Proof of Immortality, VII

[Belz...]

If we are only temporary, however, the probability of me ever existing is teensy-weensy, or vanishingly small.

No, that's nonsense. If you mean the probability of you existing right now instead, the problem is that you'll always be existing right now when you're thinking about it.

 

[abaddon]

Clearly, whoever currently owns Jabba's old domain, http://shrouddebates.com, agrees with your assessment.

Hmmm. New registrant as of 18-Dec-2017. I am guessing Jabba forgot his renewal and some wag grabbed it. And added an appropriate redirect.

 

[JayUtah]

How and where have I misrepresented the non-religious hypothesis?

Why don't you go back and read the answers that were given to you the last time you asked this very same question. They have not changed.

 

[JayUtah]

- Here's the latest version of my syllogism.

And here's the list of things wrong with it. And here's you admitting that you can't answer them. The end.

So explain why, if you're not just trolling at this point, you can't seem to manage any more sophisticated or intelligent a contribution than a lengthy repetition your long-debunked claims for the umpteenth time. Seriously -- explain why a thinking person should pay the slightest attention to you from now on. You've lost, and you've admitted that you lost, but you won't stop. Man up and give your critics the credit you seem to agree they deserve.

Also in that post is you whimpering about how you just can't keep up with your critics. Imagine how convincing that argument seems now that you've demonstrated your ability and willingness to write a wall of text that simply restates what you've been claiming all along, without the slightest attention paid to anything that's been said to you. Clearly you have the time to answer these issues -- you just apparently don't have the brains. And, clearly, addressing your critics is not something you actually do, and hence is not much of an impediment to your effort. So stop blaming your abject failure on everyone else and the dog and do what you know you should do.

 

[Thermal]

The probability that you exist in a universe in which you can be surprised by your existence is 1, no matter how temporary that existence is.


The probability that you exist at a time during which you can be surprised by your existence is 1, no matter how temporary that existence is.

Note that your existence is never new information for any hypothesis you form. It's always a given.

This is what I don't understand about poster Jabba's argument. The odds of any specific small outcome, taken from the universal perspective, are vanishingly small. So what? That doesn't prove immortality. It proves the universe is big.

 

[godless dave]

This is what I don't understand about poster Jabba's argument. The odds of any specific small outcome, taken from the universal perspective, are vanishingly small. So what? That doesn't prove immortality. It proves the universe is big.

Various people have asked Jabba this. We haven't really gotten an answer.

 

[Dave Rogers]

Yawn. For wollery's computers: P(E|~H) = 2 * P(E|H). Since twice as many computers exist with a keyboard than without one, for any specific computer it is twice as likely to exist if it has a keyboard than if it doesn't, for basically the same reason that you're twice as likely to win a lottery if two winning numbers get drawn rather than one.

The fact that you continue to mis-state the claim is pretty convincing proof that you don't understand what it is that you're responding to. Try turning off the arrogance and actually reading the posts. I suggest you GOTO #2405 and try to understand what somebodyelse is sayiong, rather than listening to your own echo chamber. And every time you mis-state the claim I've made to try and ridicule it, I'll re-direct you, if that helps; you seem to think that's a good approach.

There is a set of all possible souls and a set of all possible bodies in Jabba's mythology; his existence requires a specific one of each, and he's made it quite clear that it's the specific combination of his current soul and his current body that is the condition he believes to be set apart. In his mythology, therefore, E represents independent choices of two different entities.

And incidentally, even if E is supposed to represent the same set throughout the expression, it probably doesn't when Jabba formulates it.

Dave

 

[halleyscomet]

Hmmm. New registrant as of 18-Dec-2017. I am guessing Jabba forgot his renewal and some wag grabbed it. And added an appropriate redirect.

At least it hasn't been turned into a hardcore porn site.

Yet.

 

[JayUtah]

This is what I don't understand about poster Jabba's argument. The odds of any specific small outcome, taken from the universal perspective, are vanishingly small. So what? That doesn't prove immortality. It proves the universe is big.

