[Merged] Immortality & Bayesian Statistics

[Toontown]

It would help if you didn't keep changing your story.

Being a conscious, sentient person is like being one of the lottery winners - unlikely, but not impossible. It is nothing at all like winning the lottery every single drawing.

That one unique brain had to win a lot of lotteries to be here. Lottery after lottery after lottery, for eons. One little thing goes wrong in 14 billion years, no Dave-brain. For that matter, the entire Dave-brain-spawning species has been cheating fate for a long, long time.

 

[godless dave]

That one unique brain had to win a lot of lotteries to be here. Lottery after lottery after lottery, for eons. One little thing goes wrong in 14 billion years, no Dave-brain. For that matter, the entire Dave-brain-spawning species has been cheating fate for a long, long time.

And? So what?

It's extremely unlikely, one of many possible, equally unlikely outcomes.

Not impossible. You even said the appearance of a brain was inevitable.

Just like with the lottery winner, no reason to think anything mysterious is going on.

 

[Squeegee Beckenheim]

It isn't.

Cool, then you agree you were wrong to say they were different. Glad that's sorted.

 

[Toontown]

And? So what?

It's extremely unlikely, one of many possible, equally unlikely outcomes.

Not impossible. You even said the appearance of a brain was inevitable.

Just like with the lottery winner, no reason to think anything mysterious is going on.

An alternate explanation is not automatically "mysterious" simply by virtue of being different from your apparently hard-wired assumptions.

Assuming the conclusion that the unique brain assumption is correct, then of course you have no reason to think anything else is going on. You've already assumed the conclusion, and that brain just beat some big-time odds.

Don't assume the unique brain conclusion, have an alternative, and there is far less reason to doubt the alternative, and far more reason to doubt the unique brain assumption.

 

[Squeegee Beckenheim]

That one unique brain had to win a lot of lotteries to be here. Lottery after lottery after lottery, for eons. One little thing goes wrong in 14 billion years, no Dave-brain.

You can say the same about the actual lottery, too. The machine had to be invented, the people who invented the machine had to be born, this planet had to exist.

If anything, it's even more unlikely, because the creation of one unique brain only requires 2 people directly, whereas the creation of a lottery draw requires both more people and more equipment. So it's exponentially more unlikely.

 

[godless dave]

An alternate explanation is not automatically "mysterious" simply by virtue of being different from your apparently hard-wired assumptions.

Assuming the conclusion that the unique brain assumption is correct, then of course you have no reason to think anything else is going on. You've already assumed the conclusion, and that brain just beat some big-time odds.

Don't assume the unique brain conclusion, have an alternative, and there is far less reason to doubt the alternative, and far more reason to doubt the unique brain assumption.

I'm not assuming anything. We only observe unique brains and we understand the mechanism by which they exist. There is no reason to look for an alternative explanation because the existing explanation works just fine.

 

[Toontown]

I'm not assuming anything. We only observe unique brains and we understand the mechanism by which they exist. There is no reason to look for an alternative explanation because the existing explanation works just fine.

That explains the generalized existence of sentience. Brains generate sentience. Sentience is by it's nature a subjective experience. but that doesn't explain why there is a presumed one-off "you" experiencing sentience, or why a specific brain is the only way the presumed one-off "you" may experience sentience. Or what a "you" is, other than the natural subjectivity of sentient experience. Or why "you" assume there is an alternative to sentient experience. You've done nothing except tautologically acknowledge the general existence of sentience. You have not explained it.

 

[Squeegee Beckenheim]

but that doesn't explain why there is a presumed one-off "you" experiencing sentience, or why a specific brain is the only way the presumed one-off "you" may experience sentience.

Surely both of those things are adequately and completely explained by sentience being an emergent property of brain activity?

Or what a "you" is, other than the natural subjectivity of sentient experience.

Why is it assumed that there is anything to any individual other than the natural subjectivity of sentient experience?

 

[godless dave]

That explains the generalized existence of sentience. Brains generate sentience. Sentience is by it's nature a subjective experience. but that doesn't explain why there is a presumed one-off "you" experiencing sentience, or why a specific brain is the only way the presumed one-off "you" may experience sentience.

Talk about a tautology! The specific brain is the "you" that is sentient. The brain isn't a tool for experiencing sentience, it is the thing experiencing sentience.

Or what a "you" is, other than the natural subjectivity of sentient experience.

