Proof of Immortality III

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The Sparrow said:
Any guy who has....ummm....done some self service, has had thousands of potential persons wash down the drain. Where are they now Jabba?
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More importantly, as the whole point of this thread is a failed attempt at executing a cunning ruse designed to redirect to his proof that god is real; as god is everywhere, he must also be everything. So during said activity, not only is god willingly observing, he is also being rubbed the wrong way.
 
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ComfySlippers said:
More importantly, as the whole point of this thread is a failed attempt at executing a cunning ruse designed to redirect to his proof that god is real; as god is everywhere, he must also be everything. So during said activity, not only is god willingly observing, he is also being rubbed the wrong way.
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I told you before, DO NOT use sandpaper.
 
Dave and Agatha,
- I don't understand your reluctance to accept the relevance of potential selves (or "souls," minus any implication of immortality) in our issue here.
- "Likelihood" intrinsically involves potential occurrences...
 
Jabba said:
I don't understand your reluctance to accept the relevance of potential selves (or "souls," minus any implication of immortality) in our issue here.
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Because It's not a thing that exists. It's your latest attempt at playing word games and inventing new concepts to save your belief, because it is inconsistent with fact. And the only reason you're bringing it up is so that you can attach yet another name to the claim of consciousness, or some other form of existence, separate from the physical organism. The insinuation that you don't intend your latest fanciful construct to apply toward immortality is ludicrous.

"Likelihood" intrinsically involves potential occurrences...
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Which is what makes likelihood a qualitatively different thing than fact. You are the one claiming to be able to prove or disprove various things. The insistence upon doing that (wrongly) by means of computed probability is yours -- and one that you have been corrected for several times.
 
Jabba said:
Dave and Agatha,
- I don't understand your reluctance to accept the relevance of potential selves (or "souls," minus any implication of immortality) in our issue here.
- "Likelihood" intrinsically involves potential occurrences...
Click to expand...

Maybe, but potential selves are not relevant to the statement "people have one finite life".
 
Jabba said:
Dave and Agatha,
- I don't understand your reluctance to accept the relevance of potential selves (or "souls," minus any implication of immortality) in our issue here.
- "Likelihood" intrinsically involves potential occurrences...
Click to expand...

Maybe that's because you refuse to understand that a self is a process, and thus there is no such thing as a potential self? Once again: the self that develops is the only self that it can be because it is an ongoing process that includes every experience that person has.
 
godless dave said:
Maybe, but potential selves are not relevant to the statement "people have one finite life".
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Dave,
- I doubt this will help, but just in case -- in OOFLam I'm not really referring to "people" -- I'm referring to "selves" or "souls."
 
Jabba said:
Dave,
- I doubt this will help, but just in case -- in OOFLam I'm not really referring to "people" -- I'm referring to "selves" or "souls."
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My point is the same. Selves have one finite life. Potential selves aren't selves.

Remember that my statement that you initially questioned was about what model of consciousness I subscribe to, and it's one that doesn't include souls.
 
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Jabba said:
Dave,
- I doubt this will help, but just in case -- in OOFLam I'm not really referring to "people" -- I'm referring to "selves" or "souls."
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You're right; it won't help. Weasel words and equivocation haven't helped your argument in four years and counting. Why do you still employ them?

If your model of consciousness includes souls that exist "potentially" prior to birth and that persist or reappear in some way after death, then that is something whose existence you must prove. It's no one else's job to do that, nor anyone else's job to disprove your belief.

On a different tack, potentiality is the essence of statistics, but as has been described to you at length, statistical arguments do not and cannot establish fact. You're trying to overturn the factual reality of the process of consciousness with probabilistic arguments. This is not okay, and a statistician you revere and consulted -- whom you haven't returned to see -- told you as much.

Nor does potentiality help your "special snowflake" argument trying to show how improbable it is that you exist as you do. In fact it undermines it.

So shall we dispense with your latest distraction?
 
godless dave said:
My point is the same. Selves have one finite life. Potential selves aren't selves.

Remember that my statement that you initially questioned was about what model of consciousness I subscribe to, and it's one that doesn't include souls.
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Dave,
- I think that what you are referring to was my attempt to make sure that we were talking about the same concept -- not the concept to which you subscribe. In all that, I accepted that real concepts can refer to null classes...
- The concept that I've been talking about is the self that seems to continue the same for a lifetime -- the "thing," the "entity" or "process," that seems to remember the experiences and changes "it" has lived through. Is that a concept, possibly null, that you can recognize?
 
Jabba said:
Dave,
- I think that what you are referring to was my attempt to make sure that we were talking about the same concept -- not the concept to which you subscribe. In all that, I accepted that real concepts can refer to null classes...
- The concept that I've been talking about is the self that seems to continue the same for a lifetime -- the "thing," the "entity" or "process," that seems to remember the experiences and changes "it" has lived through. Is that a concept, possibly null, that you can recognize?
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We've already established that I recognize that concept, and that I believe it to be entirely physical.
 
Jabba said:
I think that what you are referring to was my attempt to make sure that we were talking about the same concept...
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Asked and answered. The concept to which one-finite-lifetime is connect is simple and has been explained to you numerous times. You are trying your very best to smudge that concept to the point where your belief in a soul can be wedged in, and to that extent -- as you have in so many arguments -- you've simply declared that some confusion or impasse exists, when it is in fact a confusion of your own deliberate construction.

The concept that I've been talking about is the self that seems to continue the same for a lifetime -- the "thing," the "entity" or "process," that seems to remember the experiences and changes "it" has lived through. Is that a concept, possibly null, that you can recognize?
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Memory and mutability are both quite conclusively processes of the organism. You are trying to cobble up a straw-man caricature of the self and pin it on your critics so that you can point to the aspects it doesn't cover and attribute them to a soul.

The self you define in this paragraph has no need for metaphysical or mystical explanations. It is fully explained by the physiology of the brain.
 
Am I building a strawman, or do I sense a Ship of Theseus argument here for souls? The continuity through change somehow means immortality.

The flaw in that should be obvious, if so. The ship did not exist prior to being built and once destroyed all considerations for whether it's the same ship become moot. It stops being a ship. Birth and death.
 
Jabba said:
Dave and Agatha,
- I don't understand your reluctance to accept the relevance of potential selves (or "souls," minus any implication of immortality) in our issue here.
- "Likelihood" intrinsically involves potential occurrences...
Click to expand...


Man, I wrote that whole thing about Ewan McGregor for nothing.
 
Jabba said:
Dave and Agatha,
- I don't understand your reluctance to accept the relevance of potential selves (or "souls," minus any implication of immortality) in our issue here.
Click to expand...

hmmmm, lemme guess, when you say potential selves/souls, what you really mean are souls that already exist but just have not been actualized into a body yet. That about right?
 
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