Proof of Immortality, VII

[Dancing David]

-
- By "specific self-awareness," I mean the experience that reincarnationists think returns to life. You have the same kind of experience, but don't think it will ever return to life. I think you know the experience to which I refer.

ha ha ha ha ha
You mean a totally made up event with no reality?

 

[abaddon]

- This is where we can't seem to communicate.

We cannot communicate because you refuse to communicate.

- By "specific self-awareness," I mean the experience that reincarnationists think returns to life. You have the same kind of experience, but don't think it will ever return to life. I think you know the experience to which I refer.

Reincarnationists are not some monolithic block. There is a huge diversity of such beliefs all incompatible with each other. How could you not be aware of this?

- Neither of us thinks that producing a perfect copy of my brain would bring ME back to life, nor do we believe that replicating your brain would bring YOU back to life. We both believe that replicating your brain would produce a new specific self-awareness, but we have no idea WHO that would be.

And you are wrong. Again. A copy of you would be a copy of you. If it was not, then it would not be a copy at all. Under materialism there is no soul. Why do you find this difficult?

- That's the info we don't have -- but apparently, you and I don't have the same experience in mind by "that which a reincarnationist thinks returns," by "ME," "You" or "WHO.

Still wrong. A copy of you is a copy of you. If it is not identical, then it is not a copy.

- Fortunately, that shouldn't matter...

It does matter. You do not get to say materialism requires a soul. It does not.

- Here, my objective is to determine the likelihood of the current existence of my SSA, given OOFLam

No, it isn't your objective to do anything remotely like that.

-- and, I think that you now agree that 1/10¹⁰⁰ is a reasonable estimate.

Nobody agrees with that at all, that is simply some number you extracted from some orifice on the basis of nothing at all. Stop trying to invent agreement with your nonsense ideas where none exists.

If you don't agree, that's what we need to be talking about.

No. That is not what needs discussion at all. Your proclivity for presenting dishonest arguments is a far more worthy topic.

 

[Jabba]

I'm pretty confident we do have the same experience in mind. What I'm asking about is what this means:



"Who" means "which person". That's the literal meaning of the word. If we know which self awareness we're talking about, and we know which brain is experiencing self awareness, then we know who it is. What about that self awareness don't we know?

Dave,
- I think that I've done the best I can to answer that question. But then, I do think that we're talking about the same experience, so I don't think that we have to agree upon exactly how it came about, and can move to the likelihood of its current existence -- I say less than 1/10¹⁰⁰.

 

[jond]

Dave,
- I think that I've done the best I can to answer that question. But then, I do think that we're talking about the same experience, so I don't think that we have to agree upon exactly how it came about, and can move to the likelihood of its current existence -- I say less than 1/10¹⁰⁰.

Only because you continue to ignore the fact that a process and a thing are not the same. A process only happens when the components that give rise to it are functioning. A thing exists as a separate countable entity.

In the materialistic model, the self is a process in the brain. Brain stops functioning, process stops.

In Jabba’s model, the self is a separate entity that attaches itself somehow to the brain and which could somehow continue on after the brain ceases functioning.

The two models are not the same, and your model is not in any way the materialistic model you are trying to disprove.

 

[godless dave]

Dave,
- I think that I've done the best I can to answer that question.

You've done nothing at all to answer the question. You've just repeated the statement I was asking about.

But then, I do think that we're talking about the same experience, so I don't think that we have to agree upon exactly how it came about

I think we do, because how it came about in the materialist model is why the materialist model does not include immortality. How the experience came about is the basis for any estimate of the likelihood of that experience existing.

 

[RoboTimbo]

Dave,
- I think that I've done the best I can to answer that question.

By which you mean you've done nothing.

But then, I do think that we're talking about the same experience, so I don't think that we have to agree upon exactly how it came about, and can move to the likelihood of its current existence -- I say less than 1/10¹⁰⁰.

How did you arrive at that number for the process of self-awareness in the materialist model, which is what you're trying to falsify? Can you link to it somewhere?

 

[Dave Rogers]

Dave,
- I think that I've done the best I can to answer that question. But then, I do think that we're talking about the same experience, so I don't think that we have to agree upon exactly how it came about, and can move to the likelihood of its current existence -- I say less than 1/10¹⁰⁰.