Of course that's all a you is.

I'm me and you're you just like Mars is Mars and Jupiter is Jupiter. Mars can't be Jupiter and Jupiter can't be Mars. There is no mystery to differentiating one thing from another.

 

[trebor]

That one unique brain had to win a lot of lotteries to be here. Lottery after lottery after lottery, for eons.

And indeed there were a vast number of potential 'unique brains' which could have won instead.

One little thing goes wrong in 14 billion years, no Dave-brain.

, but some other brain instead.

For that matter, the entire Dave-brain-spawning species has been cheating fate for a long, long time.

And of course there were a vast number of potential brain carrying species which could have won instead; but lost.

 

[tsig]

Jesus Christ. The likelihood of your current existence is one over one. How many times do you have to hear this before you understand it? You exist. You're not immortal. Stop wasting your time on this nonsense.

Probability is a dark and arcane art to some.

If we accept Jabba's argument shouldn't he vanish in a puff of improbability?

oh right, god.

ETA: more succinctly (1/infinity =0)chance of existence therefore god

 

[tsig]

Pixel,
- We certainly don't remember being conscious during dreamless sleep, but there is electrical activity in the brain during dreamless sleep...
- But mostly, when we wake up, we seem to be the same person. Somehow that consciousness, that "self," had persisted while resting... - I'll have to think some more about this question. I can see some merit to it -- but so far, as you might expect, I think that the perceived merit is misleading...

So did the brain.

 

[tsig]

And we still are because all you keep doing is restating everything you've already said and hoping against hope that it suddenly, and somewhat miraculously, ceases to be gobbledygook.






Different planets would be a better analogy.

Different universes with different physical laws because in his universe consciousness is some sort of free floating thing that attaches itself to a human brain temporarily, inhabits a while then leaves again.

 

[tsig]

Yeah, you've already chased that tail a couple of times.

That's your tail, BTW.

The last time you chased it, I explained that I would not apply probability to explaine why someone won the lottery, because probability does not apply to systems which are fully understood and accounted for.

On the other hand, if someone, say you for example, were to begin to win the lottery every week like clockwork, a deep suspicion would soon pervade my viewpoint on the matter.

Your ideology, however, would never allow you to reject the proposition that my weekly winnings of the lottery are strictly due to the vagaries of chance. By your own admission.

I'm just a bit mystified by an ideology that refuses to reject a proposal he finds ludicrously unlikely, yet compels him to spend inordinate amounts of time arguing against it.

 

[tsig]

Are you seriously implying that AdMans insulting nitpick "...don't you know the difference?" requires a grateful response?

It's a nitpick that seems to have sunk deep.

 

[tsig]

Which is roughly as meaningful as the objective observation that the various atoms of which your brain has been composed since your birth were once deep inside stars scattered about the galaxy - billions of years after they randomly emerged from a hot, dense quantum soup, billions of light years away.

A rudimentary, tautologous accounting of the various locations and states of various atoms at various times does not begin to explain our all-pervasive, all-conquering sentience. On the contrary, such a slavishly materialistic treatment only makes our sentient experience look ridiculously unlikely to have happened at all. Ever. Which is precisely what brings the tautologous non-explanation into question.

You need to googol that word.

I do not think it means what you think it means.

 

[tsig]

Yes, it is. And?






And this essentially proves immortality, does it?

Tautologically.

 

[tsig]

But what if we didn't? What if we didn't know what system the Mega Millions lottery uses? In my case, I haven't investigated, so I don't know.

Here we have a system that can produce hundreds of millions of possible outcomes, each one equally unlikely. According to the reasoning you have proposed in this thread, we should reject any hypothesis that attempts to explain this process, because the outcomes are so unlikely.

Since the odds are so large against any single number coming up we can conclude that no number will come up.

 

[Turgor]

Since the odds are so large against any single number coming up we can conclude that no number will come up.

No, we can conclude that numbers are immortal since they do come up!

 

[tsig]

Yes, and I specifically observe that some of this matter is invested in the one and only, ludicrously unlikely, unique brain which is weakly purported to be the only way in monkey hell I, specifically, ever see anything.

You can't make a hypothesis-generated expectation and selection go away by observing that there is a lot of other stuff in the universe that does not have membership in your ludicrously unlikely little unique brain, which only makes it the more ludicrously unlikely. You're pushing a non-sequitur.

Argument by adjective?