Cont: Proof of Immortality VIII

BTW, would I just be confusing the issue if I said that the probability of a 2-headed coin coming up heads is <1? There is, after all, the remote possibility it will land on its edge.
 
BTW, would I just be confusing the issue if I said that the probability of a 2-headed coin coming up heads is <1? There is, after all, the remote possibility it will land on its edge.

And for that same reason we can't, with full rigor, say that if a fair coin did not come up heads it must therefore have come up tails. There are in fact more than two possible outcomes to the flip of a fair coin, even though we ignore the improbable third outcome for most purposes, especially for teaching examples. But since Jabba doesn't understand what a false dilemma is, he makes the same predictable error in reasoning when the outcomes aren't as knowably skewed. In his thread on circumstantial evidence he actually got backed into a corner having had his logic boiled down to claiming equivalence (among things with four legs) between "dog" and "not a cat."
 
Either you are being blatantly dishonest about what it is you're actually claiming here, or your thoughts on the matter are just utterly hopelessly muddled and incoherent.

I'm going with (2). Which, of course, doesn't exactly support the image Jabba wants to project of the Wise Old Man teching the neophytes the true mysteries of Bays' Theorem as they relate to immortality, where any doubts of his wisdom can only arise from our inability to grasp what he's telling us; in reality, he doesn't come remotely close to grasping them himself.

Dave
 
BTW, would I just be confusing the issue if I said that the probability of a 2-headed coin coming up heads is <1? There is, after all, the remote possibility it will land on its edge.

And that's technically correct (the best kind of correct) but Jabba's using that in a dishonest way.

Basically here's (one of) Jabba's issue and it ties into his deliberate misunderstanding of probability vs likelihood.

We flip a coin. Let's say there is a 49.25% chance of heads, a 49.25% chance of tails, and a 0.5% chance of an "other" (lands on its side, shatters, quantum tunnels through the table, whatever...)

Jabba thinks he can alter the 95.5% probability of a coin landing on its head or tail side less by making up more and more technically possible but amazingly unlikely one-off scenarios to put in the .5 percent category.

Again it's the "Bayesian Overloader" concept from that SMBC comic. Since every possibility has some probability attached to it, an infinite number of amazingly unlikely alternative scenarios somehow makes the statistically likely scenario unlikely (even unlikely to the point of practical impossibility) because of... bad math and dishonest argumentatives.

That's Jabba's whole routine. "There are so many possibilities, each of which have some probability attached to them, other then my exists my exists in sufficiently improbable as to be impossible, ergo I have a soul and am immortal."
 
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.
jond,
- I never accepted that the self is a process generated by the brain. I've suggested that it's a process/thing received by the brain.
- Sorry, but this is a sub-issue I'll have to abandon for now. I have another sub-issue that I need to focus upon -- and I have discussed this general sub-issue several times over the last few years.
 
jond,
- I never accepted that the self is a process generated by the brain. I've suggested that it's a process/thing received by the brain.
- Sorry, but this is a sub-issue I'll have to abandon for now. I have another sub-issue that I need to focus upon -- and I have discussed this general sub-issue several times over the last few years.

No, it is not a sub-issue, it is not an issue at all. We are discussing the materialist hypothesis, not what you think, believe, feel, or accept.

Hans
 
jond,
- I never accepted that the self is a process generated by the brain. I've suggested that it's a process/thing received by the brain.
No, you accepted that under materialism, the brain generates the process. You don't have to believe it, you just have to accept that it's part of the materialist model you're trying to disprove.

I've already given you permission to disprove some other model that you invent but you won't be accomplishing anything by doing so.

- Sorry, but this is a sub-issue I'll have to abandon for now.
Sorry, but this isn't a sub-issue. It's a central issue which you've never been able to get beyond so your proof fails immediately.

I have another sub-issue that I need to focus upon -- and I have discussed this general sub-issue several times over the last few years.

And we've discussed it more than you have, showing you exactly how and why you are wrong to attribute a soul to the materialist model.

It's been beyond your ability to understand so far.

But by all means, continue to fiddle with the deck chairs on your sinking Titanic argument.
 
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jond,
- I never accepted that the self is a process generated by the brain. I've suggested that it's a process/thing received by the brain.

Jond linked to you doing just that. You can't wiggle out of this one.

- Sorry, but this is a sub-issue I'll have to abandon for now. I have another sub-issue that I need to focus upon

Every time a "sub issue" doesn't go your way, you abandon it for another, only to return to the former later when you "forget" about the results. Ad infinitum.
 
- Sorry, but this is a sub-issue I'll have to abandon for now. I have another sub-issue that I need to focus upon -- and I have discussed this general sub-issue several times over the last few years.