And now we're back to "Unless you accept that I'm right then we can't make any progress" gambit. No, we are not talking about the same process/experience/brontosaurus/soul in both H and ~H, because what you are referring to is a soul, and you can't develop an argument within H concerning the soul because in H there is no such thing as a soul. So, no, we can't move on to formulating your argument around a made-up number concerning something that has no meaning in the hypothesis you want it to have meaning in, because the entire conceptual basis of any such argument would be nonsensical.

Dave (the one you're ignoring)

 

[JayUtah]

This is where we can't seem to communicate.

Because you simply don't listen. Don't blame this on the problem or your critics. This is squarely on you and your bad behavior.

Remember when you told us that you seemed to always be at odds with your primary school teachers? Remember when you told us how poorly you faired in academia? Don't you see a pattern of evidence here? Might your problem with "communication" have nothing to do with academia or your primary school teachers? Might your problems here have nothing to do with the supposed hard-headedness, bias, and limited "analytical" thinking of your critics? Given that you seem to experience this difficulty in a variety of settings, we have to look to the common factor in all of them -- you. The problem you're experiencing is not the widespread inability of the world to recognize your allegedly superior "holistic" thinking. Instead the evidence points to the problem being that you are largely ineducable. You convey the impression that you are simply unable to imagine that you could ever be wrong, and the rest of your argument seems calculated to maintain that delusion.

This is your problem to fix. Don't blame everyone else.

By "specific self-awareness," I mean the experience that reincarnationists think returns to life.

No, you don't, because you don't know what "reincarnationists" believe. Most reincarnationists are not animists, and you need animism for your theory. Self-awareness is the data. "Whatever [animists] believe comes back to life" is some attempt to explain that data, i.e., some hypthosis K that is in the set ~H. You don't know your E from your H. There is no such thing as "a specific self awareness" just as there is no such thing as "a specific going 60 mph." Insisting on language that frames the evidence as necessarily a discrete entity is begging the question.

You have the same kind of experience, but don't think it will ever return to life. I think you know the experience to which I refer.

Yes, you're dishonestly referring to both the data and one hypothesis to explain it as if they were one and the same and it were all observation. This is the evidence for my claim that you simply don't know how to formulate a statistical inference properly. Now godless dave has one foot hovering over your desperate trap because he's agreed to the "experience." But he's made it clear elsewhere that "experience" as he's using the word does not include a soul, no matter how deceitfully you rename it. Don't get your hopes up.

Neither of us thinks that producing a perfect copy of my brain would bring ME back to life, nor do we believe that replicating your brain would bring YOU back to life.

No, that's just a lie. Your critics don't agree that we mean the same things by "you" and "me," nor do they appreciate your constant attempts to blur those meanings by obvious equivocation. In materialism, "you" and "me" refer to the respective organisms. That, under materialism, is all the source there is to any one person's identity. Consciousness and self-awareness are phenomena which arise out of the proper operation of that organism and denote its subjective effect on each person.

You, in contrast, use "you" and "me" as synonyms for a soul.

We both believe that replicating your brain would produce a new specific self-awareness, but we have no idea WHO that would be.

For the fifth time, under materialism reproducing the organism exactly must reproduce the properties exactly, and under materialism all that is you is an emergent property of the organism. Don't project the problems of your model onto a model that doesn't have them.

That's the info we don't have...

Under materialism we do have it, and you must consider that when you reckon P(E|H).

but apparently, you and I don't have the same experience in mind by "that which a reincarnationist thinks returns," by "ME," "You" or "WHO.

Because your critics properly decline to allow you foist your straw man onto their theory. The materialist theory doesn't have the problems of identity and incarnation that your animist model does, and which are laid bare in our long-running thought experiment.

Fortunately, that shouldn't matter...

It matters quite a bit, because -- as you do in all your debates at this forum -- you're trying to simply define your way by fiat to your desired conclusion before you actually have the debate. You've already admitted that you got the conclusion ahead of time. You're admitting that now you're trying to blaze a trail to that desired conclusion regardless of where the evidence actually leads. With all of that admitted chicanery, the question remains why anyone should take you seriously. Can you answer that, please?

Here, my objective is to determine the likelihood of the current existence of my SSA, given OOFLam -- and, I think that you now agree that 1/10¹⁰⁰ is a reasonable estimate.

This is a bald-faced lie, Jabba. Not only has no one agreed to this, everyone has agreed your made-up number is meaningless. And knock off the acronyms; no one is fooled by that particular obfuscation. You don't get to disguise the foisted soul by acronyming it to "SSA" as if it were some modern scientific thing.

