Slowvehicle
Membership Drive , Co-Ordinator,, Russell's Antin
Good Afternoon, Mr. Savage!
I applaud you--you have precisely captured the argument against defining both A and ~A; in doing so, you end up ignoring all of the things in ~(A U ~A) of which your inventiveness fails. Unless you carefully circumscribe your "universe" (eliminating the possibility of accurately reflecting reality), your defined A and defined ~A are not, and cannot be, exhaustive.
With all due respect, this is nothing at all like war.
Further, it is not that there are "superior forces" arrayed against you, but that you are arguing against observed reality and against the nature of logical construction. Do not flatter yourself that the problem is that you are outnumbered; instead, realize that, until you correctly define A/~A, your "statistical" argument is a non-starter. If only one person were pointing that out, it would still be a fatal flaw, though all the forces of beleif were arrayed against her.
I am sorry, Mr. Savage, but I fear that this approach is doomed to failure form the outset. The only way that any assumption, estimate, SWAG, or construct about the "extreme improbability" of the fact that consciousness appears to be, and acts as if it were, no more than an emergent property of a specific neurosystem could, in fact, be effective, would be to show that your version of "immortality" (whichever one you are selling this time) is the only possible, imaginable alternative. In other words, this is still the same argument. I venture to suppose that you will support it by the same claims.
I encourage you to think, and think well and hard (in fact, consider revisiting all of your posts for, at a minimum, the last three months or so), before you try to use the puddle problem, or the Texas Sharpshooter, or your "special hand of aces", to support your claim that reality is, in fact, "extremely improbable". Luigi Pirandello said it very well, in Six Characters in Search of an Author: "“Oh, Sir, do you not realize that life is full of strange absurdities, which, strangely enough, do not even need to appear plausible, since they are true?”
I am uncomfortable with your martial metaphor, if only because I am not trying to "defeat" you, or "win" the "debate". I am trying to help you understand why the approach you have adopted is neither Fruitful, Luminous, nor Congruent (to coin a phrase), especially as you cling to, and repeat, your baseline errors.
For all that, I, personally, have been urging you to present evidence for the existence of the "soul" and its "immortality". I do not pretend to speak for my "fellows". Proud as I am to claim the company of many, even most, JREF posters, there is still no "us" for you to oppose.
I have said this before, but you do not have multiple "opponents"; you have only one--observed reality.
May I remind you of just a few of the host of problems that have been raised against the existence of an "immortal soul"?
1. How do you account for population growth?
2. How do you account for (among other misadventures) traumatic aphasia?
3. How do you account for the utter lack of any practical, empirical, objective evidence for the existence of this "soul"?
Again I encourage you: start at the other end. Present your practical, empirical, objective evidence of the existence of the "immortal soul". Not so much the reason you believe, but the evidence that supports that belief.
