Filippo Lippi
Philosopher
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- Nov 28, 2002
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- 5,366
It's weasel words all the way down
Proof of Immortality, VI
- Thread starter jond
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abaddon
Penultimate Amazing
Belz...
Fiend God
Wow, that's some blatant lying, right there.
RoboTimbo
Hostile Nanobacon
Jabba's silent impartial jury of well-educated and neutral people is shaking its collective head at his repeated dalliance with truth.
The Norseman
Meandering fecklessly
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- Dec 10, 2008
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- 8,449
Well, what do you expect from a guy who only has a few hours every day to devote to posting online?
Jabba
Philosopher
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- Feb 23, 2012
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- 5,613
Dave,
- OK.
- Reset!
- I'll try some more to explain/support my answer to the Texas objection -- interesting coincident...
- It would take me a week or so to address all of Jay's list, and after that I'd have thousands of new objections to address. So if and when you're ready to specify another "fatal flaw" or two, let me know -- but for now, I'll return to the Texas Sharpshooter objection, and see if I can do a better job of defending myself against it.
- The first problem is that I am not set apart from other humans in the currently accepted way. I'm claiming that the way I am set apart has to do with perspective. I'm my only perspective... That should sound familiar.
- I'll be back.
Belz...
Fiend God
Fringe reset!
Why? Your hundreds of attempts in the last five years have yielded no result or agreement because you refuse to budge from your religious convictions.
BS. It would take you a day at most.
Lame. The objections are based on exactly those points. Stop dodging.
No, address all of them or admit that you can't.
You're not set apart in any way. You're also not set apart from a mountain or banana peel.
Your claim has been rejected.
Cats have perspective too. Are they immortal?
That you have perspective is irrelevant since under H your perspective is entirely a physical process.
godless dave
Great Dalmuti
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- Jul 25, 2007
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- 8,266
So right off the bat your approach is to not be objective.
abaddon
Penultimate Amazing
I have never seen a more blatant fringe reset.
Start with Fatal flaw #1. Is that so difficult?
After five years of repetition, it is most familiar. In those same five years you have never justified it. Not once.
abaddon
Penultimate Amazing
Also, Jabba, what is your response to this?
I'm shocked. Just... >yawn< shocked.
Not if you have any actual reply. If you don't have a reply you could just admit to that, and acknowledge that these multiple fatal flaws can't be resolved because your argument is, simply, wrong.
They've already been specified, in detail. You have already shown that you're not going to address them. What's the point in offering them up again and again?
That's not the point. I will, yet again, demonstrate so that you can ignore it entirely:
If you can specify the target after the fact, I can pick Millthreep Jones, who does not exist (but could have). Since Millthreep doesn't exist, this (by your logic) would confirm the materialist side and indicate that you're not immortal.
If we pick the target after the fact and use that as the basis of your formula, you're always picking someone that already exists and saying "Oh my goodness! The person that already exists exists! What are the odds?" which is the same as me picking good 'ol Millthreep and acting shocked that he doesn't exist.
If you're always going to pick someone that exists, your argument boils down to: "People exist, therefore I'm immortal" rather than "I specifically exist, therefore I'm immortal."
Of course, either one of those has a whole mess of fatal flaws - but it's still a relevant distinction.
Mojo
Mostly harmless
And anyone else would say exactly the same thing.
Yes, it does, to anyone familiar with the Texas sharpshooter fallacy.
jond
Illuminator
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- Apr 25, 2006
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- 3,440
Remind us again how your existence is more likely if you have both a brain and soul than if you use the materialistic model in which your self is your brain.
SusanB-M1
Incurable Optimist
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- Jul 17, 2006
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- 3,766
I wonder if he spends time each week keeping fit - at least that will help lengthen the life he has at the moment. It has certainly helped to lengthen mine!
Dave Rogers
Bandaged ice that stampedes inexpensively through
I thought you were trying to convince other people that the materialistic hypothesis cannot be correct[1]. You may well be your only perspective, but you're not my only perspective; from my point of view you're just one of a few billion other humans, and from my cat's perspective you're one of the excessively many who never feed him. So saying, in effect, that you are you doesn't set you apart from anyone else in any way at all.