If you don't agree, that's what we need to be talking about.

No one agrees, and everyone has stated their disagreement and their reasons for it. There is no "we" in the problem we face here today. The problem is entirely you, specifically your blatant disregard of everything that comes out of a mouth that doesn't belong to you. And that is not some function of ISF or of those pesky skeptics. This is the conclusion everyone has reached about you no matter where you try to have a debate. You're simply preaching from a pulpit and trying to foist the delusion that everyone in your congregation is cheering you on.

You seriously need to stop being so profoundly rude and dishonest or else go find a forum of sycophants. If you were my employee and were treating your coworkers with such blatant disregard and prevarication, you would have been fired years ago for that reason.

 

[Dancing David]

Your dishonesty knows no bounds.

That is not even counting potential dishonesty!

 

[Dancing David]

Dave,
- I think that I've done the best I can to answer that question. But then, I do think that we're talking about the same experience, so I don't think that we have to agree upon exactly how it came about, and can move to the likelihood of its current existence -- I say less than 1/10¹⁰⁰.

Jabba,
I notice that you refuse to define clearly your own concepts why is that?

You could actually explain yourself.

 

[godless dave]

That is not even counting potential dishonesty!

Potential dishonesty is unlimited. You could even say it's infinite.

Therefore, the likelihood of a specific dishonest statement existing is some number over infinity.

Thus it is reasonable to conclude that nobody is ever dishonest.

(Jabba, this makes as much sense as your argument.)

 

[JayUtah]

I think that I've done the best I can to answer that question.

You've done nothing but beg it.

The answer to the question is that under materialism there is no missing information. You must reckon P(E|H) as if the organism brings with it all that is identifiable to the person. And you must reckon it as if, were it possible to exactly reproduce the organism, the duplicate organism would be identical in all respects to the original.

But then, I do think that we're talking about the same experience...

No, you're trying to conflate proposed cause with the data. We are talking about self-awareness as the same subjective experience for both H and ~H, but you break with that as soon as you start talking about "a specific self-awareness" because then you're attributing to the data something that it doesn't have: countable distinction.

so I don't think that we have to agree upon exactly how it came about...

No, in the broadest scope we don't have to agree on how self-awareness comes about. And in fact a statistical inference is strictly based on having two or more incompatible hypotheses for how the data arose. But if your proof is built around an equation that requires you to compute P(E|H) you must use H as it is actually formulated. Your disagreement with H doesn't allow you to change it to something you agree with in this term. Similarly the fact that your critics likely disagree with ~H (again, false dilemma set aside for now) wouldn't allow them to object to an honest formulation of P(E|~H).

You simply don't know how properly to formulate a statistical inference, and you seem to think others can't tell that you don't.

...and can move to the likelihood of its current existence -- I say less than 1/10¹⁰⁰.

But you supply no rationale for this number. You simply plucked it out of the air and claimed everyone agrees with it. They do not, nor do they -- or should they -- agree with you simply plucking out of thin air all the numbers in your model. Now we're into the part of the argument where you demonstrate you don't know anything about degrees of freedom in a model and whether your model is appropriately constrained.

Further, your selection of a very small number for this probability is almost certainly traceable to your non-quantitative discussion of the data as "a specific self-awareness." Thus it's based on something that isn't materialism. Even as a bald estimate, basing an estimate for P(E|H) on something that isn't H is simply wrong.

Again, the problem with your model is not a nuance here or there. The problem with your model is that it is grossly broken in several fundamental ways, each of which is individually fatal to its validity.

 

[barehl]

All right, let's try it Jabba's way and see where that leads us.


Assumption: Souls exist independent material things.

Question: Do souls inhabit rocks? Does each grain of sand have a soul?

If yes then how is a rock with a soul different from a rock without a soul?

If no difference is detectable then souls have no evidence of existence; they can be ignored.

If no then:

Question: Do souls inhabit plants?

If yes then how is a plant with a soul different from a plant without a soul?

If no difference is detectable then souls have no evidence of existence; they can be ignored.

If no then:

Question: Is a soul the same as intelligence or memory?

If a soul is the same as memory then why don't we remember past lives? And do we lose part of our soul if we have amnesia?

If a soul is the same as intelligence then does a person born with developmental difficulties have less of a soul or no soul?

If a person with reduced mental capacity has a soul then do all animals have souls? Do bacteria have souls? If bacteria have souls then wouldn't all the cells in an organism's body also have separate souls?

