Proof of Immortality, VII

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JayUtah said:
...For someone nearly obsessed with the notion of friendliness in debate, you seem oddly deferential to a poster well known for being pompous and condescending. Would you care to explain your double standard?
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Caveman seems to know what he's talking about.
 
Jabba said:
Per usual, I don't understand your objection. Try again?
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Of course you understand my objection. That's why you have assiduously avoided all the various past requests for you to define "now."

If you want to understand my objection, trying reading the other three or four posts I've written on the subject and try to summarize them here in your own words. Per usual, I'm not going to repeat myself for someone who prides himself on how many posts he ignores.
 
Jabba said:
Caveman seems to know what he's talking about.
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That doesn't address the double standard. You require posters to be friendly. Caveman is not friendly. The ground rule you insist upon with respect to friendliness doesn't say anything about whether they may also have a legitimate point. Friendliness is a gatekeeper criterion in your proposed ground rules. You say you aren't obliged to look further to determine whether a post has merit unless it's friendly. Further you already admitted you don't know what Cavenan's talking about. I don't see how that would qualify you to determine the merit of his posts.

Would you agree that the evidence better fits the conclusion that you appeal to Caveman only because he goes after your critics?
 
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Belz... said:
Out of everyone in this thread, no one's put more effort into educating you as Jay has. He's made a great number of long posts explaining, in detail, where you go wrong, and instead of listening to him and responding to his points, you ignore him rudely time and time again. I don't understand why Jay's wasting so much of his life trying to educate you, but you've got some nerve asking him for an extra after all this.
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Befuddled Old Man -- "Aw, shucks guys, I'm just not understanding you, so could you repeat everything all over again" -- is a plot device in Jabba's fantasy play that lets him appear to be engaged in the debate without actually having to address any of its points. Additionally it shifts blame for the obstruction onto his opponents. But the drama here is so poorly written that Befuddled Old Man has devolved into a harbinger of sorts. When he appears, that's when you know that Jabba knows he is intractably stuck and needs to bail out.

As you are probably aware, Jabba's pattern of argumentation is to embody his line of reasoning as a syllogism among words whose definitions he either leaves vague so that he can equivocate among different connotations, or defines in a personal way -- which is another method of achieving the same equivocal result. While it's nice to talk about sampling the centuries according to whether human life is probable among them, the real point of equivocation in his argument this month seems to be "now".

He outright said that it can be any point in all of time. He needs it to be, otherwise he can't convolve it with his century and get a tiny number. The sense in which his claim would be true is the sense in which I pointed out that Jesus, Richard III, and Abraham Lincoln have all recorded statements invoking "now" in a way that referred to different points in time in the past few thousand years. That would seem to indicate that "now" can pop up at various points of time. Instead, all those usages refer to the lifespan of the speaker -- in fact, very specific subsets of their lifetimes. The way Jesus used it did not refer to the same absolute time point as Richard III meant. And while Lincoln's "Now we are engaged in a great civil war..." obviously incorporates the few years of war preceding the Gettysburg address and extends to the few remaining years," Lincoln's "Now we are engaged..." cannot reasonably mean Feb. 22, 2018 or April 6, 10,221 B.C.

While "now" can mean various points in time, it can do so only according to rules. Those rules are what Jabba means to break. The "now" in Richard III's "Now is the winter of our discontent..." means the end of the War of the Roses, not some arbitrary point in time. If I, Jay, say today, "Now is the end of the War of the Roses," that would not be true. The War of the Roses was hundreds of years ago; today is today. "Now" refers to whenever it was said by the person, which makes its statistical value rather dependent on who says it. That's the rule. The fact that it's been said many times throughout recorded history by many people doesn't immediately transform it into a uniform random variable governing one single invocation of "now", which is what it would have to be in order to work in Jabba's proof the way he needs. When Jabba says, "What is the likelihood that 'now' would coincide with something," his "now" is not talking about the day the Spanish Armada was defeated, or the day Moses brought the tablets down from the mountain, or the day something hit Earth and calved the Moon. None of those are reasonable candidates for "now" as Jabba means when he asks for likelihood. So not a uniform random variable.

