Proof of Immortality, VI

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Jabba said:
Pixel,
- Don't you agree that the kind of self/process we've been talking about can exist/proceed for only one finite time?
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Please read JayUtah's answer to this question, and keep reading it until either (a) you finally understand it or (b) you realise that you will never understand it, in which case you will need to find yourself another hobby.
 
Loss Leader said:
Second of all, of course the duplicate is a separate person. Nobody has ever argued differently except for Jabba. He has argued that an exact duplicate of a person would share his soul and see out of "two pairs of eyes." That's lunacy. Two different people are two different people.
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[Jabba]But if they are different they won't be the same.[/Jabba]
 
Fudbucker said:
But let me ask you: suppose they made a duplicate of you, exact in every way. Would you be OK with terminating your life and letting the duplicate live on?
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You need to ask Jabba that question, not anyone else involved in this thread. But don't expect an answer.
 
MetalPig said:
People who gave longer explanations seem to agree with what I had in mind.

Maybe I misused the word 'independent', but jt512 explained what I was thinking of.
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The probability of a set can not be greater than the probability of any superset of that set.

That's the property of a probability space that they are using. They're calling it the "conjunction fallacy". Of course their use of it is, ironically as always, fallacious because ~H is not a subset of H. It's one of those things that just keep coming up no matter how many times they've been refuted.

Here's the implicit bit added in highlight (just because you leave it implicit doesn't mean it's not a condition on the probability space):
Loss Leader said:
The chance that Jabba has a functioning neurosystem AND NOT an immaterial soul is greater than that he has a functioning neurosystem AND an immaterial soul.
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It's not a conjunction at all. ~H just isn't a subset of H, and it's definitely not that the "~" in the "~H" should have been a big indicator of that even to the most mediocre math-literate :rolleyes:
 
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Mojo said:
How is "Jabba has a body and an immaterial soul" not a subset of "Jabba has a body"?
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It is. It's perfectly true that neither P(~H) nor P(H) can be greater than P(H ∪ ~H), since P(H ∪ ~H) = 1. It is, indeed, part of the very definition of a probability space that the measure of the entire sample space equals 1. However the question was whether P(H) is greater than, equal to or smaller than P(~H), not whether both of them are smaller than P(H ∪ ~H) or not. The fallacious use is arguing this:

P(~H) ≤ P(H)

using this:
P(~H) ≤ P(H ∪ ~H)
 
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caveman1917 said:
It is. It's perfectly true that neither P(~H) nor P(H) can be greater than P(H ∪ ~H), since P(H ∪ ~H) = 1. It is, indeed, part of the very definition of a probability space that the measure of the entire sample space equals 1. However the question was whether P(H) is greater than, equal to or smaller than P(~H), not whether both of them are smaller than P(H ∪ ~H) or not. The fallacious use is arguing this:

P(~H) ≤ P(H)

using this:
P(~H) ≤ P(H ∪ ~H)
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Yes, but if you actually read the thread rather than looking for opportunities to shout "gotcha" you would see that this is not what has actually been argued over the last however many years it has been. Loss Leader may not have expressed it very well on this occasion, but that's no reason to ignore everything that's gone before.
 
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caveman1917 said:
It is. It's perfectly true that neither P(~H) nor P(H) can be greater than P(H ∪ ~H), since P(H ∪ ~H) = 1. It is, indeed, part of the very definition of a probability space that the measure of the entire sample space equals 1. However the question was whether P(H) is greater than, equal to or smaller than P(~H), not whether both of them are smaller than P(H ∪ ~H) or not. The fallacious use is arguing this:

P(~H) ≤ P(H)

using this:
P(~H) ≤ P(H ∪ ~H)
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Putting aside that argument, what we are actually trying to point out to Jabba is this:

We understand a great deal about the workings of the human brain. We can infer, from the fact among others that physical disruption of the brain can have severe effects on personality and memory, that the self is an emergent property of the physical systems constituting the brain and body. There is not therefore any need to postulate any additional entities other than the physical ones already known to exist. The probability argument therefore reduces to:

Which is more probable:
(a) The self is entirely an emergent property of the structures already known to exist, involving processes already known to take place and to have known and, in many cases, predictable influences on the details of the self;
or:
(b) The self involves all of the above (as these are already known to exist) and also some other entity, whose properties are unknown and perhaps unknowable, and which has not been shown to have any properties or influence not already accounted for?

