Proof of Immortality, VII

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Jabba said:
Mojo,
- If there is such a thing as reincarnation, at least most of us would not know that the previous person was "us."
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BTW the Alleged Historic Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama Shakyamuni, considered to the one of the greatest Vedic practitioners, when they began to teach taught one very specific tenet, 'the great enlightenment'.
Anatta : there is no atman!

IE there is no reincarnation
 
Jabba said:
Mojo,
- If there is such a thing as reincarnation, at least most of us would not know that the previous person was "us."
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This creates an interesting conundrum. This thing you want to be immortal has no aspect that you observe. So in all of the cycling between your existence and your sense of self, never are you hitting on evidence of immortality.
 
jsfisher said:
This creates an interesting conundrum. This thing you want to be immortal has no aspect that you observe. So in all of the cycling between your existence and your sense of self, never are you hitting on evidence of immortality.
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If the "self" has no memories or personality but the one contained in the brain of whatever body it inhabits, then although the "sense of self" would be the same, it'd have no way to recognise itself! So not only no way to test whether the theory is correct, but also it makes no difference to the individual person.

In a way, I suspect that jabba's sense of self and mine are in many ways identical, like "going 60 mph" is the same for two cars. It's the body that makes the difference.
 
Jabba said:
If there is such a thing as reincarnation, at least most of us would not know that the previous person was "us."
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If you are now claiming there need be no operative continuity between incarnations, then you have some work to do. First you have to reconcile that new claim with your protests earlier regarding the hypothetical cloning scenario. Your vague "Wouldn't be me" and "Looking out through two sets of eyes" would seem no longer to be an issue under your new argument, as they seem to require integrity and continuity that your new definitions obviate. Second, you need to statistically justify why any of those now-independent incarnation events should be considered part of a class of equivalent events. Your argument seems to be that more chances for incarnation means more centuries in which Jabba lives. But now you're saying you wouldn't be able to know that any two given incarnations are both of anything that can be identified as Jabba.

As I pointed out before, you have no evidence for any of this, which continues to adjust your prior downward. The evidence is important because a proof for something doesn't let you simply resolve unknowns or ambiguities for which you have no evidence always in your favor. That's eminently cheating. Especially when yours is a statistical inference, you cannot simply establish optimistic givens and treat them as proven in the larger, empirical sense just because you assumed for the purposes of likelihood. (Actually you haven't even done that much.) If you do not know how reincarnation would work, then you have to factor that into the model underlying your inference. You haven't done that. You've just assumed in your favor all the optimistic variables that relate to P(reincarnation) and P(Jabba|reincarnation), and that all the actual work in reckoning those is implied in 1-P(something else).
 
Jabba said:
Mojo,
- Say that we do have a penny -- i.e., the probability that this penny exists is 1. We flip the penny and it comes up heads. What is the Bayesian likelihood that this penny is two headed?
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As with your proof of immortality, we do not have sufficient information to begin to determine that. To make the calculation, we would need to know the proportion of pennies that are two-headed, and the proportion that are two-tailed. We know that P(H|D)=1 and P(H|F)=0.5, where D is a double headed and F a fair coin; but we cannot calculate P(D|H) from these without knowing P(D) - and, of course, P(T) (where T is a double tailed coin), because F =/= ~D. And, finally, the observation that the penny comes up heads tells us very little except that P(T|H)=0.

It's actually a pretty good analogy for your proof of immortality. You've taken two outcomes that aren't logical complements, made an observation that doesn't help to distinguish between them in any way whatsoever, failed to offer any information on the data that would allow a valid deduction to be made, and then asked what the answer is. The only sensible answer is "insufficient data provided".

Dave
 
Jabba said:
Mojo,
- Say that we do have a penny -- i.e., the probability that this penny exists is 1. We flip the penny and it comes up heads. What is the Bayesian likelihood that this penny is two headed?
Click to expand...

jond said:
Jabba, remember when you agreed that in the materialist model, the self is a process generated by the brain? That was back in December. Are you now saying that the self is NOT a process generated by the brain in the materialist model?
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jond,
- No.
- So far, I don't understand why my question led to your conclusion that I had changed my mind.
 