Dave
[1] At least, so far as I can tell what you're doing, that appears to be a necessary part of it.
Belz...
Fiend God
See, Jabba's not stupid. He knows that if he starts with the first item on the list he'll have to, you know, address it and deal with the arguments it engenders. But by asking us to choose, he also knows that several choices will be suggested, allowing him to either pick the weakest (in his mind) or (more likely) continue to dodge the issue.
You've had 5 years, and you haven't managed to address one of them yet, why would another week make a difference. None of the objections is new.
Oh, I love the use of scare quotes. They are fatal flaws because each one of them blows your ridiculous, unsupported, belief out of the water. You need to address every single one of them or else you fail. That you have failed in five (5) years (FIVE YEARS) to put up a credible defence against a single one of them is rather telling, especially given your opening statement.
Hokulele
Deleterious Slab of Damnation
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
You say that like it's funny. It's actually highly annoying and rude when you respond to well-formed rebuttals by demanding another do-over. The problem is not that you're failing to communicate your argument. The problem is that your argument is provably wrong and you are unwilling to address that proof.
Through several rounds of discussion you have never wavered from simply special-pleading that it isn't a fallacy or shouldn't be considered a fallacy in your case. We shouldn't have to remind you that simply stating your beliefs and desired outcome is not an argument.
You have been asked by several posters to explain in your own words what the Texas sharpshooter fallacy is and why it's a fallacy. Your steadfast refusal to do so indicates either that you lack the brains to understand why your argument fails, or that you realize full well that your argument does fail and, because of your emotional attachment to it, you don't want to admit it.
It's obvious at this point that "trying once more" is not going to advance the discussion. It's also obvious (and has been for some time) that advancing the argument is not a thing you want.
No.
If you suggest it would take more than an hour to do what I've asked you to do, then you are not trying to do what I asked. What I'm asking for would fit in a single post and take you no more than an hour to compose. What I'm asking for is an overview -- "executive summary" fashion -- of how you plan to address each fatal flaw, not the details of the argument in each case. For example, working from your last substantive post:
Even though I've admitted I'm not an expert, I plan to show that I understand it well enough to prove my point. I'll address in turn each error you've identified in my formulation.JayUtah said:
That's all I'm asking for. I've explicitly freed you from providing the details so that you can fit your responses into a single post. Please do that, and do not try to straw-man up some excuse that you've been set too arduous a task for you to complete.
You've given us exactly the evasive response we all expected from you -- some excuse why you can't prove your claim that, aside from a detail here and there, you have the argument well in hand. I've handed you an opportunity to prove you're not just a serial obstructionist. You're failing badly at proving you aren't.
You claim that but for the Texas sharpshooter fallacy, your argument would succeed. You claim alongside this that there is general agreement on your argument aside from that one point. Both these claims are false, but you avoid debate of that by manipulating the debate via your "effective debate" (i.e., obstructionism) strategy to focus only on "sub-sub-issues" to the attrition of your critics. Since we never rise up out of the bog of pointless quibbling, we never get to the altitude at which your argument is the most broken.
Now that you've been given the opportunity to prove that you do, you prove that you don't. You've evaded that list of fatal flaws for several weeks. You comically said you couldn't find a copy of it, even though you had just linked to it only a few hours previously. And now you're trying to push the discussion of it in a direction it was explicitly designed not to let you go. You're trying to force your critics to choose only one or two of the items on it, when the exercise was explicitly to make you address it briefly in toto. "Sub-issues" are not allowed in your brief summary response, so you don't get to excuse yourself from writing it on the grounds that you don't have time to get into the sub-issues.
It's clear that list scares the bejeezus out of you, Jabba. You're pulling out all the stops to avoid having to deal with it.
Having new objections to address is one goal of the exercise. For five years you've wallowed in the same nonsense, repeating the same claims and following the same strategy of focusing pointlessly on minutia while ignoring the huge gaping flaws in your overall line of reasoning.
The other goal of the exercise is to prove to your critics that your argument is worth pursuing. That is, you must prove that there is a light at the end of the tunnel. If you can't explain in two or three sentences how you plan to address each of your critics' rebuttals, then it's obvious you really don't know whether you can or not and your critics have no reason to believe that descending into the "sub-sub-issues" on that point would have any value. You don't get to insist on "sub-sub-issue" debate until you can show a prima facie case that the details would matter.