The answer to this question can logically only be either that (a) is more probable, or that both are equally probable; since (b) involves entities whose existence cannot by definition be established, however, it cannot be assigned a probability of 1. Therefore, the only reasonable answer is (a).

Dave
 
Mojo said:
Yes, but if you actually read the thread rather than looking for opportunities to shout "gotcha" you would see that this is not what has actually been argued over the last however many years it has been.
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Really? Let's see some evidence. Because otherwise that is one sad excuse, whining about "gotcha's" while pretending that for all these years you've not been arguing about P(H) vs P(~H) but about P(~H) vs P(H ∪ ~H).

Loss leader may not have expressed it very all on this occasion
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Bet you 10$ Loss Leader simply doesn't have a clue what he's talking about.

but that's no reason to ignore everything that's gone before.
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What's gone before has been round after round of that same simplistic error.
 
Dave Rogers said:
Putting aside that argument, what we are actually trying to point out to Jabba is this:

We understand a great deal about the workings of the human brain. We can infer, from the fact among others that physical disruption of the brain can have severe effects on personality and memory, that the self is an emergent property of the physical systems constituting the brain and body. There is not therefore any need to postulate any additional entities other than the physical ones already known to exist. The probability argument therefore reduces to:

Which is more probable:
(a) The self is entirely an emergent property of the structures already known to exist, involving processes already known to take place and to have known and, in many cases, predictable influences on the details of the self;
or:
(b) The self involves all of the above (as these are already known to exist) and also some other entity, whose properties are unknown and perhaps unknowable, and which has not been shown to have any properties or influence not already accounted for?

The answer to this question can logically only be either that (a) is more probable, or that both are equally probable; since (b) involves entities whose existence cannot by definition be established, however, it cannot be assigned a probability of 1. Therefore, the only reasonable answer is (a).

Dave
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There's nothing logical stopping b from being more probable than a. The answer, under the maximum entropy principle (which you should use), is that they are equally probable.
 
caveman1917 said:
There's nothing logical stopping b from being more probable than a.
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Yes, there is. Does the self consist of all the processes and entities we have already observed, which are sufficient to explain its existence, or does it consist of all those processes and entities plus an immortal soul? To suggest that the latter is more probable is to commit the conjunction fallacy.

Dave
 
Fudbucker said:
Well, a duplicate of me would be numerically different, for starters. It would also occupy a difference location in space.
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Just like you right now is different from you a minute ago. Does that mean you die every planck time unit?

But let me ask you: suppose they made a duplicate of you, exact in every way. Would you be OK with terminating your life and letting the duplicate live on? Or would you consider the duplicate a separate person? I view it the latter.

Or, in other words, teleportation is suicide. :)
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Yes, it is.
 
Dave Rogers said:
Yes, there is. Does the self consist of all the processes and entities we have already observed, which are sufficient to explain its existence, or does it consist of all those processes and entities plus an immortal soul? To suggest that the latter is more probable is to commit the conjunction fallacy.

Dave
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:rolleyes:

"The self consists entirely of X" is not a superset of "the self consists of X and Y". "This body consists entirely of a torso" is not a superset of "this body consists of a torso and other stuff". The always-present irony here is that, going by the wikipedia explanation of this "conjunction fallacy" thing[*], you are the one making it.

* turning something as perfectly simple as "if A ⊆ B then P(A) ≤ P(B)" into some convoluted "conjunction fallacy" for FSM knows why.
 
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Dave Rogers said:
...
(a) The self is entirely an emergent property of the structures already known to exist, involving processes already known to take place and to have known and, in many cases, predictable influences on the details of the self;
or:
(b) The self involves all of the above (as these are already known to exist) and also some other entity, whose properties are unknown and perhaps unknowable, and which has not been shown to have any properties or influence not already accounted for?
...
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caveman1917 said:
There's nothing logical stopping b from being more probable than a. The answer, under the maximum entropy principle (which you should use), is that they are equally probable.
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Which is the probability distribution ("testable information") for a soul involvement in the mental process you are relying on to apply the maximum entropy principle?
 
Bob: "Two plus purple equals potato!"
Ted: "That makes no sense."
Bill runs into the conversation: "Ted I need to take you for task for how you are mathematically refuting Bob's equation."
 
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