Proof of Immortality, VII

Status
Not open for further replies.
The Sparrow said:
Jabba insists that humans are MORE than just the body and brain, that they are receiving a "soul transmission". The soul would not be copied, therefore the copy would be an incomplete copy. It would be (as he has said) "missing something".
He is presupposing materialism is false in order to show materialism as false.
Click to expand...

Yes, that's absolutely correct. One strand of Jabba's argument is based on shoe-horning the concept of a soul into materialism, pointing out that the concept of a soul is inconsistent with materialism, and claiming on that basis that materialism contains an internal contradiction. This is why he continually tries to equate the process of consciousness with the soul, with his 'process/thing/experience' construction, a transparently obvious attempt to employ the fallacy of equivocation. But there are other strands, equally fallacious, such as his equivocation between the absolute probability of his existence at this particular moment and the conditional probability of his existence at this particular moment given that his soul has been created, or his unevaluated inequality fallacy between the conditional probability of his existence given materialism and its complement.

Dave
 
Mojo said:
Oh good. A word that Jabba hasn't used for it yet.
Click to expand...

Also a word I haven't used for it. Whatever you think "it" is.

zooterkin said:
Not without a brain.
Click to expand...

Unlike your moot caveat.

Belz... said:
You must be joking.

Consciousness is one of the most fleeting things in the universe. Free neutrons last longer.
Click to expand...

Careful. You might convince yourself it doesn't matter if you walk out in front of a train, because your sentience won't last long enough to know what hit you anyway.

But my sentience lasted long enough for me to answer that question I answered yesterday. Plus, I'm sufficiently confident it's the same sentience it was yesterday that I would bet that way if my life depended on it. How about you? How would you bet?

Huh. Completely reasonable 3 word response to 1 question results in 3 attacks on completely reasonable 3 word response.

That's one attack per word. I'm outta here. Boring party anyway. Mundaneness squared.
 
Toontown said:
Careful. You might convince yourself it doesn't matter if you walk out in front of a train, because your sentience won't last long enough to know what hit you anyway.
Click to expand...

Nonsense. Ants know to avoid danger and they're not conscious in any way you or I would understand. Robots can do that too.

Consciousness is not awareness. And you also apparently misunderstood what I said: consciousness is fleeting. It is not persistent because it keeps being reset, killed off and remade, and generated. It's like "going 60 mph" in that sense.

But my sentience lasted long enough for me to answer that question I answered yesterday.
Click to expand...

You don't know that. You have no way to know if the "sentience" that reads this word here is the same that began the sentence or the same that ends up here. The illusion of continuity is strong, but it is just that: an illusion. And as you may know, your consciousness is just an effect; an observer. It doesn't make decisions, so it's actually useless beyond giving us an inflated sense of importance.

Plus, I'm sufficiently confident it's the same sentience it was yesterday that I would bet that way if my life depended on it. How about you? How would you bet?
Click to expand...

I'd bet against it, since I lost consciousness at the very least when I went to bed and for several hours. Who's to say that "me" today is the same "me" as yesterday or a second ago? Sure, I have access to Belz...'s memories from yesterday and I have the feeling of being the same person, but how could I even tell the difference?

Huh. Completely reasonable 3 word response to 1 question results in 3 attacks on completely reasonable 3 word response.

That's one attack per word. I'm outta here. Boring party anyway. Mundaneness squared.
Click to expand...

If you think challenging your claims is an attack, you have an odd view of how human interactions work.
 
Last edited:
Toontown said:
I don't hold you responsible for Jabba's floundering. I don't even hold you responsible for your own floundering. I merely joke about it occasionally.
Click to expand...
A smiley would help to distinguish a serious post from the occasional joke so misunderstandings are less likely to occur.



JoeMorgue said:

Of course it bloody is.

The moment we put the "Under Materialism" disclaimer on our stance we delivered on a silver platter a meaningless distinction for Jabba to dance on forever.

I get that I harp on this a lot but it's just so functionally insane to me. We're stuck in an argument where we had to put "Unless reality doesn't exist" as a modifier in our argument. It's just inviting the idea that it's possible under some other... something. We've allowed "Invoking magic" into the discussion.

It's what Jabba and all the thread nannies are using against us the most.
Click to expand...
Which is why I'm starting to use the phrase "for all intents and purposes..." I'm trying that in an effort to move off the materialist merry-go-round we've been stuck on for years.
 
Heh. I look into this thread every ten pages or so. It's all the same, every time:

- Jabba is droning along somewhere in his circular maze of tracks.