Mental ability is adversely affected by brain damage. If intelligence and memory are independent of the material then these should not change. Since they do change they cannot be related to an immaterial soul.

Question: If a soul is not related to mental ability or memory then what does it relate to?

How is a person with a soul different from a person without a soul?

If no difference is detectable then souls have no evidence of existence; they can be ignored.


I think logic like this is what most people here have already considered and why they have concluded that souls either don't exist or have no detectable effect on us or on anything in our environment.

 

[barehl]

so I don't think that we have to agree upon exactly how it came about, and can move to the likelihood of its current existence -- I say less than 1/10¹⁰⁰.

The first mammals appeared 225 million years ago. Let's say that a generation on average is 1 year. I'm sure many here are better at statistics than me, but I would assume this would give you a rough estimate of 1 in 450 million. This would be 1 / 4.5 x 10⁸.

 

[Dancing David]

Potential dishonesty is unlimited. You could even say it's infinite.

Therefore, the likelihood of a specific dishonest statement existing is some number over infinity.

Thus it is reasonable to conclude that nobody is ever dishonest.

(Jabba, this makes as much sense as your argument.)

P(A|B) = P(B|A) * P(A) / P(B). P(A) and P(B)

 

[MRC_Hans]

- This is where we can't seem to communicate.
- By "specific self-awareness," I mean the experience that reincarnationists think returns to life. You have the same kind of experience, but don't think it will ever return to life. I think you know the experience to which I refer.

Jabba, seriously, we neither know nor care what exactly reincartionists think.
We all experience self-awareness, but there is nothing specific about it.

- Neither of us thinks that producing a perfect copy of my brain would bring ME back to life, nor do we believe that replicating your brain would bring YOU back to life.

Wrong. We do think it would bring us back to live. Obviously the former, original version would not be alive, but the copy would and would feel, think, act, and in everything BE like the original.

We both believe that replicating your brain would produce a new specific self-awareness, but we have no idea WHO that would be.

Wrong. The new self-awareness would be us.

Jabba, if you keep ignoring this, you are being deliberately obtuse. And that will be your loss, not ours.

- Fortunately, that shouldn't matter...
- Here, my objective is to determine the likelihood of the current existence of my SSA, given OOFLam -- and, I think that you now agree that 1/10¹⁰⁰ is a reasonable estimate. If you don't agree, that's what we need to be talking about.

That figure is a completely arbitrary number that you have drawn from someplace dark. I don't think ANYBODY else agree with you. And it doesn't matter.

Jabba, imagine we have a random number generator that can produce one of 10¹⁰⁰⁰ different numbers on the press of a button. Now, seriously tell me: If you press the button, will you get a number?

What is the likelihood that you will get a number when you press the button?

THAT is the same likelihood that you will exist and have a self: Someone pressed the button, and there you are!

How does it feel to ignore this?

Hans

 

[Jabba]

- So Dave, I think that the likelihood of the current existence of my SSA -- given OOFLam -- is less than 1/10¹⁰⁰. Do you disagree?

 

[JayUtah]

- So Dave, I think that the likelihood of the current existence of my SSA -- given OOFLam -- is less than 1/10¹⁰⁰. Do you disagree?

Don't be rude.

 

[godless dave]

- So Dave, I think that the likelihood of the current existence of my SSA -- given OOFLam -- is less than 1/10¹⁰⁰. Do you disagree?

It probably is. Do you agree that given the materialist model, the likelihood of the current existence of your specific self awareness is exactly the same as the likelihood of the current existence of your living physical body?

From past experience I know that if I agree with this point, you will then go on to claim that this low likelihood is somehow significant, even though it's not significant for all the other highly unlikely things that happen all the time. When pressed on why, you won't have a good answer. We'll ask why this isn't an example of the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy, and you won't have a good answer. Then you will go back to saying some number (probably 7 billion, for some unfathomable reason) over infinity as the likelihood. Then we will repeat the discussion of what the materialist model actually is. Then we'll end up right back here. So we might as well nail down the materialist model for self awareness now and save some time.

 

[jond]

- So Dave, I think that the likelihood of the current existence of my SSA -- given OOFLam -- is less than 1/10¹⁰⁰. Do you disagree?

So what? Whatever number you assign to it, the materialistic model (which only includes your brain) is still more likely than your model (which includes your brain AND a separate entity which could continue after your brain ceases functioning).