Flaws like the false-dilemma structure of your argument lie at a higher level than where you want to debate it. You behave as if you want to distract from that perspective by picking at leaves and bark while the forest burns down around you. I'm giving you the opportunity to prove to your critics that there's more to you than just wild goose chases around trivial distinctions.
Yes, an "executive summary" version of your argument, bereft of "sub-issues" and detail, will certainly engender further discussion. But it also gives you an anchor you sorely need, and which your critics rightly accuse you of not having. No matter how far the discussion delves into detail, you can always refer back to the answer I'm asking you to give and assure your critics that it's part of a plan to prove your point, not just a plan to see how many people you can sucker into feeding your ego.
No.
That is explicitly not what you're supposed to be doing. This is explicitly not a "exhaust-one-subject-at-a-time" exercise. You've relied on that far too long as a crutch for avoiding a meaningful test of your proposed proof. This exercise is aimed squarely at evicting you from the rut you've insisted we all travel in for five years.
If you're not willing to provide the summary I've asked, you leave me no choice but to interpreting this as a concession that you are unwilling or unable to address the dozen or so fatal flaws in your argument.
You're set apart from other humans only by criteria you imagine exist and should apply. Begging the question.
Yes, it's the Texas sharpshooter fallacy. You shoot at a barn. Your buddy shoots at a barn. You each, from your "perspective," declare that you hit the target you were aiming at. Did anyone win the shoot?
The question is whether you'll be back with anything except "business as usual" evasion and time-wasting.
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
Indeed. As you can tell, we're flushing the game. Jabba wants to make it seem like it's his critics' fault the debate goes in circles and has lasted longer than it needs to. So I've provided him the opportunity to take a different tack and show that his argument works also at the higher-level altitude where so many of his critics have identified flaws. I've also shown him the incentive for taking that tack.
This "flushes out" the question of debate strategy; he can either choose to show his critics he's serious, or he can confirm instead that his real purpose is just to bog down and go in endless circles. Even when we can show it's in his best interests to fulfill the assignment I've given him, he acts otherwise. What are then his interests?
Similarly, as you point out, Jabba questions my civility. Mean ol' JayUtah never helps him out by doing all the legwork needed to compensate for his selective attention. (I specifically adopted a policy of not repeating myself or doing his remedial research for him, and told him so. He tries to get as much rhetorical mileage out of that as possible, but I stand by that. Sending one's critics off on remediation errands is a common way of keeping them too busy to challenge one's argument.) But in this case I posted a link to that list at least once day for weeks. Jabba could literally have found that post by going to any of the pages of this debate since oh, probably late July. Then he made the gaffe of claiming he couldn't find it right after having linked it in a previous post.
This "flushes out" the civility argument. Jabba wants to make it seem like it's too onerous a task to keep up with the debate and have the pertinent information at hand. But we see that the blame-game behavior continues unabated even when it becomes trivially easy to do the responsible and expected thing. Are his excuses valid? Or maybe mean ol' JayUtah isn't really as mean as all that and Jabba is just trying to curry sympathy with knee-jerk complaints and excuses.
And for the trifecta we have to point out the one-on-one "effective" debates. He insists we must follow his one-side ground rules for debate, and that we just can't have an "effective" debate otherwise. But we saw what happened when he tried that with Loss Leader. He fled.
This "flushes out" the question of debate footing. He wants to blame all his misbehavior as inescapable consequences of the debate footing and format. But we see that the misbehavior continues even after his proposed causes for it are eliminated. What's the real reason for the misbehavior? What's the real reason for his ground rules?
Via methods like these we show that Jabba's argument isn't really an argument in favor of any proposition, but rather just a long string of only partly connected, ham-fisted strategies to make his critics look bad and himself look good. As you're well aware, his debates here have never been about the topics at hand, be it the Shroud or immortality. It seems to be all about ego reinforcement. Driving the debate to its obvious conclusion deprives him of his daily efforts to show how much better a thinker he must be than all those benighted skeptics.
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