Proof of Immortality, VII

[JoeMorgue]

Lying about materialism is fine, it's a lie for Jesus

And, I seriously I'm not trying to just keep harping on this, framing this in the context of "materialism" is playing into Jabba's hand.

As long as we keep saying "X isn't true under materialism" all Jabba (and certain hanger on thread nannies) hear is that that means it's possible under some other context, cue infinite regressions and nitpicking.

I get it, we have to slap the modifier on there to keep the pedants away but by doing so we've gift wrapped Jabba a hairsplit to walk for eternity.

And it's functionally absurd. How exactly did we get argued into our side of the debate being "Death exists unless under... the very concept that reality exists." I can't help but feel that that second part i doing more harm than good.

I can't help but feel I'm having to put a "Unless reality doesn't exist" modifier on way more of my statements that is necessary under any sane context.

 

[JayUtah]

See how it looks when I remove your dishonesty and add what should be your honest words?

And it's not as if your rewriting changes Jabba's argument. Jabba has admitted that the concept he's thinking of is the soul, and that the only reason he doesn't use the word "soul" is because he doesn't want it to be as readily apparent that he's begging the question.

Jabba, what RoboTimbo has produced above is pretty much how your critics read all your arguments. It should be easily discernible then how little chance you have to convince a dispassionate third party that you really have something beyond the word games JoeBentley has astutely described. It really is quite insulting to your critics that you think you can so easily deceive them.

 

[JayUtah]

As long as we keep saying "X isn't true under materialism" all Jabba (and certain hanger on thread nannies) hear is that that means it's possible under some other context, cue infinite regressions and nitpicking.

I agree that's what they likely hear. But it doesn't stop it from being a true rebuttal, and a necessary one.

I get it, we have to slap the modifier on there to keep the pedants away...

But it's not just pedantry. It's a necessary qualifier for the part of the model Jabba is trying to justify with his potentiality argument. We're looking at a ratio of likelihoods for which P(E|H) is one of the terms. It is the term Jabba hopes to justify as very, very small based on his theory of where "selves" must come from in materialism. When we say "under materialism" it is therefore also to emphasize that it is meant to hold only when devising an expression for P(E|H) -- i.e., only when we can assume H is true.

In contrast, when we switch to reckoning P(E|~H), we will have to assume that ~H is true, whatever Jabba decides that will be. (There is an additional error in that Jabba has not reconciled the false dilemma, but that would confuse the point I'm trying to make.)

You're right, I think, in pointing out that many of the responses people are giving do not see the hidden pitfall Jabba has laid by insisting on his vague language. And as such those responses stand to validate the hidden premise in Jabba's loaded questions. But at least when I say "under materialism" I'm attempting to remind Jabba that he must reckon P(E|H) as if materialism were as his critics have defined it, and as if that were true.

 

[JoeMorgue]

If one side has been reduced to "I'm right if you assume reality doesn't exist" I sort of feel like the conversation should stop there.

"I'm right if you assume reality doesn't exist" shouldn't a valid point to address in any topic ever outside of a Philosophy 101 class.

Half the threads on this board at times are functionally reducible to one side going "I'm right if you assume... magic." Letting people routinely use "Materialism" as a way to portray "I assume reality exists" as a stance that has to be defended against other valid alternatives is just insane to me.

 

[JayUtah]

If one side has been reduced to "I'm right if you assume reality doesn't exist" I sort of feel like the conversation should stop there.

And most of us agree this conversation should have stopped years ago after it became objectively obvious that Jabba didn't know what he was talking about. But as you say, he's created a dynamic where he doesn't have to admit defeat, and where the frustrated departure of his critics can be spun to suggest his success.

When I say we get to assume materialism is correct, it's only because that's a narrow feature of the method Jabba has chosen. In a Bayesian inference you get to assume each involved hypothesis is in turn correct for the purpose of determining what that tells you about the progression of data you actually see. It doesn't beg the question because each hypothesis gets a turn at being correct for some observation, and the aggregation of all those attempts to explain the outcome is what we reason from. If Jabba weren't using this particular inferential framework then we wouldn't be talking about qualified remarks this way.

 

[Jabba]

Except whenever you try to come up with a value for P(E|H), you don't base it on the materialist model. In the materialist model, the self comes from the brain. It does not come from nowhere. It is cause and effect traceable.

- Yes, I do. The likelihood of my current existence -- given OOFLam --is virtually zero. I must be missing something, but I can't figure out what it is.

 

[Jabba]

So, like I've been saying, if you made an exact copy of my body, my self would be reproduced.

- Is this "self" the same concept/experience that reincarnationists think returns?

 

[RoboTimbo]

- Yes, I do.

No, you don't.

The likelihood of my current existence -- given OOFLam --is virtually zero.

No, it isn't. The likelihood of your current existence is one.

I must be missing something, but I can't figure out what it is.

I will credit you with telling the truth here. I have absolutely no doubt that you wouldn't be able to figure it out if left to your own devices. However, you are fortunate in that you don't need to figure it out yourself. Virtually everyone else in the thread has told you exactly what it is with specificity and excruciating detail over years of time and thousands of posts.

If you were honest, this wouldn't be an issue.

 

[SOdhner]

I must be missing something, but I can't figure out what it is.

JABBA: I must be missing something.

LITERALLY EVERYONE ELSE: Here's a detailed list of all the things you're doing wrong, stated twelve different ways and repeated for literally five years.

JABBA: I just can't figure out what. It's a mystery!

 

[RoboTimbo]

- Is this "self" the same concept/experience that reincarnationists think returns?

You're the one dishonestly obfuscating terms. What do you want it to refer to in the materialist model?

 

[JoeMorgue]

- Yes, I do. The likelihood of my current existence -- given OOFLam --is virtually zero. I must be missing something, but I can't figure out what it is.