Jabba generally dances around this by equivocating the nature of the specificity and how the outcome is characterized. In today's restatement of his claim, the outcome is SSA, for "specific self-awareness." In Jabba's proposed terminology this refers to an entity, "a self-awarness," rather than merely to the property of being self-aware. This entity is then characterized as the vital element of a dualistic theory -- "looking out through ... [a] pair of eyes." It has a property-sounding name ("self-awareness") but a distinctly entity-seeming characterization. By that equivocation Jabba evidently hopes to lure some skeptic into cursory agreement. Jabba then declares that this dualistic contrivance is somehow unpredictable via any materialistic notion; that it is in effect a product not only of the intractably chaotic system of mammalian genetics, but also of the supposedly irreproducible and irreducible (and by Jabba, as yet undescribed) character of this "particular self-awareness."

Having thus attempted to veil dualism in a thin gauze of lexical contrivances, he then goes on to brazenly commit the Texas sharpshooter fallacy. The probability that some outcome occurs from among a plethora of possible outcomes is meaningful only if the meaning existed prior to the outcome. Jabba feebly suggests that it is possible to retrospectively assign that meaning, but gives only convoluted examples in which the meaning existed prior to the outcome but was discovered only afterward. In short, he argues that the Texas sharpshooter fallacy should not be a fallacy. He tries to conflate the notion that a particular outcome occurred with the vastly different notion that a particular outcome is significant.

 

[Dave Rogers]

This is what I don't understand about poster Jabba's argument. The odds of any specific small outcome, taken from the universal perspective, are vanishingly small. So what? That doesn't prove immortality. It proves the universe is big.

I think Jabba wants to prove that the probability of his existence is so small under materialism that materialism must be false. This requires a proof of the theorem that there exists a positive non-zero number X such that X<<Y for all positive non-zero values of Y. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to work out how absurd a claim that is.

Dave

 

[JoeMorgue]

This is what I don't understand about poster Jabba's argument. The odds of any specific small outcome, taken from the universal perspective, are vanishingly small. So what? That doesn't prove immortality. It proves the universe is big.

A dozen plus people have spent literally over half a decade trying to get anything that resembles an answer to that question out of Jabba.

All we've got for it is stalling and fringe resets from Jabba and a handful of thread nannies running in to scold us.

 

[Belz...]

A dozen plus people have spent literally over half a decade trying to get anything that resembles an answer to that question out of Jabba.

All we've got for it is stalling and fringe resets from Jabba and a handful of thread nannies running in to scold us.

It's like watching a 50,000 hour version of 12 Angry Men where juror 3 never breaks down and just keeps blathering about bleeding hearts and damned kids for the rest of the movie.

 

[JoeMorgue]

This thread make Andy Warhol's Empire look like a Paul Greengrass film.

 

[Jabba]

Do you not remember the whole discussion about this we had just a couple days ago?

Here's yet another example from your most recent post:

Here’s how it works.
The likelihood of drawing a particular sample from a particular population has mathematical implications re the likelihood that a particular sample was, in fact, drawn from that population… You might want to read that again…

The non-religious hypothesis about human senses of self does not involve drawing samples from a population.

Dave,
- You quoted the hilite. The whole sentence is a fact utilized by Bayesian statistics to re-evaluate a hypothesis -- whether religious or not.

 

[godless dave]

Dave,
- You quoted the hilite. The whole sentence is a fact utilized by Bayesian statistics to re-evaluate a hypothesis -- whether religious or not.

But when we're talking about the non-religious hypothesis we are not talking about drawing a sample from a population. Bayesian statistics can be used to evaluate hypotheses that don't involved drawing samples from populations.

 

[John Jones]

- Here's the latest version of my syllogism.
[...]

I'm not reading that swill again.

 

[SOdhner]

Here's the latest version of my syllogism.

Wheee! Fringe reset!

Or, it could be that all possible events – given H – are equally unlikely (e.g. a fair lottery) — if so, the particular event needs to be “set apart” in a way that is relevant to the hypothesis in order to impact the hypothesis.

I mean, kinda. I'll interpret this in the most charitable way and say I agree... but then wait! You want to say that *you* are set apart somehow, and you have literally zero justification for this. Essentially you say "I must be set apart somehow because otherwise it would be devastating to my case!" which... is not how this works. What makes you special, Jabba? Especially since you've already said that this argument remains true regardless of who uses it?

