Proof of Immortality, VII

[Belz...]

That's always been the weirdest part of this. At any point Jabba could just invoke a religious belief in a soul and.... sorta win.

Indeed. Once you admit to not having any evidence or argument but maintain your belief, that's the end of the discussion and you can still hold your head high.

But that's not what Jabba wants.

 

[godless dave]

Indeed. Once you admit to not having any evidence or argument but maintain your belief, that's the end of the discussion and you can still hold your head high.

I personally wouldn't feel right holding my head high in such a situation but hundreds of millions of people do.

 

[Belz...]

I personally wouldn't feel right holding my head high in such a situation but hundreds of millions of people do.

Sure. I think it's legitimate to hold a belief in the absence of evidence or even against it, so long as you realise and admit it. It's not my cup of tea, but I don't mind it. It's the ones insisting that they are objectively, provably correct despite everything that bug me.

 

[JayUtah]

You just don't understand the math.

Bwahaha! You're actually going to try to play this card when not more than six months ago you were referring to the "Bayesian instructions" for advice on how to formulate your problem, and you were confessing to your critics that you didn't really understand how the formula worked? Heavens, you even challenged your critics to try to find something in "the Bayesian instructions" that specifically forbade the exact error you had made. That's how desperate you were to avoid being called out on your ineptitude. And you're really going to play this card after every statistician you've consulted has told you that you were wrong -- and some in not very unmistakable terms? "Profound ignorance" was thrown about. The statisticians' forum you consulted accused you of trying to completely reinvent probability theory in fanciful terms in order to make your proof work.

The evidence shows you are not a competent mathematician.

And frankly your blatant ego-stroking has gotten out of hand, to the point of destroying any semblance of this thread as a serious discussion of your proof. I'm sure you want some hypothetical "neutral jury" to buy into the bluster that you're an unsung genius mathematician who has single-handedly proven one of the most elusive propositions in all of philosophy. I suspect your "neutral jury" won't have a single mathematician on it, just as your cheering section of sycophantic Shroudies didn't have a single scientist or mathematician among them. You were able to fool them, but you failed to fool anyone who exercised even a modicum of critical thinking. I suppose your continuing to insult your critics in this particular way must be some effort to convince yourself that you are somehow still the imaginary hero you pretended to be for the Shroudies. But in this case you're up against critics who have actual expertise in mathematics and have given you actual, precise reasons why your proof doesn't work. "You just don't understand the math," is an insulting rejoinder when you pointedly decline to put your money where your mouth is and address the mathematical errors.

Likelihood," here, is the probability of an event (the current existence of my self) given reincarnation, and given OOFLam.
...
When you talk about evidence for reincarnation, you're talking about the "prior probability" of reincarnation.

And this the error you have specifically committed. You told us P(E|H) had to be very small because you didn't believe in materialism, H. You specifically tried to reckon the likelihood as if it were allowed to incorporate the prior, P(H), and you are still trying to the same thing. And because you formulate your problem incorrectly as a false dilemma, you think you can reckon immortality as 1 minus the likelihood of materialism, when in the best you could ever hope for is relative likelihood between two specific propositions. This is a cardinal rule of statistical inference. Further, the likelihood function P(E|H) in your model is nothing more than some nonsensical pseudo-rationale you just made up, not something actually observed. P(E|~H) is missing in action, assigned a similarly made-up value and based on nothing observed.

You seem to be trying to break out of the false dilemma by choosing "reincarnation" as a singular hypothesis to run against materialism, such that you can present P(E|M)/P(E|R) where M is materialism, R is reincarnation, and E is the observation that you exist as a conscious being. But it's been shown that you don't actually know what reincarnation is, at least as described among those who believe in it. Nor have you shown us any data pertaining to reincarnation, such that P(E|R) would have any toehold in fact -- which it must have, if its probability distribution over some subsequent parameter is to have any meaning. Further, you haven't reconciled that what you really need is animism, and that few if any reincarnationists actually believe in animism, that you have no data for animism, and that animism doesn't inevitably result in immortality.

And in the midst of this mathematical minestrone, you have the temerity to accuse your critics of not understanding the math.

 

[Monza]

That's always been the weirdest part of this. At any point Jabba could just invoke a religious belief in a soul and.... sorta win.

This thread originated in the Science and Mathematics sub-forum. It was eventually moved over to the Religious sub-forum to accommodate Jabba's veiled reference to a soul.

 

[theprestige]

That's always been the weirdest part of this. At any point Jabba could just invoke a religious belief in a soul and.... sorta win.

Not really. He's already invoked a religious belief in a soul, as his starting point. His stated win condition is to provide scientific support for his religious belief.

 

[Jabba]

Dave,

- "What we've got here is a failure to communicate."

- If we were able to produce a perfect copy of your body/brain, we would have no idea who the new self would be. But, we're pretty sure it wouldn't be you.

That may be the case in your reincarnation model, but it is not the case in the materialist model. In the materialist model, we would know for sure that a copy of me wouldn't be me because 1+1=2. We also would know that the copy would be identical to me in every respect. There is nothing we would know about the original that we wouldn't also know about the copy.

Dave,
- Each of us humans has a personal sense of awareness. According to materialism, any specific personal sense of awareness (such as yours or mine) can only exist once, at most. The copy of you would have a different personal sense of awareness than you.

 

[godless dave]

Dave,
- Each of us humans has a personal sense of awareness. According to materialism, any specific personal sense of awareness (such as yours or mine) can only exist once, at most. The copy of you would have a different personal sense of awareness than you.

