Proof of Immortality, VI

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Jabba said:
- Do you guys think that you experience the same thing/process that reincarnationists think comes back to life?
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Yes, I mean no, I mean....

I don't understand the questions.

I experience an awareness, a sense of being an observer of what is happening inside and outside of me. Some of these things I remember, some I attach importance to.

Sounds now like you are trying to suggest we don't experience what religious and reincarnation people experience because we are atheists. And if we were religious, we would know what you are referring to.
 
Is this the "ask foolish questions" thread? I thought you were trying to prove immortality.
 
Jabba said:
- Do you guys think that you experience the same thing/process that religious people call the "soul"?
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Jabba said:
- Do you guys think that you experience the same thing/process that reincarnationists think comes back to life?
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No.

Stop equivocating. Stop groveling for agreement. Stop begging the question. It wastes our time, since after nearly five years of polling it should be obvious that your critics are not simply going to agree with you. What you're doing is exceptionally rude, since the reasons for their disagreement are carefully laid out and have gone acknowledged but unanswered by you.

Specifically stop trying to bait people into letting you define the data in terms of your hypothesis. Stop baiting people into saying, "Why yes, the thing I call self-awareness has been my immortal soul all along. You're a genius!" Among the indnvidually fatal flaws we have identified in your argument is your inability to understand what the different parts of a statistical inference are and the role each plays in the inference. You are simply committing that same error again.

You clearly don't have a proof. You have a series of dishonest tactics intended to bypass a proof and simply garner agreement to the belief by trickery. You're not a mathematician or a logician, you're a preacher -- a salesman. Give your critics their due. They have patiently endured years of you spinning this same merry-go-round of ham-fisted wheedling. It's clearly all you have, and it doesn't work any better here than it did all the other places you tried it.
 
Jabba said:
- Does anyone here agree with me that the new self resulting from a perfect copy would be different than the original self?
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Different in the sense of being separate and identical, sure. Two instances of the emergent properties of the copied original that have the same memories and self-awareness as each other.

Can you please explain how the copies would be different in any other sense?

Jabba said:
- Do you guys think that you experience the same thing/process that religious people call the "soul"?
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I think my conscious mind's experience is an emergent property that has arisen from the unconscious collection of grey matter inside my skull. Religious beliefs are, for many people, an important part of their psychological make-up. The number of people who believe in unevidenced assertions doesn't make unevidenced assertion appropriate for use as objective evidence on which to base rationally arrived at mathematical concepts.

Jabba said:
- Do you guys think that you experience the same thing/process that reincarnationists think comes back to life?
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This question contains at least three undefined terms.

You're not making any progress in convincing me that you genuinely believe that your argument has any merit.

Other than the guilty pleasure I take in Schadenfreude.
 
godless dave said:
Here's what I said the last time you asked this:
I experience a sense of self. I don't experience anything that couldn't possibly be duplicated, or that could see out of two sets of eyes (other than very rare exceptional circumstances).
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Dave,
- I'm not sure what you're saying. My best guess is that you're saying that you're not sure to what "self" reincarnationists are referring.
 
Jabba said:
Dave,
- I'm not sure what you're saying. My best guess is that you're saying that you're not sure to what "self" reincarnationists are referring.
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We all know what reincarnationists are referring to, Jabba. We understand it better than they do, which is why we know their beliefs are nonsensical.
 
Jabba said:
Dave,
- I'm not sure what you're saying. My best guess is that you're saying that you're not sure to what "self" reincarnationists are referring.
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I don't think all people who believe in reincarnation believe in the same kind of self. I'm pretty sure Buddhists believe the self is an illusion.

I am confident we are all experiencing the self in pretty much the same way, although the nature of subjective experience means there's no way to actually know, just as nobody can be sure that everyone perceives colors the same way.

I think what I'm saying is pretty clear. But since the way The Sparrow said it is even more clear, I will just quote The Sparrow:

The Sparrow said:
I experience an awareness, a sense of being an observer of what is happening inside and outside of me
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Jabba said:
I'm not sure what you're saying.
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I am. It's straightforward English.

My best guess is that you're saying that you're not sure to what "self" reincarnationists are referring.
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Do not put words in your critics' mouths, especially words that seem to open up the question in a way that's favorable to you.