His critics having now (See how I used that word?) exposed the equivocation over "now" in his argument, Jabba realizes they have once again homed in on the pea in his shell game and the jig is up. So expect some wild gesticulations trying to keep the meaning of "now" up in the air, or an abrupt change of terminology to avoid "communication problems."
 
JayUtah said:
Befuddled Old Man -- "Aw, shucks guys, I'm just not understanding you, so could you repeat everything all over again" -- is a plot device in Jabba's fantasy play that lets him appear to be engaged in the debate without actually having to address any of its points.
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And yet, at the same time, he wants to appear as the Wise Old Man, dispensing his pearls to the callow youths who have yet to attain the benefit of his experience, up to the point where we suddenly experience our Road to Damascus moment and see that he's been right all along and we were blinded by our own prejudices. It's not a flaw in his reasoning (unusually), but the incompatibility of these two self-images is quite a big clue that something's not right.

Dave
 
Dave Rogers said:
And yet, at the same time, he wants to appear as the Wise Old Man, dispensing his pearls to the callow youths who have yet to attain the benefit of his experience, up to the point where we suddenly experience our Road to Damascus moment and see that he's been right all along and we were blinded by our own prejudices. It's not a flaw in his reasoning (unusually), but the incompatibility of these two self-images is quite a big clue that something's not right.
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He's many-faced, like Vishnu.
 
Jabba,

I post this so that it can be referred to as needed. It has been suggested that you might see anyone quitting this thread as a kind of success on your part, and since I'm having trouble finding the motivation to continue posting on this topic I wanted to document some of the reasons so that you would be just slightly less likely to imagine your own. I'm not leaving entirely, I'll glance in from time to time, but as this thing isn't really going anywhere I probably won't read every single post. Because of that if any question is meant for me specifically it might be best to drop me a PM and draw my attention to it.

1. The fundamental flaw with this whole thing is the Sharpshooter Fallacy. Jabba's attempts to avoid this fatal flaw amount to acknowledging it and then saying he doesn't think that it should apply. He hasn't justified this, and in fact it's such a clear case that it's hard to imagine that there could possibly be any justification. It seems likely that he doesn't fully understand how the fallacy works, and repeated requests for him to define it in his own words or give an example of it have been ignored. For this reason alone, the thread should probably be marked as a resolved issue and locked for further comment.

2. There are a number of other fatal flaws with his arguments, which again he has not properly addressed. I'm not going to list them all out, that has been done a number of times. I only mention it because I don't want to give Jabba the impression that I think the Sharpshooter Fallacy is the only problem I have with his argument.

3. Jabba has not shown an understanding of the topics required for this discussion. He has a very loose grasp of statistics in general and doesn't understand Bayesian statistics specifically even though that's supposedly the whole core of his argument. As needed he can pull up a somewhat relevant web page to grab a quote, but that's not the same as demonstrating actual understanding.

4. Jabba ignores most posts which could possibly be excused due to the volume, but more importantly the choice of which specific parts of posts he replies to indicates a deliberate attempt to avoid resolving any issues. If someone makes an offhand comment and then goes on to clearly identify four serious problems along with detailed explanations of why they are problems and what questions would need to be answered to resolve them, Jabba will reply only to the offhand comment. Likewise he focuses on any imperfect wording or hint of agreement (usually given just to be charitable in order to address a more important issue) and ignores the meat of a post.

5. On the rare occasions that Jabba is forced to admit error or lack of fundamental knowledge, he does nothing to correct this. Instead, he shifts to another topic even though the admitted errors are fatal to his theory. This is like looking at a house that is literally on fire and saying "Yes, well, I'd like to focus on that chipped paint over in the corner for now". Since there are a nearly infinite number of sub-issues he can switch to or invent, this guarantees that no true resolution will ever be achieved.

6. Even after a topic has been covered in depth, Jabba will bring it back up after a time as if the prior objections never existed. This means the conversation is forced to repeat itself. Jabba has shown an ability to look up older posts as needed and has demonstrated that he keeps notes on (some of) the complaints that are raised, but this doesn't change his arguments most of the time. He'll just repeat them again, as if the refutations never happened.

7. Jabba will frequently try to put words in people's mouths, or suggest that "most people" or "most scientists" or whatever group agree with him or some part of his theory. Either he knows better, or this is downright delusional. It doesn't matter which, really.

