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Proof of Immortality, VI

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Dave,
- My choice of words proved inadequate.

It has nothing to do with your choice of words.

- A pool of potential selves would be the only intrinsic limitation on the number of actual selves. Any other limitations would be the result of extraneous factors such as time and necessary conditions.
- Since there is no pool of potential selves, there should be no intrinsic limitation on the number of potential selves.

If there is no pool of potential selves, then there are no potential selves, and your entire reasoning is baseless.
 
Dave,
- My choice of words proved inadequate.
- A pool of potential selves would be the only intrinsic limitation on the number of actual selves. Any other limitations would be the result of extraneous factors such as time and necessary conditions.
- Since there is no pool of potential selves, there should be no intrinsic limitation on the number of potential selves. And, it's the result of intrinsic limitations that would limit the number of potential selves in the logic of the Bayesian formula.

And we’re back to “potential selves”, a concept that has no place in the materialistic model. Recently you said potential bodies, which is slightly more sensible. Except that there are limitations on potential bodies, like the number of sperm, ova, and females of childbearing years available at any given time. Also the finite lifespan of those entities.

Because the self is a process in a brain, there is only one possible self each brain/body can be. Barring a split brain, of course...
 
- Since there is no pool of potential selves, there should be no intrinsic limitation on the number of potential selves. And, it's the result of intrinsic limitations that would limit the number of potential selves in the logic of the Bayesian formula.

Materialism includes no notion of "potential selves." If we charitably grant you that such a notion must follow inexorably from the basic nature of entities that exist discretely, your argument still fails according to reductio ad absurdum because it would mean no discretized entity would have a non-zero probability of existing. And every time we point this out to you, you deploy the same special-pleading excuse that it only applies to people because only people have souls. Souls are disallowed in materialism.

Nor does materialism allow that the self exists as a discrete. In fact, the self under materialism is a property, not an entity. In other words, it's something that can't exist as a discrete, so there's ample reason not to grant you the basis behind your countability premise.

It's not your words that prove inadequate. Your concepts are inadequate. More precisely, you're trying to falsify materialism, but the thing you're falsifying has nothing to do with materialism.
 
Dave,
- My choice of words proved inadequate TO OBFUSCATING MY MEANING SUFFICIENTLY.
FTFY. Your word choice will always be inadequate to obfuscating your meaning since everyone knows that is your aim. You just aren't clever at it.

The rest of your post was gibber, Jabba.
 
Dave,
- My choice of words proved inadequate.
- A pool of potential selves would be the only intrinsic limitation on the number of actual selves. Any other limitations would be the result of extraneous factors such as time and necessary conditions.
- Since there is no pool of potential selves, there should be no intrinsic limitation on the number of potential selves. And, it's the result of intrinsic limitations that would limit the number of potential selves in the logic of the Bayesian formula.

Why would we use the "intrinsic" limitations? Why not the "extraneous" ones?

There's no pool of potential anythings - stars, planets, snowflakes, or people. The limitations on the existence of any of those are the amount of material available to make them out of and the conditions that allow their existence.
 
- A pool of potential selves would be the only intrinsic limitation on the number of actual selves. Any other limitations would be the result of extraneous factors such as time and necessary conditions.
- Since there is no pool of potential selves, there should be no intrinsic limitation on the number of potential selves. And, it's the result of intrinsic limitations that would limit the number of potential selves in the logic of the Bayesian formula.


Jabba -

Are there an infinite number of potential loaves of bread. The actual number of possible loaves of bread is limited by extraneous factors such as time and a finite amount of flour and water. That's exactly the same way that potential people are limited by time and a finite amount of sperm and ova.

So, if there is no intrinsic limit on possible people, isn't it true that there is no intrinsic limit on loaves of bread?

Are there an infinite possible number of loaves of bread?

If not, would you consider that this nonsense statement has come about because your pretend concepts of of intrinsic/extrinsic factors are wrong?
 
Jabba there are three concepts I'm going to introduce you to.

Fractal Wrongness - You are not just wrong. You are wrong at every conceivable level of resolution. Zooming in on any part of your worldview finds beliefs exactly as wrong as your entire worldview.

Not Even Wrong - refers to any statement, argument or explanation that can be neither correct nor incorrect, because it fails to meet the criteria by which correctness and incorrectness are determined.

Wronger Than Wrong - describes any idea that equates errors that clearly aren't equal.

Where are you in your debate? Fractally Wronger Than Not Even Wrong. You've broken the scale.

Jabba you have put forward the single wrongest wrongity wrong argument I have ever heard. Not one of your assumptions is even reasonable from a thought experiment point of view, all of your conclusions are disproven or meaningless bunk, and even when making up the assumptions and the conclusions none of your arguments actually work to get you from the assumption to the conclusion. You wrongly going from wrong to wrong in the wrong way. You're making up all the data and all the conclusions and still somehow getting the answers wrong even within the wrong context you've made up from other wrongness. You're so wrong that there is no place in any of your arguments that any correct information could actually slot in. You're not just wrong, you're anti-right.

You are so wrong there's actually no way to argue anything. I honestly think you are so wrong that everything you hear about how wrong you are doesn't have any context for you to grab onto. We can list every way you are wrong, as we've been doing for far too long, but I don't think it matters.

We've been shown a fruit salad and are being expected to explain why it's not a good suspension bridge. You can't answer that. It's too wrong. Even with wrong you need some base points of solidity to hang an argument on.
 
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By that logic the dart example is also problematic because it's impossible to have a dart tip with exactly zero area, in practice it will always have a non-zero area. There's always a certain level of abstraction inherent in mathematics...


Yes, and therefore we can at least talk about the dart tip having an exact center, which has probability 0 of hitting any particular point, but probability 1 of hitting some point.

There is almost always going to be loss of mathematical rigor when trying to illustrate a mathematical abstraction with a real-world example. I'm surprised that no one has objected to the dart example on the grounds that where the dart lands is actually deterministic, and thus has probability 1 of landing exactly where it did.
 
All of which were made yesterday, the day before, and so forth. I gather from Jabba's admissions that posting here on this subject is something of a hobby for him. Having returned from his flounce telling us he just can't stay away, however, you'd think he'd require something a bit more substantive than simply repeating the same debate every single day.

Sounds like Buddhism. He's doomed to repeat the same argument until he gets it right, and then he can finally stop being reincarnated. Like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, but without the piano lessons or other self-improvement.
 
Sounds like Buddhism. He's doomed to repeat the same argument until he gets it right, and then he can finally stop being reincarnated. Like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, but without the piano lessons or other self-improvement.

Indeed, we should just fast-forward to the toaster scene.
 
- Try this. Is there any limitation on who would be the first actual self?

What is an "actual" self? Also, please stop just making up new things to try to plug holes that arise from the last thing you made up. At some point this needs to be a mathematical proof, not a cascading failure of contrivance.
 
- Try this. Is there any limitation on who would be the first actual self?


The phrase "actual self" has no meaning.

A person is not a self. The self is a process, a property of a working brain. It changes from moment to moment.

In any case, each working body has an illusion of the self. They're all "actual" selves. They're all equal.

Here is your question: Is there any limitation on which car would be one going 60 miles per hour?

If you don't think that question makes sense, then you must agree that your question doesn't make sense, either.
 
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