Reincarnationists believe in a soul. In the past, you have tried to characterize what you're calling "the self" as functionally equivalent to that sort of soul. Specifically you continually claim that such a soul as the reincarnationists believe in would be "looking out" through a set of eyes, since it is an entity inhabiting the organism rather than a property exhibited by the organism. That's what "incarnation" means. Similarly you have said that "the self" cannot be duplicated by duplicating the organism, since the "self" (i.e., a soul) is a separate entity not inexorably connected to the organism.

Dave, in his comment, specifically repudiates those specific idioms by which you refer to and characterize "the self" (i.e., a soul) and thereby clearly and effectively repudiates that his sense of self is anything like the soul reincarnationists believe in.

You do not address your critics. You simply search for ways in which you can trick them into saying things you can misuse, or begging them to accept your beliefs as fact. One of your tricks is to pretend you don't understand something. This either gives you leave to restate it in your own terms, as you have here, or to ignore it altogether. You must stop these childish tactics if you wish to be taken seriously.
 
Jabba said:
- Does anyone here agree with me that the new self resulting from a perfect copy would be different than the original self?
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Clearly not. Part of the problem is that they simply disagree (if you want to get into a big thing about this, I'm sure there are several threads already out there - look for stuff about the Ship of Theseus or the "Teleporter Problem") and part of the problem is that you aren't defining your terms clearly and consistently.

"New self" isn't something you've even convinced anyone here is a valid concept, partly because you can't seem to clearly define what you mean by "self" that isn't already explained differently and better by science. Note that even if you can clearly explain it you would still have to convince people, but at least you'd have made a good start.

Jabba said:
- Do you guys think that you experience the same thing/process that religious people call the "soul"?
Click to expand...
Jabba said:
- Do you guys think that you experience the same thing/process that reincarnationists think comes back to life?
Click to expand...

As far as I'm concerned those are both the exact same question.

I don't believe that anyone has a soul. I believe that I experience roughly the same sense of consciousness and self-awareness as typical humans, whether or not they believe in souls, but I don't know that I agree that there is a specific thing that any group experiences that they claim to be the soul. They believe they have one, and they experience life, but I haven't really heard people say "There! That experience! That's what my soul feels like!"

As others have pointed out, there's a bit of a god of the gaps thing going on here. What part of our experiences isn't already accounted for? We still have a lot of things to learn about the brain, but everything we have learned about memory and personality and consciousness tells us it all comes from the meat in our skulls. What's left to be the "soul"?

If I get a traumatic brain injury, it can change my personality, erase my memories, drastically alter my decision making - so has it damaged my soul? If not, what meaningful part of "me" could possibly be contained in the soul? If the soul isn't my personality, memories, decision making, or emotions - all of which we can alter by poking at the right spots in someone's brain - then what the hell is the point of it anyway?
 
godless dave said:
I am confident we are all experiencing the self in pretty much the same way...
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What Jabba is trying to do is to get you and others to agree to conflating the subjective experience with theories as to its cause. He tried this before and managed to ensnare a couple of people before they figured out what was going on. In short, he's still trying to read the notion of a soul into the data, E, and say that ~H explains that "data" better than H.

"Experiencing the ... soul" is a fairly predictable Jabba-esque equivocation that tries to blur the important distinction between (E) the experience of self-awareness and (h∈~H)[1] which tries to explain E by means of a soul that can be variously incarnated. The questions boil down to, "Do you agree that you have a soul?"

No, we do not. We require the existence of the immortal soul to be proven mathematically, as the OP originally claimed. If this cannot be done -- and five years of unfruitful attempts is ample evidence it cannot -- then Jabba should graciously concede and thank his critics for pointing out his error.

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[1] ~H is not a theory in this model. It is a set of theories, all the theories that are not materialism. The notation h∈~H is meant to suggest h is the singular theory of reincarnation, which is a member of -- but not all of -- the set ~H.
 
Hokulele said:
Why are you using the wording "thing/process"?
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In case your question was not rhetorical, it's obvious that Jabba's argument needs to maintain the unwarranted conflation between self-awareness as the proper result of a process in materialism, and self-awareness as the soul in his model. An entity and a property are in no way the same thing. But absent his ability to prove it, he must keep up this linguistic abomination in order to press home his attack and ignore the extremely important distinction that he must know by now is a fatal error in his proof.
 
Jabba said:
- Do you guys think that you experience the same thing/process that reincarnationists think comes back to life?
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That depends. Do you think that you experience the same movie/elephant that moviegoers refer to as Wonder Woman?

Do you think that you experience the same ice cream flavor/1957 Polaroid Brownie Camera as Ben and Jerry's calls "Chunky Monkey"?
 
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