Jabba said:
Mojo,
- Say that we do have a penny -- i.e., the probability that this penny exists is 1. We flip the penny and it comes up heads. What is the Bayesian likelihood that this penny is two headed?
Click to expand...

Dave Rogers said:
As with your proof of immortality, we do not have sufficient information to begin to determine that. To make the calculation, we would need to know the proportion of pennies that are two-headed, and the proportion that are two-tailed. We know that P(H|D)=1 and P(H|F)=0.5, where D is a double headed and F a fair coin; but we cannot calculate P(D|H) from these without knowing P(D) - and, of course, P(T) (where T is a double tailed coin), because F =/= ~D. And, finally, the observation that the penny comes up heads tells us very little except that P(T|H)=0.

It's actually a pretty good analogy for your proof of immortality. You've taken two outcomes that aren't logical complements, made an observation that doesn't help to distinguish between them in any way whatsoever, failed to offer any information on the data that would allow a valid deduction to be made, and then asked what the answer is. The only sensible answer is "insufficient data provided".

Dave
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Dave,
- Yes we do.
- The likelihood of a fair coin is .5 -- the likelihood of a 2 headed coin is 1.
 
jsfisher said:
This thing you want to be immortal has no aspect that you observe.
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He has explicitly defined in exactly that way whatever he thinks will turn out to be the immaterial operative principle in his hypothesis. He has done this in order to place it out of science's reach to refute. In this way he desires to claim a reasonable prior for the probability of reincarnation under the argument that an immaterial soul most likely exists, that reincarnation most likely occurs, but that these propositions are largely untestable by science owing to science's alleged inability to detect their effects (in one case) and science's alleged bias against him (in the other case).
 
Jabba said:
jond,
- No.
- So far, I don't understand why my question led to your conclusion that I had changed my mind.
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I’ve linked to it several times. The point, which should be obvious, is that if the self is a process generated by the brain, then the probability of the self existing is exactly the same as the body existing and functioning.
 
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Jabba said:
Dave,
- Yes we do.
- The likelihood of a fair coin is .5 -- the likelihood of a 2 headed coin is 1.
Click to expand...

That doesn't make sense. The coin may be fair, two-headed or two-tailed, and the probabilities of those three outcomes must sum to 1. Yours sum to 1.5. Show your working, and I'll show you where you've gone wrong.

Dave
 
Jabba said:
We flip the penny and it comes up heads.
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What event in your proof for immortality is this event in your analogy supposed to represent? If having the penny (versus not having a penny) is one event, and flipping the coin is a second event, and having it come up heads is a third event, how is this meant to represent your proof?
 
jond said:
I’ve linked to it several times. The point, which should be obvious, is that if the self is a process generated by the brain, then the probability of the self existing is exactly the same as the body existing and functioning.
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Looks like he's trying to sneak incarnation in there as a separate event, somewhere between "mere existence" and "Jabba won the here-I-am-now lottery."
 
JayUtah said:
What event in your proof for immortality is this event in your analogy supposed to represent? If having the penny (versus not having a penny) is one event, and flipping the coin is a second event, and having it come up heads is a third event, how is this meant to represent your proof?
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I think he's moved on from proving immortality to money-making schemes, because the way I read it he's flipped a penny and ended up with a cent and a half.

Dave
 
JayUtah said:
Looks like he's trying to sneak incarnation in there as a separate event, somewhere between "mere existence" and "Jabba won the here-I-am-now lottery."
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Yup. As always, he treats the self as a separate entity but tries to pretend that he's not doing so.
 
jsfisher said:
Contact Kevin Knuth in the Physics Department directly (yes, Physics -- kknuth at ualbany.edu). Invite him to meet you for lunch. There's a Dibella's very near by the SUNY campus. Consider that.
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- Done.
 
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