Proof of Immortality, VI

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JayUtah said:
Fine with me; I'm still trying to come up with a chicken pun that hasn't already been used. I need all the fake internet points I can get.
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This week is almost over. Maybe you'll have one some time nest week.
 
Seriously, we should be paying attention to the...


No, stoppit. Puntastic as it may be, the matter at hand still remains eggsactly where it is.

Perhaps we should start a photo album(en).
 
godless dave said:
I thought we were calculating from the beginning of the universe. P(E|G) would approach 1.00 as the date approached 480,000 BC. Just as P(E|H) would approach 1.00 as the date approached your birth date.
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- If we start from the beginning of the universe and the laws of physics are in place, I would assume that the exact shape of Mt Rainier has a likelihood of almost 1.00 -- except, perhaps, for where humans are involved (I'm allowing for the possibility of free will where humans are involved). We're pretty sure about the laws of physics, and have no reason to suspect that they haven't been completely applied in regard to Rainier.
- I'm accepting that the laws of physics determine what we humans are, but not who we are -- or at least, if they do determine who we are, we have no idea how they do it...
- Do you know what I mean when I try to distinguish between what we are and who we are?
 
Jabba said:
- If we start from the beginning of the universe and the laws of physics are in place, I would assume that the exact shape of Mt Rainier has a likelihood of almost 1.00 -- except, perhaps, for where humans are involved (I'm allowing for the possibility of free will where humans are involved). We're pretty sure about the laws of physics, and have no reason to suspect that they haven't been completely applied in regard to Rainier.
- I'm accepting that the laws of physics determine what we humans are, but not who we are -- or at least, if they do determine who we are, we have no idea how they do it...
- Do you know what I mean when I try to distinguish between what we are and who we are?
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-Odd. Earlier you agreed that the likelihood of Mount Rainer was every bit as unlikely as you. Perhaps you might make up your mind?

-Yes. Who we are is the result of ongoing processes in our brains (which is the what). The "what" and "who" are equally likely because "who" is a result of the functioning of "what" and not a separate entity.
 
Jabba said:
- If we start from the beginning of the universe and the laws of physics are in place, I would assume that the exact shape of Mt Rainier has a likelihood of almost 1.00...
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Then your conceptualization today of "the laws of physics" must be emphasizing the deterministic portion of chaotic systems. Chaotic systems are deterministic, just at a complexity we can't typically deal with. That's the only way you can tell us "the laws of physics" lead deterministically from the origin of the universe to the one specific shape of Mt Ranier we see today with a probability approaching 1.

Oh, but then again we'd have to apply the same to a specific human -- also the product of a chaotic system. It would also have to deterministically arrive at each and every individual human by "the laws of physics" with a probability approaching 1, because there are only one set of those laws in our universe.

But we've been here before. As soon as we point out that materialism tells us this, you challenge this by talking about whether we can predict some individual human. You equivocate across the two broad-strokes concepts of chaotic systems which, despite my urging, you've obviously never studied. Mt Ranier is the product of what you assert is a deterministic system, arriving at its present form by a sure, steady application of straightforward laws. But people arise, according to you, out of a completely different process you don't specify. But because it's not practically predictable, that's what you say makes the difference. You're conflating determinism with predictability, and we already refuted this confusion on your part.

I'm accepting that the laws of physics determine what we humans are, but not who we are...
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In materialism there's no difference. That's partly what defines materialism as a hypothesis. You're begging the question that there must exist a concept of "who" that materialism can't possibly touch and which therefore must have some separate kind of existence.

Let's see, what can that be. Oh, right -- it's a soul. You're begging the existence of a soul and trying to say that materialism can't explain it.

or at least, if they do determine who we are, we have no idea how they do it...
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In materialism everything that is a property of you is a property of the material that is you. You keep saying we can't explain it, but we can -- at least in materialism. Straw man.

Do you know what I mean when I try to distinguish between what we are and who we are?
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Yes, we know what you mean. It's called a straw man. It's a desperate attempt to trump up something whose existence you will frantically beg us to accept -- insulting us if we don't -- for the sole purpose of pointing to something you say materialism can't explain. Therefore souls.

Sad, Jabba.
 
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Jabba said:
- Do you know what I mean when I try to distinguish between what we are and who we are?
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Yes. You're referring to the soul as "who we are" in a doomed attempt to prevent people noticing that you're begging the question.
 
Jabba said:
- If we start from the beginning of the universe and the laws of physics are in place, I would assume that the exact shape of Mt Rainier has a likelihood of almost 1.00 -- except, perhaps, for where humans are involved (I'm allowing for the possibility of free will where humans are involved). We're pretty sure about the laws of physics, and have no reason to suspect that they haven't been completely applied in regard to Rainier.
- I'm accepting that the laws of physics determine what we humans are, but not who we are -- or at least, if they do determine who we are, we have no idea how they do it...
- Do you know what I mean when I try to distinguish between what we are and who we are?
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No. I have no idea what you mean.
 
JayUtah said:
it differs little from his Shroud thread, in which he admitted defeat but qualified it by saying he lost only because his critics wouldn't accept speculation and question-begging as evidence.
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Which makes complete sense. If we allowed for nonsense, unevidenced claims, illogic and question-begging, we'd agree with a great many more claims.
 
