Proof of Immortality, VII

[Belz...]

That is not what materialists claim.

Notice how Jabba made a mistake there. He says that under H the self is "linked" to a particular body, which flatly contradicts his claim that you'd see through two sets of eyes following a copy, also under H.

 

[JayUtah]

- OOFLam doesn't refer to the body (even for materialists) -- it refers to a particular awareness.

No. In materialism there is only the body. Self-awareness is a property of that body, and of any functioning human body.

Materialists claim that a particular awareness is completely linked to a particular body.

No. Materialists have no concept of "a particular self-awareness."

 

[godless dave]

Notice how Jabba made a mistake there. He says that under H the self is "linked" to a particular body, which flatly contradicts his claim that you'd see through two sets of eyes following a copy, also under H.

I think he's saying that if the bodies were identical, one awareness would be linked to two bodies.

 

[jond]

- OOFLam doesn't refer to the body (even for materialists) -- it refers to a particular awareness. Materialists claim that a particular awareness is completely linked to a particular body.

Wrong: the materialistic model is that awareness isn’t a thing, it’s a process generated by the brain. (You agreed to this back in late December.) Therefore, your current existence is entirely explained by th existence of your body. To get to immortality or reincarnation then requires a separate entity, which you also agreed to back in late December.

 

[Belz...]

I think he's saying that if the bodies were identical, one awareness would be linked to two bodies.

No, that's not how jabba uses the word "particular".

 

[Belz...]

Wrong: the materialistic model is that awareness isn’t a thing, it’s a process generated by the brain. (You agreed to this back in late December.) Therefore, your current existence is entirely explained by th existence of your body. To get to immortality or reincarnation then requires a separate entity, which you also agreed to back in late December.

He's also kind-of agreed today that body only is more likely than body+soul.

He can't help but lose, in the end.

 

[JayUtah]

So far, I think that your reservation refers to the 'Texas Sharpshooter" fallacy. Would you agree?

Stop trying to play the shell game, Jabba. You're admitting that your invocation of the Texas sharpshooter fallacy is a weak point in your argument, but the tacit predicate to that statement is that your argument is otherwise sound. You are fully aware that your argument is not otherwise sound. You have further admitted that you are unable to cure it, and go on to beg people not to hurt it too much. You were invited to turn over all the shells and prove that your game wasn't rigged. You refused to do that, so please tell us why we shouldn't assume that your plan is to keep bouncing from topic to topic with no other purpose than to waste time and irritate your critics into apoplexy.

 

[Thermal]

Thermal,
- By 'virtual proof' I am referring to mathematics, but only statistical. My claim is that my current existence -- given the typical non-religious hypothesis of Only One Finite Life (at most) -- is so unlikely as to virtually disprove that hypothesis.
- So far, I think that your reservation refers to the 'Texas Sharpshooter" fallacy. Would you agree?

Jabba:

Sooooort of. I think your hypothesis ascribes meaning to an insignificant probability. The odds of virtually any micro event viewed from the universal perspective are, as you say, vanishingly small. I would take that as a given, not extrapolate from it. The specific existence of anything shares that probability (assuming chaos), and should be viewed as a shared neutral state, as opposed to a staggeringly unique improbability.

 

[jond]

He's also kind-of agreed today that body only is more likely than body+soul.

He can't help but lose, in the end.

What is the likelihood that Jabba responds to SOdhner’s follow up post? Virtually zero?

 

[Belz...]

Zero. SOdhner and myself have made it impossible. He has to ignore the posts, as they are too devastating to his entire claim. I'm surprised he even answered the original problem.

 

[abaddon]

It's really not.

"The earth revolves around the sun in an ellipse as if some force were pulling it toward the sun" would be closer to a hypothesis.

The problem with your OOFLam is that it doesn't specify why each person only lives one finite life. When you started the thread all those years ago we assumed you meant a model where each person lives one finite life because in that model people are entirely physical, and we know bodies don't rise from the grave. That's why most of us in this thread believe we each have one finite life. But it eventually became clear that you were talking about a model where immaterial "selves" exist and are somehow connected to bodies, and those selves disappear at the same time the bodies die, and never come back. Those two models would have different prior probabilities and different likelihoods for a particular person existing.

And there is the problem. H, in Jabba's formulation, is OOFLAM which, according to Jabba, includes a soul. OOFLAM is therefore not materialism since materialism does not allow any such thing. Materialism therefore rightly belongs among Jabba's ~H set i.e. everything else.

Jabba's big deception is to attempt to argue against the materialist model by arguing against some other model he simply made up out of whole cloth. Jabba's OOFLAM model is simply materialism + one soul. The entire five year exercise has been Jabba attempting to foist that notion upon materialism by questionable means. Once again, I suggest that Jabba is a form of presuppositionalist. Materialists, in the Jabbaverse, already accept that there is a soul. Therefore he feels quite justified in inserting a soul into the materialist model even though it specifically precludes one.

ETA: And what is with OOFLAM? Only One Finite Life At Most. That is what it means. It is a daft notion. I have never met any person that has had some fraction of a finite life ever. Nobody has ever existed that had 1/4 of a life, or 1/10 of a life, or any other fraction. OOFLAM is fundamentally meaningless. Clearly, materialism would state that you have a single life of some length and that is it. OOL (Only One Life) would be more accurate. That life, under materialism, might be 120 years or 40 years or seconds even. Materialism does not much care.