OK? Of course it would have a different personal sense of self awareness - it would be a different body. It would be "different" in exactly the same way the body was different. We would still know which body it was, and thus "who" it was.

 

[JayUtah]

Each of us humans has a personal sense of awareness.

I disagree with godless dave here. Each human has a "particular" sense of self-awareness only in the same sense that every car on the highway has a "particular" going-60-mph.

According to materialism...

According to materialism the sense of self is a property. It is not an entity. It is not individualized.

Remember when people accused you of misrepresenting materialism? You're doing it again.

 

[JayUtah]

According to materialism, any specific personal sense of awareness (such as yours or mine) can only exist once, at most.

No. According to materialism, any property associated with an entity would be putatively observable any time the entity exists, and would be commensurately reproducible with the material itself. Qualifications like "specific" or "particular" or "personal" simply have no meaning in the framework of properties and entities as materialism conceives of them. You're trying very, very hard to make a property seem like an entity, not because they are but because you need countable entities in order to shoehorn the facts into your preconceived model. Properties are not individualized under materialism, no matter how hard you need them to be. Thus a model that requires countable entities cannot apply to a property.

The copy of you would have a different personal sense of awareness than you.

As usual you're equivocating on "different." Please try rephrasing your argument in terms of the commonly accepted definitions of "distinct" (numerical countability) and "indistinguishable" (qualitative comparison of properties). I bet you can't do it. I bet you can't make sense of your own argument unless you're allowed to use equivocal language.

 

[RoboTimbo]

Dave,
- Each of us humans has a personal sense of awareness. According to materialism, any specific personal sense of awareness (such as yours or mine) can only exist once, at most.

Which, you agree, is an idiotic thing to attribute to materialism. Does materialism also say that a specific going 60 mph can exist only once, at most?

Are you capable of understanding the argument, Jabba?

The copy of you would have a different personal sense of awareness than you.

The JILpu (Jabba Immortal Lie per usual). In what sense are you using the word "different" this time? You've been caught so many times in this one, you've become numb to it.

 

[John Jones]

Dave,
- Each of us humans has a personal sense of awareness. According to materialism, any specific personal sense of awareness (such as yours or mine) can only exist once, at most. The copy of you would have a different personal sense of awareness than you.

You don't get to speak for each of us humans. Take a poll before you try it, Popeye.

 

[JoeMorgue]

Jabba,

Stop lying about what other people believe.

 

[Belz...]

Dave,
- Each of us humans has a personal sense of awareness. According to materialism, any specific personal sense of awareness (such as yours or mine) can only exist once, at most. The copy of you would have a different personal sense of awareness than you.

So do you, every other moment. Are you not jabba anymore?

 

[Dave Rogers]

Dave,
- Each of us humans has a personal sense of awareness. According to materialism, any specific personal sense of awareness (such as yours or mine) can only exist once, at most. The copy of you would have a different personal sense of awareness than you.

And here we go with another fringe reset and another attempt to dictate that materialists believe that there is such a thing as a soul but with a different name. No, Jabba; according to materialism the personal sense of awareness is a process, not an object, and according to materialism there is no object that takes the place of the soul.

Dave

 

[abaddon]

Dave,
- Each of us humans has a personal sense of awareness. According to materialism, any specific personal sense of awareness (such as yours or mine) can only exist once, at most. The copy of you would have a different personal sense of awareness than you.

Jabba, you persist in tagging on the highlighted rubbish despite being asked explicitly what it actually means.

Do you think you can define it? I don't believe even you know what it means, nor it's implications.

According to that, it must be possible to have 0.25 of a life in the jabbaverse since one finite life is the most one can have.

I have asked more than once, but you seem to be unable to explain it. I can only conclude that it is meaningless, and you simply tossed it into your argument for no reason other than you thought it sounded "cool".

 

[zooterkin]

Dave,
- Each of us humans has a personal sense of awareness. According to materialism, any specific personal sense of awareness (such as yours or mine) can only exist once, at most. The copy of you would have a different personal sense of awareness than you.

Leaving aside the fact that you're misrepresenting materialism, yet again, you are also not describing what you yourself have claimed.

You do not have any recollection of any personal sense of awareness in 1880, so where is your evidence for that?

How does 'personal sense of awareness' bear any relationship to the 'bucket of consciousness' you keep referring to?

 

[abaddon]

Leaving aside the fact that you're misrepresenting materialism, yet again, you are also not describing what you yourself have claimed.

You do not have any recollection of any personal sense of awareness in 1880, so where is your evidence for that?

How does 'personal sense of awareness' bear any relationship to the 'bucket of consciousness' you keep referring to?

Wait. Jabba has stated that he has absolutely no recall of faffing about around in 1880, but he definitely must have done so because he is immortal even though he has no memory of it.

This from a man who cannot remember his own posts? (Except when it is convenient)

Seriously?

 

[Mojo]

Wait. Jabba has stated that he has absolutely no recall of faffing about around in 1880, but he definitely must have done so because he is immortal even though he has no memory of it.

This from a man who cannot remember his own posts?

If Jabba doesn't remember doing something it is clearly quite likely that he did it.

 

[halleyscomet]

And here we go with another fringe reset and another attempt to dictate that materialists believe that there is such a thing as a soul but with a different name. No, Jabba; according to materialism the personal sense of awareness is a process, not an object, and according to materialism there is no object that takes the place of the soul.



Dave

Wait! Wait! I’ve figured it out!

Jabba is a Trill who was never approved to get a symbiont and he’s STILL bitter about it.