We're all aware that every time you realise you can't defend one part of your argument you respond by running away to where you can fail to defend a different part of it, in the hope that by the time you get drawn back to the first sub-issue we'll all have forgotten that you ran away. Problem is, you've done this multiple times with every single sub-issue. Don't you think that, after failing to defend any part of your argument on any of the times you've reverted to minutiae to deflect attention from the fact that the overall argument makes no sense either, it would be a little more dignified to admit that the whole thing doesn't work?

Dave
 
Either you are being blatantly dishonest about what it is you're actually claiming here, or your thoughts on the matter are just utterly hopelessly muddled and incoherent.

The latter. Here's Bayes:

P(A|B) = P(B|A)/PB P(A)​

A and B are events. The blue part is usually called the likelihood ratio. The blue part is what Jabba thought he was asking for -- in his wording, "the Bayesian likelihood." In jt512's post, he calls it the "weight of evidence," which makes sense when you consider that when Bayes' theorem is used to drawn an inference, event B is usually data, or evidence, gleaned from the outside world. A is the event that a certain hypothesis is true. P(A) is the probability that your hypothesis is true, irrespective of what new evidence might tell you. The role of the blue part is to either attenuate or amplify the probability of your hypothesis based on how much worse or better it explains B, the evidence, over chance.

Jabba didn't know what to call the blue part because statistics is not something he really knows much about. So he made up a word for it, "the Bayesian likelihood," and sprang it on people expecting them to just read his mind and know what he meant. (People who actually know a field and work in it use the standard language to avoid just such confusion.) Naturally you and I and everyone else thought he was asking for P(A|B), which can't be computed in his example without knowing P(A). If P(A|B) is the likelihood that a coin is two-headed given that it came up heads, we have to know P(A) -- the probability of a two-headed coin reckoned by a means other than the toss. For example, if you had a jar with 10 coins in it and were told that one of them is two-heaaded, you can draw a coin and use a series of tosses to home in on whether it's the two-headed one. But it would starte= with P(A)=0.1 for this particular case. P(A) might be different for a different reported (or estimated) population for two-headedness.

Jabba is trying to impress beyond his abilities. His present ability doesn't include the standard vocabulary of statistics, or the grasp of what those terms in the equation mean. There is a conceptual difference between a likelihood and a ratio of likelihoods. The latter is important in Bayes. We think of the blue term as a scaling factor that clusters around 1. If it works out to 1, then that tells us the evidence B is unrelated to the hypothesis A. Greater than 1 means the evidence favors the hypothesis. Less than 1 means it disfavors the hypothesis -- that the data B is actually evidence that the hypothesis A is not true. In order to get the likelihood P(B|A) to be in the neighborhood of 1, we normalize it using P(B), the probability that the data arose irrespective of any attempt to explain it.

Making up your own words for things that experts already have names for is a sign of bluffing. Additionally you may have noticed Jabba adopting words he sees in his critics' posts and using them in ways that suggest he doesn't really know what they mean. This is another symptom of the bluff. And lately, for example, you see him plastering the word "Bayesian" in front of everything, even when it makes no sense to qualify a concept that way. More bluff. He's arguing as if he really doesn't think any of his critics knows enough to rebut him confidently, and if he just throws around impressive-sounding terminology he can pretend he's been a genius.
 
jt,
- Apparently, I was asking about the likelihood ratio -- I'm just not that familiar with the appropriate terminology...
- In doing that, I was trying to emphasize the difference between probability (both prior and posterior) and the likelihood ratio.
- The likelihood, in the Bayesian sense, of getting heads when flipping a 2 headed coin is 1.

There is no "Bayesian sense" of likelihood. Likelihood means the same thing whether you're doing Bayesian or non-Bayesian inference.
- OK. Again, I'm not very good with the terminology. I just know that P(E|H) is not the same as P(H) or P(E) or P(H|E), and that's what I've been trying to communicate -- while the others are mixing them up.
 
- OK. Again, I'm not very good with the terminology. I just know that P(E|H) is not the same as P(H) or P(E) or P(H|E), and that's what I've been trying to communicate -- while the others are mixing them up.

That's an outright lie. Not just an ordinary lie, that's a Donald Trump level lie. Everyone else has been trying to tell you that P(E|H) is not the same as P(E), P(H) or P(H|E), and you've been mixing them up.

Dave
 
I never accepted that the self is a process generated by the brain.

False. You finally agreed that this is what happens in the materialist model. You've been trying to make the materialist model look like something else that's easier to refute. Having finally eked out of you the admission that you're misrepresenting it, we are not simply going to let that go.

I've suggested that it's a process/thing received by the brain.

That is a misrepresentation of the materialist hypothesis.

Sorry, but this is a sub-issue I'll have to abandon for now. I have another sub-issue that I need to focus upon...

You're cornered and you need to escape by changing the subject. This dodge is your standard evasion.

and I have discussed this general sub-issue several times over the last few years.

No, you haven't discussed it. You've simply tried to foist the same straw man unsuccessfully for years. Your critics are rightly calling you on that, and your response -- as always -- is to ignore them and run away. We've already seen you admit that you can't participate in the debate unless you have the unfettered ability to control its direction and steer it away from topics you know you can't address.
 
