JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
Yup. When people asked him why his description of E, the observation of self-awareness, had so many irrelevant aspects that seem to refer to a soul, they asked him point-blank why he didn't just say "soul." His answer was that he didn't want to come right out and say "soul" because he was afraid people could see he was begging the question. So most of what he's doing now is a series of word games designed to hide the fact that he needs self-awareness described by E to include purports of attributes that would be provided by a soul, and his attempts to foist dualism onto H, the materialist hypothesis.
Yes, as I discuss in connection with Fatal Flaws 5 and 6, Jabba equivocates his variables to hide the false dilemma. Some days, one variable is the singular hypothesis and its noted complement is "everything else." Other days what his notation identifies as the complement is a singular hypothesis. Jabba's argument requires a bona fide dilemma because it's a process-of-elimination argument. He can't compute directly the probability of immortality, so he has to argue it's computed by subtracting from 1 the probability of everything else.
But both "immortality" and "everything else" comprise sets of potentially disparate hypotheses, which Jabba can't deal with mathematically. He just doesn't have the chops, or the data. So his dilemma is contrived, and subsequently invalid. "Everything else" reduces to materialism in his argument, and he used to play a shell game between P(H) and P(~H) as to which can be considered singular and well-formed. He simply doesn't have a formulation for P(immortality) that directly proves it to be a number very nearly 1, so he relies on purporting to show that P(something else) is very nearly zero, and that P(immortality) should be 1-P(something else), thus very nearly one.
Any time his critics reach consensus on how Jabba's terminology is specifically and provably misleading, he simply changes it so that they have to slog once again through nailing him down on what those terms really mean. R and NR have the same problems as H and ~H. But because they're purportedly new concepts in a new formulation, Jabba insists they be evaluated de novo.
Because Jabba doesn't understand statistical inference, he doesn't grasp that all he could defensibly do with his approach and this problem is to show something relative regarding P(immortality|datum)/P(something else|datum) for various values of something else -- say, materialism -- and for some given string of data, thus some P(immortality)/P(something else) as relative posterior probability assuming good data. For the problems statistical inference is actually used for, that would be valuable finding. But it wouldn't necessarily amount to proof of P(immortality). That's Fatal Flaw 2.
Jabba will never do this because it requires him to expose some rationale for computing P(immortality) directly. He doesn't have one of those. He hopes merely to derive it indirectly from P(something else) and never have to explain himself further. Moreover, depending on formulation, such a rationale might need him to specify individual theories for immortality. P(reincarnation|X)/P(materialism|X) cannot be assumed the same as P(Christian resurrection|X)/P(materialism|X). The last thing Jabba wants is to be on the hook to actually describe and prove what he claimed he could. He wants to infer it -- without further description, effort, or ado -- from the purported failure of some other theory, take his curtain call, and depart the stage. This is essentially what most fringe arguments look like. The actual proposed theory is never directly tested; its purported prevalence is inferred from purporting to have independently and objectively falsified the mainstream theory, therefore making any competing theory somehow more probable. This is expressly what Jabba argues when he insists that all he needs to run against materialism is "any reasonable alternative." He wants to foreclose the need to prove it's more reasonable than what was discarded.
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