I claim that by using my own current existence as the new info, Bayesian Statistics, virtually proves that we humans are not mortal.

But you're not "new info". I mean, "The person formulating this argument exists" is by definition not new info. It can't be, ever. You're so totally and obviously wrong. If you think I'm wrong, you would need to point to all the arguments made by people who *don't* exist as a rebuttal. I would love to see that.

the probability of a hypothesis being true is affected by the likelihood of samples actually drawn from the involved population — given that hypothesis.

Again, giving you the most charitable reading I'll agree with this. It also has nothing to do with your actual argument because you fail to honestly evaluate probabilities or examine the probabilities under alternate hypothesises(ses)*

According to the typical, non-religious model of reality, each of us is temporary and singular — at best.

What do you mean by "at best"? Can I live a half life? Can I live zero times? if so, what would "I" be? Can I live a negative number of times? Why, when you know we all object to the "at best" thing, do you insist on still using it?

Also it depends on what you mean by a lot of those other words. Sometimes you use "us" or whatever to mean our sense of consciousness, but we often stop having that and then start again. Sometimes we even lose brain function to the point where we would say someone has died, and then get going again. The "singular" thing - maybe? Really depends on how you define it. I could argue that if you're really focused on my sense of self then I'm just one of a long chain of "me"s that will exist as emergent properties of this body (with this body also gradually changing over time). So I'm not prepared to agree with the singular thing. But I'll give you "temporary".

By “we,” I mean we “selves” or senses of self” or “specific self-awarenesses” (SSA) or even “souls” (if “soul’ isn’t defined as immortal) — in other words, what reincarnationists think keep coming back to life.

Aaaaand you've gone off the rails. Badly. Critically. You said this was for the non-religious version. So no, you're totally wrong with the above. Do not pass go. This is a total halt.

If we are only temporary, however, the probability of me ever existing is teensy-weensy, or vanishingly small. I’m damned lucky to ever be here.
And as now happens to be now, I’m even luckier than that.

No, that's wrong. You're one hundred percent guaranteed to be here, because the person talking about the likelihood of existing always exists. If you're saying that's not the case then we also have to look at your argument and see if it holds up when presented by a person that doesn't exist. Let's use my old friend Gazorpazorp Washington.

Oh man! Gazorpazorp is unlikely to exist and in fact doesn't exist, therefore confirming the non-religious model! So I guess you're not immortal. In fact, I have another eleventy-squintillion people that don't exist, and it turns out none of them exist either so you're just one in elevnty-squintillion which about matches your predicted likelihood. So that's solved.

But then, is my current SSA “set apart” from all the other SSAs?

It's not. Also "SSA" isn't a thing.

My SSA is the only thing or process that I know exists — the rest could be my imagination.

This logic requires you to exist and is therefore circular reasoning. You're using blatant circular reasoning, Jabba. Look at it for like one second.

And every once in a while, someone gets a poker hand of 4 aces.

We decided that having four aces is important to the game of poker *before* that hand was dealt. If you want to use that comparison for your thing we need to pick a person that doesn't exist right now and see if they come into existence.

Okay that's plenty. It's not like he'll learn anyway. Plus I went to lunch with this window open so probably like a hundred people have already replied better than me in the meantime anyway.


*Just... a total brain fart trying to write that word. I could fix it but at this point I kinda like it.

 

[halleyscomet]

Dave,
- You quoted the hilite. The whole sentence is a fact utilized by Bayesian statistics to re-evaluate a hypothesis -- whether religious or not.

Perhaps you just need to find a different logical loophole.

 

[theprestige]

It's like watching a 50,000 hour version of 12 Angry Men where juror 3 never breaks down and just keeps blathering about bleeding hearts and damned kids for the rest of the movie.

And a couple prospective jurors keep barging in from the waiting room to wave their hands around and tell the other 11 angry men that they're doing jury duty wrong.

 

[RoboTimbo]

Dave,
- You quoted the hilite. The whole sentence is a fact utilized by Bayesian statistics to re-evaluate a hypothesis -- whether religious or not.

I appreciate your admission that you know that you are trying to use Bayesian inference where it doesn't apply.

When will you be able to correct your syllogism to reflect your admission of incompetence?