Jabba said:
Dave,
- I think you've been asking me to explain why I think that I'm a legitimate target -- why the likelihood of my particular current existence is a valid entry for P(E|H). Am I correct?
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Instead of answering the question, you pull back to another question.

It's queries all the way down.
 
Jabba said:
I'm accepting that the laws of physics determine what we humans are, but not who we are -- or at least, if they do determine who we are, we have no idea how they do it...
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So you are not then talking about H.

Under H, everything is determined by the laws of physics. You're trying to have your cake and eat it too.
 
JayUtah said:
And here we go with the endless "clarifying" questions -- stall, baby, stall. I've analyzed your formulation of P(E|H) in depth this week. Apparently it isn't neutral or well-educated enough for you.

The materialist hypothesis explains variations within entity types by noting the operation of chaotic systems in the production of those entities. A chaotic system is a deterministic system of a complexity sufficient to evade meaningful prediction from initial conditions. I've referred you several times to the science of chaotic systems so that you can learn its quantitative behavior, which applies to your argument.

Because a chaotic system can produce great variation from the same initial conditions -- initial conditions here, in your argument, being the instant of the Big Bang -- it is licit to say the probability of one specific describable specimen arising is very small. However, that probability is meaningless. In order for it to have meaning, the significance of that one describable specimen would have to be established by criteria that existed before the system operated.

That doesn't occur for mountains and it doesn't occur for people, under materialism. There were no preordained criteria for what Mt Ranier is like today, and there were no preordained criteria for what you are like today. Therefore the probability you can compute for each specimen is essentially meaningless. Just because you have two numbers and can divide one by the other doesn't give you a probability that governs some arbitrarily identified system. Your critical error -- above the dozen or so fatal ones I keep having to remind you about -- is that you simply don't get how quantitative modeling works. At all. At the most fundamental level.

Again we have to go back to the card table. You and your friends Tom, Dick, and Harry sit down for a game of Ad Hoc Poker. The regular deck is shuffled and the hands are dealt. You get a random assortment of five cards that spell nothing according to the rules of classical poker. "I win," you declare. "The chances of being dealt the hand I'm holding are only 1 in 2,598,960. That is an extremely small probability, so the fact that I was dealt it must indeed be very remarkable. Because of that, I declare this to be the winning hand."

"Now hold on," says Tom, who's also holding a garbage hand. "The chances of being dealt my hand are also 1 in 2,598,960.* At best you have a tying hand." Dick and Harry similarly note that the probability works out the same for their hands. So the round is considered a draw and the cards are dealt again. Round after round is played, with the same "highly improbable" deals being declared winning hands on no basis other than the perception of the extreme unlikelihood of every hand.

The significance of the winning hands in poker are that they are reckoned in play according to criteria that predated the deal. In variants of poker that allow discards and draws, or which have hole cards or community cards, prestating the rules -- "Gentlemen, the game is Five Card Draw with deuces wild" -- allows the players to assess probability correctly during play because they know what targets they're aiming for and they know which of the equal probabilities of the random draw are to be considered favorable.

That's what it means to be a target, but you're trying to trump up a new concept of "targetness" that simply hides your obvious error in declaring the drawn sample to have been a target according to predetermined criteria, and remarkable simply by the magnitude of a meaningless quotient. Materialism is rock-solid (pun intended) on the concept that your mathematical exercise is no different for mountains than for people. And you know this, which is why your next step is always to gesticulate wildly and imagine new attributes that apply only to people.

We're not asking you to explain (again and again and again) why you think you're a legitimate target. You've already provided your explanation. We've told you in exactly what way it's wrong. What we're asking you to do is either provide a different explanation that isn't easily shown to be wrong, or to concede that you cannot support the major premise to your proof and that therefore your proof fails. Please do one of those, not simply repeat your claim for years on end and try to shame people into accepting it without proof.
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It's really unfortunate that the only people reading your posts are those towards whom they're directed.
 
Jabba said:
- If we start from the beginning of the universe and the laws of physics are in place, I would assume that the exact shape of Mt Rainier has a likelihood of almost 1.00
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So, at the beginning of the universe, every atom had been formed and set on its course to coalesce into stars, explode, have rings of metals attract each other and form planets, create the molten core of the earth, spin the core to create a magnetic field, form plates adrift on magma, push those plates into each other to form mountain ranges, release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, cool the planet so large ice sheets formed and pushed mountains ahead of them, warm the planet so those same ice sheets cut valleys and left palisades, have water run along the ground to further erode the land, have grasses and trees evolve to anchor soil to one spot even in spite of water, have huge storms dump feet of snow on mountaintops, leveling some of the vegetation, have small animals burrow through the ground making it more susceptible to erosion, have larger animals carry matter into the trees to make nests or into the rivers to build dams, have even larger animals kick rocks in various directions and eat the grasses and pull down trees, and have a rogue planet plow into ours, creating a moon that stabilized the orbit and tilt of the earth.

All of that was set from the moment the universe began, but your exact DNA sequence wasn't?

I think your argument is ridiculous.
 
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