously wrong. Are you interested in learning why?
Not at all, because you're trying to obfuscate the problem by ladling it with emotional angst. You told us you were going to supply a mathematical proof for immortality. Mathematics is based on objective laws. Instead we find your "proof" is nothing but a bunch of trumped-up, illogical coffeehouse pseudo-philosophy dressed up to look like math in the vain hope it will escape its clearly religious roots. Do you really think we can't see your "pool of potential selves" as too-thin coat of paint over Christian pre-existence? God sending little souls down from heaven to inhabit the bodies of babies -- but only the lucky ones?
We're not interested in your inability to make cobbled-up gobbledy-gook sound like a cogent argument to engaged critics. If you don't understand the concepts that pertain to your argument, but your critics do, then you are likely to lose the argument. That's how effective debate works. Debate is most effective when it reaches a well-reasoned resolution, which this one has. The rest is just overcoming your admitted emotional entrenchment toward your desired belief in the face of fact.
Belz...
Fiend God
After a fashion. Since "you" are composed of molecules, atoms and elementary particles that have existed since the universe came into being, "you" have always been there (like Kosh). It's the specific configuration that gives rises to the 'mind' that you're talking about, but then it didn't appear from nowhere, did it?
Jabba
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- As I said. I doubt that I can be any more convincing than I already have been.
Though, while I can't expect to convince the opposing lawyer or his colleagues, I still think that a well-educated, but neutral, jury would recognize light at the end of my tunnel.
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Imhotep
Graduate Poster
Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is an oncoming train.
Pixel42
Schrödinger's cat
- As I said. I doubt that I can be any more convincing than I already have been.
A well educated neutral jury would point out the same fatal flaws in your argument that have been pointed out on this thread, and would respond to your failure to address them in exactly the same way as we have. Why on earth you would expect otherwise I cannot imagine.
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
I doubt that I can be any more convincing than I already have.
And you aren't convincing. You have been given specific reasons why your argument is not convincing. These reasons have to do with objective principles of logic and mathematics, upon which your argument is ostensibly based. The reasons, in general, spell out your attempt to rewrite the principles of logic and mathematics in your favor to correspond to what you have freely admitted is subjective, emotionally-dictated belief.
The problem is not with your critics. The problem is your argument and the way you present it. You have presented your findings to academic experts, whom you specifically chose. They told you your argument was wrong. You have presented your findings to self-organized teams of statisticians. They told you your argument was wrong, and gave you the same reasons as you're getting here why your argument was wrong. In addition, they formed the opinion that you were not interested in assessments of the correctness of your proof, but essentially only in hearing yourself talk.
Based on all this data that has absolutely nothing to with ISF, do you really think the most parsimonious explanation for your predicament is that you are still right and that everyone else in the world is just being lawyerly and unfair to you?
Once again you simply insult your critics by suggesting they are biased and (now) poorly-educated. It is doubly-insulting since your critics have been kind enough to present you lists of objectively justified reasons why your argument is not convincing, which you have ignored in favor of your insults.
Belz...
Fiend God
You've been utterly unconvincing, for the reasons stated hundreds of times.
So you, in fact, do not read what people tell you.
RoboTimbo
Hostile Nanobacon
A well-educated and honest claimant would admit that his claim had been soundly refuted and that he was utterly incapable of addressing the refutations.
The Sparrow
Graduate Poster
- As I said. I doubt that I can be any more convincing than I already have been.
They won't.
But.......what if they did?
Do you think that if someone agrees with your claim that will make it true?
Do you think Jay is uneducated?
godless dave
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Then you have nothing. I don't even understand how you are convinced by it. It doesn't even look like an attempt to address what I said, which was:
Godless Dave said:
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JesseCuster
Master Poster
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I don't get it. What's the coincidence? What's so special about the year 2017 or you existing in that year?
Please explain this coincidence and why its significant. I bet you can't.
Hokulele
Deleterious Slab of Damnation
- As I said. I doubt that I can be any more convincing than I already have been.
In other words, you aren't interested in being right, just being convincing.
Have you ever considered politics as a career?
JesseCuster
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That's not even an attempt at answering the post you responded to which was, why is the year 2017 special? How is your existence combined with the year 2017 a coincidence?- As I said. I doubt that I can be any more convincing than I already have been.
I genuinely don't understand this. The only way this could be a coincidence is if the year 2017 is significant. The reason it's significant can't be because you exist in that year because it's not a coincidence (in the usual sense of the word) that your existence coincidences with the time in which you exist. That would be a rather silly thing to argue, so I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you're not reduced to arguing something that silly.
Therefore there must be some other significant to the year 2017 that you haven't explained. What is that significance? Please explain.
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JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
In the larger sense he isn't. His belief in immortality is, he freely admits, a purely emotional belief. All the nonsense about proving it mathematically came later. The attempts at proofs that he's posting here are not the reason he believes he's immortal.
I'm not so sure about the firmness of anybody's religious beliefs. Attempts to prove their validity by some sort of non-doctrinal reasoning -- Bayesian statistics, for example -- dunno why that occurred to me, but anyway -- suggest a pretty wobbly faith, one that the believer has a hard time maintaining.
Heck, he might find himself just repeating the same flawed arguments again and again.
Possibly for years.
Loss Leader
I would save the receptionist., Moderator
I could really do without being called a chicken who can't do math.
There is no evidence that the general users of this thread have any difficulty understanding your concepts. There is evidence that many find them illogical as somewhere between dead wrong, unsupported, and just plain irrelevant.
There is no evidence that the general users of this thread have any difficulty understanding your concepts. There is evidence that many find them illogical as somewhere between dead wrong, unsupported, and just plain irrelevant.
jt512
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