8. The only variety to be had in this endlessly repeating argument is with some of the bizarre tangents that pop up, and those are just as bad as the main event. This "now" thing is a great example. It has a lot of the same fundamental errors as Jabba's main argument, but it is also essentially irrelevant since even if Jabba admitted he was totally wrong he would then turn around and re-state his formula and we would be back where we started. It's unlikely he will even be convinced of the obvious errors in this, but if he is he won't generalize that information at all.

9. This has been going on for more than five years. This is absurd. Nobody agrees with him, and yet somehow we're still talking about it more than five years later. I don't get it.

10. At its core, this is just yet another person saying they believe they have an immortal soul of some sort without any actual evidence. That he thinks he can suggest it's the more likely scenario through the use of a Bayesian formula is mildly interesting at best. In the end, even if we were to agree with his formula (we don't) and even if we were to agree that formula implied a soul was more likely than not (we don't, and it isn't) it still wouldn't be proof. Jabba wants "much more likely" to equal "guaranteed". He wants "virtually prove" to mean "prove". That's not how it works. Unlikely stuff happens all the time. So even if all the flaws in his actual argument were somehow resolved in his favor it STILL wouldn't actually prove anything.

11. Jabba has so mangled the definition of "self" that it's meaningless. He has often focused on his physical body, even though that's not what he thinks is immortal. The part he does think is "immortal" he also thinks is just mixed into a big vat 'o selfiness and doled out to other living things including not just humans but other animals and possibly plants. It doesn't seem to carry any memories. It can be mixed with other bits from other people or split into multiple people at once. In no way does this seem to carry any kind of useful form of "Jabba's self" onwards. His personality is in no way carried on while it's split into 32 parts, mixed with other things, and half of it is in literal vegetation. This is the most meaningless form of immortality I can possibly imagine.


So to sum up: Jabba's argument is bad, his formula is bad, he doesn't grasp key concepts relevant to what he's trying to do, he doesn't honestly engage the other posters, he won't focus on the important flaws in his argument, this conversation is never going anywhere, if it did somehow go somewhere it still wouldn't prove anything and if it did magically prove something all it would prove is something useless.

This isn't a flounce or anything, I'm not saying I'll never post in this thread again. It's just not likely. After all, you could just pick some random post I've already made here and it's likely it would still apply so what's the point of making new ones? Have a lovely day everyone.
 
JayUtah said:
More importantly you need to define "now" in a way that supports your math. You said "now" is a uniform random variable across all time. But that is not the natural meaning of "now," nor is it what you mean when you say "What are the chances that the century corresponding to my life would occur now."
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He needs to define "now" without reference to his own birthdate and lifespan.
 
If we're at the point where a half dozen people are patiently explaining over and over that "Death exists," "1 and 2 aren't the same number," "Now means this moment in time," "1/1000 is less probable than 1/00," and "You can't change the probability of an event by making up more and more unlikely counter scenarios" and we're still getting thread nannied by random passerby's with chips on their shoulder about skepticism as a concept the problem doesn't lie with us.
 
Mojo said:
He needs to define "now" without reference to his own birthdate and lifespan.
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He does, but my point is that I don't think it's possible to do that. "Now" has little meaning besides "The time at which the statement is made," which necessarily ties it to a point within the lifetime of the person making the statement. "Now we are engaged in a great civil war" refers to November 1863 if it's Lincoln who states it, or 1643 if it's Oliver Cromwell who states it. What makes it "now" for Cromwell is that Cromwell was alive and speaking in 1643, while Lincoln was not. What makes today "now" for me and Jabba is that we're both alive and speaking. I can't use "now" in a direct way without it referring to a time when I'm alive. Paradoxically Jabba cites the ability of long-dead people to invoke the concept of "now" to refer to their time as justification for its being able to represent any point in time.

It's a typical Jabba wordplay argument.

In order for "now" to work in Jabba's argument the way he wants it to, he will have to define it in terms other than referring to a point in his lifetime. That's the only way it could be the uniform random variable he's treating it as. But of course that's not what "now" means. What we need from Jabba is to define "now" in unambiguous terms. Only then can we properly assess whether his proof has rigor. But he won't do that. He needs the vagary of the present non-definition so that he can make it look like one thing for one purpose and other thing for another purpose. That's how all his arguments always work.
 
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