"The likelihood of my current existence -- given the total bullcrap thing I completely made up just to shoe into this argument and have a dozen people explain to me in terms a child would understand what is wrong with over a course of years -- is virtually zero."

The thing you are "missing" Jabba is THAT OOFLAM IS A TOTAL BEGGING THE QUESTION PIECE OF ABSOLUTE NONSENSE YOU MADE UP!

Jesus tap dancing Christ. At least when you talk to a wall sometimes you'll get an echo.

 

[JoeMorgue]

- Is this "self" the same concept/experience that reincarnationists think returns?

Why are you asking us for a third party's view of something?

What are you doing? Who are you talking to? Do you think we're stupid?

 

[JimOfAllTrades]

- Yes, I do. The likelihood of my current existence -- given OOFLam --is virtually zero. I must be missing something, but I can't figure out what it is.

But you don't. You say that an exact copy of you wouldn't be the same as you because it would be a second instance of you, not the original you.

But that is exactly what materialism predicts: that a copy would be a second instance of the same object, identical in every way, but separate. So by saying that because the copy is a different instance there must be something missing from the copy, you're not talking about materialism.

 

[godless dave]

- Yes, I do. The likelihood of my current existence -- given OOFLam --is virtually zero. I must be missing something, but I can't figure out what it is.

One of the things you're missing is that "virtually zero" doesn't mean anything mathematical. But let's ignore that for now.

In the materialist model, the one you claim to be H in for P(E|H), your current existence is a result of your parents having sex, you being conceived, you being born, and you surviving through today. Their existence is a result of similar circumstances with their parents, and similarly back to the first appearance of life on earth, which was itself the result of events we don't understand, which were in turn the results of other events going back to the beginning of time and the universe.

So depending on when you calculate the likelihood of your eventually existence, you might get a very small number. But the same would be true of absolutely everything that exists now: every snowflake, every grain of sand, every piece of rock on every planet in the universe.

In the materialist model, your self is entirely the result of natural processes. It did not come from nowhere. Its relative unlikelihood at various points in history is no more significant than the unlikelihood that the formation we call Mount Rainier would one day exist in the form it currently exists in.

 

[JoeMorgue]

Jabba I still think the term "materialism" needlessly confuses you. I think you lack the context to understand what people are telling you when they say "There is no place for a non-reproducible part of the self under materialism" and lack the intellectual honesty and curiosity to learn it.

So I'm going to be more direct.

There's no such thing as soul in reality. You don't have a soul. You are going to die one day and never come back.

 

[godless dave]

- Is this "self" the same concept/experience that reincarnationists think returns?

It's the same experience but not the same concept. All the reincarnation beliefs I'm familiar with posit some kind of soul that exists independently of the physical body.

 

[SOdhner]

- Is this "self" the same concept/experience that reincarnationists think returns?

No, that would be a soul. We don't believe those exist, and under the materialistic model they aren't a thing.

Which we've explained to you, like, a thousand times.

Obviously I don't have the energy but it would be really interesting to take these five years of posts and see how many times each thing has been explained to Jabba.

Anyway, here's to attempt #77,519:

This is the Materialist view of the sense of self. It doesn't matter if you agree with it, for your argument to make any sense you need to calculate your probabilities as if this is the case:

1. We do experience consciousness, or a sense of self.
2. This is caused by our physical brains, by the electrical signals and neurochemistry and all that jazz.
3. If our brains are disrupted, so is the sense of self.
4. Our sense of self isn't a tangible thing, nor is it a thing at all. It's an emergent property of our brains.
5. If you duplicated someone perfectly, that duplicate would also have a sense of self. Since the person was duplicated exactly, both copies would have the same thoughts, feelings, and personality.
6. Our sense of self goes away every night when we get some good sleep. By most reasonable definitions it's just gone. When we wake up we once again have a sense of self.
7. Likewise, people have been pretty darn dead and have been brought back. During the time we are dead (or deeply sleeping, or in a coma, or whatever) our sense of self isn't somewhere else - it just is gone entirely. There is no persistent sense of self that survives outside our body.
8. We don't really call this a "new" sense of self, because it's an emergent property rather than a countable thing. Likewise if a chameleon was green, and then turned red, and then turned green again we wouldn't say it had a "new" green. It was green, then it wasn't, then it was. We are aware, then we're not, then we are.
9. When our brains break sufficiently that they can no longer generate this sense of self awareness ever again, it's just over. There's nothing to reincarnate because that sense of self isn't a countable thing and it's gone anyway. Nobody else will have "our" sense of self, or any part of it, because it's not a THING that can be passed around or divided up.
10. That feeling you have, that a copy wouldn't be you and that there's something special about the original that would be lost in translation - that's not an actual thing, it's more like sentimental value. It means something TO YOU but it's not an actual measurable or quantifiable value. If we DID replace you with a perfect copy and didn't tell you, you would never know.

 

[JimOfAllTrades]

- Is this "self" the same concept/experience that reincarnationists think returns?

I would imagine that what I think of as "me", my sense of self or whatever you want to call it, is probably what some reincarnationists think is reincarnated. Other reincarnationists may think some other aspect is reincarnated. Like most groups, I doubt you'll find a 100% (or maybe even large majority) consensus.

But why does what some reincarnationists think affect your formula?

 

[JayUtah]

Yes, I do.

No, you most certainly don't. You base it on your own straw-man version of materialism.

I must be missing something, but I can't figure out what it is.

Funny how that happens when you ignore everything that's happening around you.

 

[Loss Leader]

Dave,
- I'm saying that what I'm calling the self would be different in the copy in the same way that a new loaf of bread would be different than the original -- except that the new self is the result of an emergent property that has no analog in the new loaf of bread.

Really? What about the smell of the bread?