But it certainly does not involve a soul.

 

[JayUtah]

I think your hypothesis ascribes meaning to an insignificant probability. The odds of virtually any micro event viewed from the universal perspective are, as you say, vanishingly small.

Correct, and we've brought up snowflakes, snowballs, bananas, Volkswagens, and individual North American mountains (Ranier is the favorite) as examples of items that exhibit individual variation in their emergent properties owing to chaotic elements in the processes that form them.

Jabba insists that consciousness, or self-awareness, is a special property unlike any other kind of emergent property of any other kind of matter, and thus can't be considered equivalent to any of those other examples. He will offer you a whole web of special pleading to support that insistence.

I should not that I may appear to differ from some of my colleagues in that I deny the individuality of self-awareness. That is, I argue that the property of self-awareness, consciousness, or whatever name you want to apply, is the same for all properly-formed humans. We are all self-aware. Each of us is self-aware in exactly the same way as another. This is illustrated by the property of a car on the freeway, that it "is going 60 mph." This is true of all cars going that speed, and there is not an individualized difference between the "going 60 mph" of one car and the "going 60 mph" of another car. The cars are obviously individuals, but the property is not. It is not discretizable.

My colleagues seem to fully agree with the above, but for some purposes wish to conflate such things as sensory input and memories into the observation of self-awareness. In materialism, memories are stored in the brain as chemical and physical configurations of the brain's physiology. But then again in materialism, self-awareness and consciousness are the product of properties exhibited by that same brain physiology, so an argument can be made that the process named by the property should be individualized accordingly. It's not a big deal, of course, but you should be advise of it.

 

[JayUtah]

Zero. SOdhner and myself have made it impossible. He has to ignore the posts, as they are too devastating to his entire claim.

And he knows, and "virtually" admits, they are. This is why he has to try to foist all sorts of ground rules that propose to limit what posts he is liable for answering, so that it seems his evasion is justified. If you don't stroke his ego just right, according to those rules, he says he is justified in ignoring you. Or if you post too much. Or too little. Or if he doesn't have time.

 

[jond]

Zero. SOdhner and myself have made it impossible. He has to ignore the posts, as they are too devastating to his entire claim. I'm surprised he even answered the original problem.

Indeed, that was a surprise. And, yes, it is obviously an obvious destruction of his claim.

 

[Belz...]

Materialists, in the Jabbaverse, already accept that there is a soul. Therefore he feels quite justified in inserting a soul into the materialist model even though it specifically precludes one.

That's pretty much the only hypothesis that makes sense. He thinks we already secretly agree with him that souls exist. He doesn't seem to consider the possibility that we might actually think they don't.

 

[RoboTimbo]

- OOFLam doesn't refer to the body (even for materialists)

Of course it does. Why do you continue to lie about materialism? What else would materialism refer to? Try and think about the word materialism.

-- it refers to a particular awareness.

Awareness isn't particular, as you've been told hundreds of times. You continue to lie about it.

Materialists claim that a particular awareness is completely linked to a particular body.

Materialism makes no such claim. The very phrase makes no sense in materialistic terms.

Materialism asks again that you stop misrepresenting it.

 

[Belz...]

I should not that I may appear to differ from some of my colleagues in that I deny the individuality of self-awareness. That is, I argue that the property of self-awareness, consciousness, or whatever name you want to apply, is the same for all properly-formed humans. We are all self-aware. Each of us is self-aware in exactly the same way as another. This is illustrated by the property of a car on the freeway, that it "is going 60 mph." This is true of all cars going that speed, and there is not an individualized difference between the "going 60 mph" of one car and the "going 60 mph" of another car. The cars are obviously individuals, but the property is not. It is not discretizable.

Makes sense to me.

 

[Dave Rogers]

Jabba's big deception is to attempt to argue against the materialist model by arguing against some other model he simply made up out of whole cloth. Jabba's OOFLAM model is simply materialism + one soul. The entire five year exercise has been Jabba attempting to foist that notion upon materialism by questionable means.

He's even gone so far as to virtually admit that he's doing that (for Jabbaverse values of the variable "virtually").

-- to me, OOFLam is an obvious hypothesis. Maybe, I shouldn't call it the consensus Scientific hypothesis. Would it help to just call it one of the non-religious hypotheses about mortality?

It seems that, rather than trying to disprove materialism, he now thinks he's trying to disprove "one of the non-religious hypotheses about mortality," and for some reason still thinks that disproving one hypothesis about mortality that he's made up himself will somehow disprove mortality.

Dave

 

[halleyscomet]

I'm impressed. Jabba's managed to conjure up a completely new misunderstanding. I thought he'd already done them all.

Dave

It's an anomaly in the neurology of the current Jabba clone. It's very exciting as this is the first novel thought processes we've detected from a Jabba clone in a god six iterations.

How many legs does the cake have?

That depends on if the cake is a lie.

 

[Dancing David]

- OOFLam doesn't refer to the body (even for materialists) -- it refers to a particular awareness. Materialists claim that a particular awareness is completely linked to a particular body.

And that the process is ephemeral , changing and inconstant: never the same from moment to moment