- A small heroic band of opponents are trying, in vain, to take a chip out of his Titanium Illogic Armor.

- Toontown pops in occasionally to throw largely incomprehensible insults at everyone, imagining he/she sounds smart. He/she is, not surprisingly, mostly ignored.

.... forever ... .... ....

Hans
 
Last edited:
caveman1917 said:
GOTO 1892. Exit condition:
Click to expand...

That doesn't even come close to responding to my post. I can only assume you're blindly replying to anything about this part of the discussion without really reading it.

Toontown said:
Plus, I'm sufficiently confident it's the same sentience it was yesterday that I would bet that way if my life depended on it. How about you? How would you bet?
Click to expand...

Oh I'd bet against it for sure. Similar, yes. "Same" even, in the general conversational sense where we're not really worried about details. But if you get some good deep sleep then it's not continuous, and in the morning there are differences from who you were when it last broke apart into sleep mode. So I'd say if we're being technical about it it's not the same one at all.

I'd compare it to a program on a computer. The same program is running, but not the same instance of that program - and as the program runs some of the settings change, data is logged, etc. so that each morning when you run it again there are minor differences. And when the program is shut down and you're defragging your hard drive it's not running at all.
 
MRC_Hans said:
Heh. I look into this thread every ten pages or so. It's all the same, every time:

- Jabba is droning along somewhere in his circular maze of tracks.

- A small heroic band of opponents are trying, in vain, to take a chip out of his Titanium Illogic Armor.

- Toontown pops in occasionally to throw largely incomprehensible insults at everyone, imagining he/she sounds smart. He/she is, not surprisingly, largely ignored.

.... forever ... .... ....

Hans
Click to expand...

You forgot Caveman in your cast of characters.
 
Dave Rogers said:
To be fair, responding to criticism by repeating the original assertion seems to be on-topic for this thread.
Click to expand...

well I can't argue with that. I do wonder how far we can take this particular technique of Caveman's though... insist that someone use our obviously flawed comparison and then dismiss them because it's flawed, I mean that's a special kind of genius. I think we can take it to the next logical step though, and just replace the whole post:

Caveman, if you can't replace the words in your post with "Goo goo ga-joob, I am the Walrus" and not sound like a crazy person your point is invalid.

Steve said:
Are you suggesting that the original assertions is immortal? :D
Click to expand...

It certainly refuses to die, but I'm not convinced it has a soul.
 
SOdhner said:
I'd compare it to a program on a computer. The same program is running, but not the same instance of that program - and as the program runs some of the settings change, data is logged, etc. so that each morning when you run it again there are minor differences. And when the program is shut down and you're defragging your hard drive it's not running at all.
Click to expand...

Even worse: computer programs that run aren't a single thing or "entity". They're a collection of processes composed of electrical impulses that are all different from each other but appear to be a single thing. You know, like the "self".

There is no continuity from one moment to the next.
 
Last edited:
Belz... said:
Even worse: computer programs that run aren't a single thing or "entity". They're a collection of processes composed of electrical impulses that are all different from each other but appear to be a single thing. You know, like the "self".
Click to expand...

Exactly. And this is what Jabba doesn't seem to get. The program (thing that is actually running) is based on the program (lines of code stored on the computer) but:

1. They aren't the same thing.
2. The thing that's running is temporary and made up of electrical impulses.
3. If I re-create the lines of code, given all the same variables, the result will be identical.
4. The thing that is running simply doesn't exist once it's gone.

He wants to confuse the three meanings of 'program' (thing that's running, lines of code, and the act of coding). He wants to blindly insist that it MUST continue to exist once you've melted the whole computer down to slag, AND he wants to say that all computer designers and programmers agree with him about this even though they clearly don't.
 
Dave Rogers said:
To be fair, responding to criticism by repeating the original assertion seems to be on-topic for this thread.

Dave
Click to expand...

There is no criticism. It's just the umpteenth unsupported repetition of the same simplistic misconception, but with the newest set of cosmetic changes and fluff. In a previous iteration he was asked to properly define a probability space and formalize his claims and he failed (or refused) to do so.

If one were to formalize this specific misconception one would see that it is formally equivalent to the torso/legs counter-example (there's a reason that "loop exit condition" is there). And do you know what having a counter-example to a theorem does, Dave? What it tells you? It tells you that there does not exist a proof of the theorem. That's it, done, finito, moving on... So you see, from my perspective I don't even need to bother reading whatever is imagined to be the latest "argument" for this specific claim.
 
Last edited:
Status
Not open for further replies.

Back
Top Bottom