- OK. Again, I'm not very good with the terminology. I just know that P(E|H) is not the same as P(H) or P(E) or P(H|E), and that's what I've been trying to communicate -- while the others are mixing them up.

Hogwash. You cannot demonstrate understanding of either the concepts or the terminology. You are are using the wrong words to express your ideas, and this is naturally confusing to your critics. Quit blaming them for the effects of your ignorance. It's consummately rude.
 
jond,
- I never accepted that the self is a process generated by the brain. I've suggested that it's a process/thing received by the brain.
- Sorry, but this is a sub-issue I'll have to abandon for now. I have another sub-issue that I need to focus upon -- and I have discussed this general sub-issue several times over the last few years.

I linked to it again yesterday. The problem, Jabba, is that you agreed with Godless Dave on Dec 27 that in he materialist model, it is a process generated by the brain, not something received by the brain. On December 30, you agreed with me that the only way for you to get to immortality was to add another entity in addition to your brain. Now you are back to insisting that this additional element exists when in the materialist model which you are trying to disprove it does not.
 
The latter. Here's Bayes:

P(A|B) = P(B|A)/PB P(A)​

A and B are events. The blue part is usually called the likelihood ratio. The blue part is what Jabba thought he was asking for -- in his wording, "the Bayesian likelihood." In jt512's post, he calls it the "weight of evidence," which makes sense when you consider that when Bayes' theorem is used to drawn an inference, event B is usually data, or evidence, gleaned from the outside world. A is the event that a certain hypothesis is true. P(A) is the probability that your hypothesis is true, irrespective of what new evidence might tell you. The role of the blue part is to either attenuate or amplify the probability of your hypothesis based on how much worse or better it explains B, the evidence, over chance.

Jabba didn't know what to call the blue part because statistics is not something he really knows much about. So he made up a word for it, "the Bayesian likelihood," and sprang it on people expecting them to just read his mind and know what he meant. (People who actually know a field and work in it use the standard language to avoid just such confusion.) Naturally you and I and everyone else thought he was asking for P(A|B), which can't be computed in his example without knowing P(A). If P(A|B) is the likelihood that a coin is two-headed given that it came up heads, we have to know P(A) -- the probability of a two-headed coin reckoned by a means other than the toss. For example, if you had a jar with 10 coins in it and were told that one of them is two-heaaded, you can draw a coin and use a series of tosses to home in on whether it's the two-headed one. But it would starte= with P(A)=0.1 for this particular case. P(A) might be different for a different reported (or estimated) population for two-headedness.

Jabba is trying to impress beyond his abilities. His present ability doesn't include the standard vocabulary of statistics, or the grasp of what those terms in the equation mean. There is a conceptual difference between a likelihood and a ratio of likelihoods. The latter is important in Bayes. We think of the blue term as a scaling factor that clusters around 1. If it works out to 1, then that tells us the evidence B is unrelated to the hypothesis A. Greater than 1 means the evidence favors the hypothesis. Less than 1 means it disfavors the hypothesis -- that the data B is actually evidence that the hypothesis A is not true. In order to get the likelihood P(B|A) to be in the neighborhood of 1, we normalize it using P(B), the probability that the data arose irrespective of any attempt to explain it.

Making up your own words for things that experts already have names for is a sign of bluffing. Additionally you may have noticed Jabba adopting words he sees in his critics' posts and using them in ways that suggest he doesn't really know what they mean. This is another symptom of the bluff. And lately, for example, you see him plastering the word "Bayesian" in front of everything, even when it makes no sense to qualify a concept that way. More bluff. He's arguing as if he really doesn't think any of his critics knows enough to rebut him confidently, and if he just throws around impressive-sounding terminology he can pretend he's been a genius.
- I'm not talking about two events, and I'm not using that formula. I'm talking about the "likelihood" of a particular event -- given a particular hypothesis. The symbols I use for that ingredient are P(E|H). The formula I use to determine the posterior probability of H is P(H|E)=P(E|H)P(H)/(P(E|H)P(H)+P(E|~H)P(~H)). My estimate for P(E|H) is 10-100.

- Also, I have a lot of excuses for my poor terminology, but mostly, while I must have taken about 10 courses in Statistics, I only took one in Bayesian Statistics, and that was cut short by the Kent State shooting almost 40 years ago as I was finishing up my course work.
 
- OK. Again, I'm not very good with the terminology. I just know that P(E|H) is not the same as P(H) or P(E) or P(H|E), and that's what I've been trying to communicate -- while the others are mixing them up.

Hogwash. You cannot demonstrate understanding of either the concepts or the terminology. You are are using the wrong words to express your ideas, and this is naturally confusing to your critics. Quit blaming them for the effects of your ignorance. It's consummately rude.
- Where, specifically, am I wrong in the above? Where is the hogwash?
 

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