Cont: Proof of Immortality VIII

Hans,
- I assume that you're being facetious about the progress, but we might have actually moved a little...
I agree. I don't think you've learned anything.

- I need to tinker with your opening statement. I wouldn't just say that my sense of self is a function of my current brain -- in ~OOFLam, it likely has an existence outside of any brain.
I'm going to further tinker with yours. -- in materialism, the brain produces a process we recognize as a sense of self. There are memories and continuity which cease when the organism dies.

In Jabba's NOT(materialism), there is a separate soul which has no properties and is undetectable but which houses our memories, sense of continuity and self but they still cease when the organism dies as if there were no soul at all.

Do you disagree with any of that?
 
Last edited:
hans,
- I now need to tinker with my own statement -- I made a mistake.
- I'll be back.

Are you finally going to go back to the link? You will find that you spent several weeks arguing that the body is what is so unlikely. You will also find that on December 30 you agreed that you need a soul in addition to your body to get to immortality.
 
...it likely has an existence outside of any brain.

And it is the nature of that proposed existence that you keep equivocating from point to point. You argue on the one hand that it's continuous and persistent, such that you can consider as equivalent all the times that it may be incarnated. And then on the other hand you argue that it has no attributes, does not transfer memory, or seem to have any other existence other than your nominal claim. You're variously (re)defining this existence not to arrive at a working definition of the soul, but simply to avoid points of refutation on a day-to-day basis.
 
Fine!

- Under OOFlam, your sense of self is assumed to be a function of your current brain.

- In your belief (~OOFlam), it is something that cooperates with your current brain, let's call it a soul.
Thus, in both cases, your sense of self, in order to be experienced, depends on the existence of your current brain.

Therefore, OOFlam and ~OOFlam are equally likely, PROVIDED a soul is always available when a brain is spawned. If not, OOFLam is more likely (since we must assume that some potential brains somehow fail for the lack of an available soul).

Thank you. I think we made progress.

Hans
Hans,
- I assume that you're being facetious about the progress, but we might have actually moved a little...
- I need to tinker with your second statement. "In your belief (~OOFlam), it (your sense of self) is something that cooperates with your current brain, I'll call it a soul" -- but, it doesn't necessarily depend upon a brain.
- In ~OOFLam, my sense of self/soul likely has an existence outside of any brain.
 
Hans,
- I assume that you're being facetious about the progress, but we might have actually moved a little...
- I need to tinker with your second statement. "In your belief (~OOFlam), it (your sense of self) is something that cooperates with your current brain, I'll call it a soul" -- but, it doesn't necessarily depend upon a brain.
- In ~OOFLam, my sense of self/soul likely has an existence outside of any brain.

But your current existence DOES have a brain. And we can manipulate every aspect of your sense of self by altering that brain, chemically or physically. Further, you have in the past stated that your soul requires your brain to communicate with others.
 
I'll be back.

When you come back, please revisit this list.
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=11871278&postcount=3198

As before, this is a question treating first the breadth of your argument, not its depth. The acceptable response will be a single post containing all the responses to each of the numbered fatal flaws. Each response should be one or two sentences describing how the final form of your argument will address the flaw. The post should not contain excerpts from other posts, multicolored "maps" or dialogues, or anything similar to the other distractionary items you previously tried to include. Just the answers I ask for. I intend you to spend no more than one hour on this task. I specifically do not intend this to be simply another springboard for your immediate rush for irrelevant detail.

I suspect you will ignore this request. And that's fine, because we have in hand already your statement conceding that you are unable to answer these questions. If that is still your position, we will consider this a confirmation of that.
 
Hans,
- I assume that you're being facetious about the progress, but we might have actually moved a little...
I agree, you don't seem to have learned anything.

- I need to tinker with your [HILITE]second[/HILITE] statement. "In your belief (~OOFlam), it (your sense of self) is something that cooperates with your current brain, I'll call it a soul" -- [U]but, it doesn't necessarily depend upon a brain.[/U]
- In ~OOFLam, my sense of self/soul likely has an existence outside of any brain.
I'll tinker with your second statement a bit.

In Jabba's NOT(materialism), there is a soul which has no properties, is undetectable and manifests nothing. Sometimes it needs to be attached to an organism and sometimes it needs to be detached from an organism, depending on which fatal flaw Jabba is failing to rebut.

Do you disagree with any of that?
 
Hans,
- I assume that you're being facetious about the progress, but we might have actually moved a little...
- I need to tinker with your opening statement. I wouldn't just say that my sense of self is a function of my current brain -- in ~OOFLam, it likely has an existence outside of any brain.

Oh, we made progress. Perhaps you didn't notice.

Perhaps it has existence outside a brain in ~OOFLam, but it is OOFLam you are trying to disprove, and you just agreed that whatever a soul is, it does not increase the likelihood of the brain existing, which means that ~OOFLam has at best a likelihood EQUAL to OOFLam.

Which part if this do you not agree with?

Hans
 
In ~OOFLam, my sense of self/soul likely has an existence outside of any brain.

