I think this should be called the "conjunction fallacy fallacy".
Explain this in your own words. You have a habit -- going back to your Shroud argument days -- of picking up words that other people use and repeating them in an argument in ways that suggest you really don't know what they mean. Hence you will need to do more than simply repeat another poster in order to make a viable argument.
We've attempted to engage you on the conjunctive fallacy. You don't know what it means. You've claimed it's magically accounted for in a Bayesian inference, but you don't explain how. At other times you've said that the solution is "more complicated," and vowed to address it in the future. Now it just seems you're clinging religiously to some other poster under the pretext that he has solved your problem for you.
Separately, there exists such a thing as the Fallacy Fallacy. It's very straightforward. It says that if a proposition has been refuted, but the refutation is shown to be fallacious, that outcome does not assert the truth of the proposition. "Haha! You're wrong; that means I'm right." The proposition may still be false according to a different refutation. This is where you tend to ignore Caveman. He takes your critics to task not because they are refuting a true proposition, but because he believes that the refutation they are providing is not well-formed. He has separately said that he believes your proposition fails for entirely different reasons than your critics believe. The only way this applies to your argument is if your true purpose is merely to show skeptics are wrong regardless of whether you also are wrong. Is that your true purpose?
If reincarnation is correct, my self exists over and over again; whereas, if OOFLam is correct, I only exist once -- for maybe 100 years at most. Under which hypothesis, is my current existence more likely?
The only data you use in your model is your current existence. You simply lack the mathematical and logical tools to see how that doesn't distinguish at all between the two hypotheses you contemplate.
You desperately look to Caveman, not because he has the right answer or because he cares about your theory, but because a slight misstatement of your argument gives him the ammunition he needs to stir up a bunch of useless, pedantic bluster against other skeptics. Making other skeptics seem foolish is the only thing he cares about on this forum. Do not ask your critics to accept otherwise, because they're better informed than you are about his behavior and history.
As we've repeated stated, "OOFLAM" is not a hypothesis. It is an
observation that would likely follow under the materialist hypothesis. Given materialism, each organism that lives does so exactly once. It says nothing, nor requires nothing, about the probability of some preordained organism to exist. It's not a factor in the model.
Given reincarnation, we might be able to make an entirely different observation, but you haven't given us a suitable definition. You simply wave your hands and refer vaguely to "what reincarnationists believe returns." But if you're talking about the various Dharmic religions, they aren't animists.
You don't return, but something that may once have been you or a part of you, returns. You don't model this in your proof, because you contrive the posteriors to make it seem like you don't have to.
If your point is to argue that, given reincarnation, it is likely that something that can be called "you" lived prior to this lifetime and will live again after this lifetime, the only data in your model is
still this lifetime. It tells us nothing about possible prior or subsequent lifetimes, and therefore gives us nothing but speculation about P(reincarnation). Keep in mind that it was once your goal to prove the certainty of this mathematically, so sooner or later you're going to have to show something more tangible than speculation.
You posit that an immortal soul exists, and that this is a variable on which your speculated multiple incarnations somehow depend. You then seem to be arguing, given reincarnation and also given that speculated dependence, that we should consider a single incarnation somehow more likely
a priori, as supposedly one of man. That is, you seem to think you get more chances to be an incarnate being, so the sum total of this somehow improves your plight over materialism.
In other words, you're begging the question. You just hope to hide that begged question in a bunch of math that your "neutral jury" won't know anything about.
A Bayesian inference has three elements: the priors, the likelihood ratio, and the posteriors. I've explained in part above how you fudge the likelihood ratio, but I'm not done with that. Let me first explain how you fudge the priors.
The conjunctive fallacy applies to your priors. P(materialism) requires only biomatter, which exists in abundance. P(reincarnation) requires that plus an immortal soul, evidence of which has been diligently sought -- by better men than you -- without success. Your prior is conditioned on the existence of something not, at this point, likely to exist. All you can muster in its favor is a pile of solipsist twaddle. It's pure, desperate handwaving -- not math.
But back to the likelihood ratios. We've been discussing a new way for you to pretend to compute P(Jabba|materialism). You're taking the approach that it's wildly improbable for you and your lifetime to have arisen here and now, in this one century among all 140 million of them, under materialism. What you seem to be saying is that if P(Jabba|reincarnation) isn't limited to just one century, then how much more likely your existence should be than P(Jabba|materialism), the one-shot deal.
Such an approach obviously equivocates P(Jabba). P(Jabba) is the probability of your
current existence, irrespective of how many others you might have had or will have. P(Jabba|reincarnation) is the likelihood of your
current existence under reincarnation, irrespective of how many other incarnations you may have had or will have. Despite being repeatedly asked, you've provided absolutely no information to tell us how it should be any different. Your proof does not describe how, knowing only that you exist right now, reincarnation makes it more likely for your present existence to be
now -- this century.
You're equivocating the concept that being repeatedly incarnated, from time to time, over 140 million years gives you more chances for any one of those incarnations to land in some given century. But that equivocates past all the specificity and identity arguments you tried to foist last year. "It wouldn't be me!" was what you kept crying. So no, you don't get to equate Jabba
1942-2042 to some hypothetical Jabba
1372-1412 or Jabba
BCE.15,332-BCE.15,305. Your
current existence is one specific event under both hypotheses, not -- under your hypothesis -- a class of allegedly interchangeable ones.
Lest you try the lottery analogy again, the Dharmist model of reincarnation (which seems to be the one you're using) means the tickets -- and copies of them -- get put back in the pot. The next "drawing" in each round is not 1 from among N-1 tickets but M from N tickets. That makes it once more not just a uniform random distribution. And your model tells us nothing about how many "drawings" there will be. The competing model is all entirely unevidenced speculation across many contrived variables that you've just conveniently defined to work out in your favor. It's not a proof. It's a what-if.
So much for gimmicking the likelihood ratio. Now the posteriors.
The problem with your P(reincarnation|Jabba) is that at no time do you actually compute it as a likelihood. Rather, you reckon it as a default probability. If P(materialism|Jabba) is some number, then P(reincarnation|Jabba) must be 1 minus that number -- i.e., a default probability. That's your false dilemma. You don't actually know whether P(reincarnation|Jabba) is -- as a true likelihood -- any more favorable than materialism because you aren't computing likelihoods.
And, this is one of the sub-issues that Caveman kept supporting me on.
No, Caveman told you that your argument was so ill-formed it could not be redeemed. Caveman is gone. Caveman won't be back for another month, and when he comes back he's just going to keep engaging in the same self-serving behavior he always does, which does nothing to help your case. Caveman is not your savior. Caveman is not your guardian and protector. We are not interested in what you think Caveman argues, because you already admitted you don't understand what he says. Please stop clinging to him like drowning man to a life buoy and deal with what people are saying to you
here and
now.