You refuse to describe the particulars of this alleged existence. Which is to say, your descriptions of it vary from post to post, and often contradict each other.

Would you agree that the sort of free-form speculation you're engaged in here, without reference to supporting fact, means that P(R) must necessarily be very low? You're asking us to believe, in the absence of fact, that the thing you imagine but cannot precisely define is actually an operative concept. Further, would you agree that, absent any clear definition of nature and method in R, calculating P(A|R) for any event A is fundamentally impossible?
 
You have on multiple occasions made up excuses as to why you can't participate in the thread you started.

Indeed. Upon further reflection, I'm going to press Jabba on this.

...each post is full of name-calling.

It's a very tall claim to say that each post is full of name-calling. I'm going to make you substantiate this. I stipulate that in the past 48 hours I've made several posts to this forum. Please link to three of them that you allege contain name-calling. I will make sure they are reported for moderation, so that your claim can be tested.
 
Monza,
- Please point me to where I made these contradictory statements.

They were highlited in the post that Monza re-posted. You saw it and responded to it.

- The claim is that the new brain does share my sense of self -- it just (in most cases) does not share any (conscious) memories.

Without memories it has no ability to even have an impression that it's the same self as the other "life". Ergo, he's not you.

Belz,
- With which numbers do you disagree?

The only one you keep trotting out. 1/10100 is made up. You have not justified it.
 
jt,
- Do you accept that the formula I'm using is appropriate for evaluating complementary hypotheses? That's
- P(H|E) = P(E|H) x P(H)/(P(E|H) x P(H) + P(E|~H) x P(~H)).

That formula does follow from the basic Bayes Theorem. However, you do not have a complementary hypothesis. The H you have is that of a materialistic reality. Immortality is not the complement of that. It is just one of the possibilities.

So, no, you cannot use that formula.
 
Last edited:
jond,
- The claim is that the new brain does share my sense of self -- it just (in most cases) does not share any (conscious) memories.
- I used to hypnotize people. Twice I age-regressed them back to "previous lifetimes," and they came up with something. I sort of suspect that they just made up their stories, but then, it could be that hypnosis allowed them to access unconscious memories...
Not that there is any good evidence that it does...


:id::id::id::id::id::id::id:
:id::id::id::id::id::id::id:
:id::id::id::id::id::id::id:
 
They were highlited in the post that Monza re-posted. You saw it and responded to it.

But by asking for it he gets to make his critics run around doing various clerical things instead of arguing the substance of his argument and its flaws. It's the classic hamster wheel. Shucks, guys, I just don't remember and don't feel like going back to re-read the thread. Could you all just say all the things all over again? I promise I'll remember them until tomorrow when I pretend again to be all flustered and forgetful. Contrast this with the laser-beam accuracy he can muster in finding all the posts that seem to lead to a "gotcha!"

Without memories it has no ability to even have an impression that it's the same self as the other "life". Ergo, he's not you.

This is important to Jabba's argument. Jabba is correct in claiming that a person only exists in any conceivable way under materialism for the century or so in which his brain is alive. He then goes on to present that in a probability context where the potential field for human existence is modeled as 140 million discrete centuries in a uniform distribution, leading to a miniscule likelihood, given a person, that this would be the century that person would occupy. We've discussed at length what's wrong with that argument. Jabba is uninterested.

In contrast, Jabba claims that under his model existence is thought of as a soul that has always existed and will always exist. Therefore he insinuates that it can be incarnated in any number of those 140 million centuries, and that all such incarnations are functionally equivalent. Thus in his model, given a person, the likelihood that this would be the century in which that person would exist approaches tautology because that person existed in more than one century, and perhaps all centuries. That rationale relies upon equivocating the distinctions among persons and kinds of existence. It relies specifically on saying that all incarnations of Jabba are statistically equivalent events, even though elements of his description of a disembodied soul contradict that equivalence.

The only one you keep trotting out. 1/10100 is made up. You have not justified it.

I'm sure he believes he has. He has explained where he got it. It seems that in Jabba's mind there is a distinction between simply choosing a number arbitrarily, and naming a number provided with a nonsensical rationale. Jabba does not seem to consider the latter as "making up" a number.

Jabba's original argument tried to introduce the nonsensical concept of "virtual zero." This, in his argument, was a magical entity that exhibited exactly and only all of the properties of finite numbers that he needed to satisfy his proof, and simultaneously exactly and only all the properties of infinity for the same purpose. It was a magical concept that let him, as he is wont to do, simply define his way to success.

Now that he has realized he cannot foist this made-up concept, he's resorted to a finite number that's obviously very small and would differ from zero only negligibly for most purposes. In choosing a finite number he avoids all the problems that infinity causes in his argument. But now he's just trying to sweep under the carpet all the problems a finite number causes. Specifically he's trying to avoid the prospect that useful, valid finite numbers ultimately have rational, finite, discrete derivations -- and he has none for this one. He chose it to be arbitrarily close to zero, and upon no other criterion.
 

Back
Top Bottom