Proof of Immortality III

[jsfisher]

I'm just claiming that Bayesian statistics virtually disproves OOFLam.

You have been unable to define OOFLam. How can you possibly expect to disprove it.

(Giving it a name and associating it with vague characteristics does not define it.)

 

[zooterkin]

- But, it does match Eastern religious ideas of a soul.

Why on earth would that be relevant to someone intent on proving the Shroud of Turin to be the authentic burial cloth of Jesus Christ?

 

[JoeMorgue]

Agatha,
- But, it does match Eastern religious ideas of a soul.

No version of any religious idea of a soul exists.

There is no such things as a soul in an literal, not metaphorical sense.

I accept that natural law operates just as completely on material selves as they do on mountains.

But your entire argument is based on that not being true.

You can't just "accept" something as a way to get out of an argument but then plow forward having learning nothing.

I just believe that there is an immaterial self that science either denies or is confused about.

Do you know what "accept" means.

There is no single scientific model of consciousness.

There's no "single scientific model" of anything.

Stop treating science like it's a religion.

I'm just claiming that Bayesian statistics virtually disproves OOFLam.

Okay. At what point exactly are you going to in any way support this?

You do realize that claims are the first part of a discussion, not the end of it right?

They are "made-up numbers" only in the sense that they are "estimates" (or as jt says, "subjective" numbers) which is totally appropriate in Bayesian statistics.

No they are "made up numbers" in the sense that you are totally and completely making them up.

 

[JayUtah]

But, it does match Eastern religious ideas of a soul.

Then which one are you arguing? Cat or dog? This is the same problem you keep running into

I accept that natural law operates just as completely on material selves as they do on mountains. I just believe that there is an immaterial self that science either denies or is confused about.

And there we have it. It wasn't enough to accuse science of incompleteness. Now you have to accuse science also of ideological malfeasance because it doesn't conform to your religious belief.

There is no single scientific model of consciousness.

And according to you there is not one model of the soul. You don't seem to think that multiple contradictory claims for a soul are fatal to your belief. Why would multiple scientific models of consciousness be fatal to the scientific theory? The question is not whether science is certain (although so many fringe theorists argue that way). The question is whether you can locate an observation that requires the existence of an immaterial, immortal soul to explain it and then prove the explanation. Simply saying science "must" be wrong because it doesn't confirm your belief is a cop-out.

I'm just claiming that Bayesian statistics virtually disproves OOFLam.

It does not, and you refuse to engage in the discussion of why it will not.

These are "made-up numbers" only in the sense that they are "estimates" (or as jt says, "subjective" numbers)...

I.e., made up.

...which is totally appropriate in Bayesian statistics.

Asked and answered. You intend your application of Bayes to constitute proof. When applied to made-up numbers, Bayesian methods will only tell you how those beliefs are affected by new information. It in no way proves the belief, the converse of the belief, or "virtually disproves" anything in an objective sense. Even when applied to measurement, the result is ever only a probability, which must bow to observation. You cannot claim that statistics is probative just because you don't have anything that really is probative.

Bayes is not a method for converting subjective belief into objective fact.

 

[godless dave]

Agatha,
- But, it does match Eastern religious ideas of a soul.

- I accept that natural law operates just as completely on material selves as they do on mountains. I just believe that there is an immaterial self that science either denies or is confused about. The following video expresses my thoughts on this issue quite well. https://www.scienceandnonduality.com/?gclid=CNDcraOloM0CFdgcgQodRGAEmw

- There is no single scientific model of consciousness. I'm just claiming that Bayesian statistics virtually disproves OOFLam.

Except that your formula depends on what you're calling OOFLam including those immaterial selves you mentioned. To people who don't believe in immaterial selves all you've done is attempted to disprove a model we don't believe in anyway.

I guess your target audience would be people who believe in mortal immaterial selves. I don't know where you would find such people. Probably not here at ISF.

 

[JoeMorgue]

I'm reminding of a line from Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy where the titular guide has a passage proving that no one exists.

The logic goes:

The universe is infinitely large.
There is a finite number of people.
Diving the number of people in the universe by the size of the universe would give you the universe's population density.
Any finite number divided by infinity is effectively zero.
Therefore no one exists.

 

[JayUtah]

Therefore no one exists.

/me vanishes in a puff of logic.

 

[JayUtah]

The following video expresses my thoughts on this issue quite well. https://www.scienceandnonduality.com/?gclid=CNDcraOloM0CFdgcgQodRGAEmw

For those who want the tl;dr -- a bunch of glittering New Age generalities with no evidence or argument. It does, however, accurately represent Jabba in a few ways, such as the admission that consciousness is currently known to come from the brain, "...but I believe otherwise."

 

[Jabba]

Except that your formula depends on what you're calling OOFLam including those immaterial selves you mentioned. To people who don't believe in immaterial selves all you've done is attempted to disprove a model we don't believe in anyway...

Dave,
- I'm just saying that OOFLam refers to everyone's sense of self -- but, it implies that whoever has an immaterial sense of self is wrong.

I guess your target audience would be people who believe in mortal immaterial selves. I don't know where you would find such people. Probably not here at ISF.

- My target audience would be people who don't believe in immaterial selves, and that's pretty much every one here.

 

[JayUtah]

I'm just saying that OOFLam refers to everyone's sense of self -- but, it implies that whoever has an immaterial sense of self is wrong.

If the model you're trying to show is so improbable as not to exist includes immaterial elements, then you can't use it to prove the existence of those same immaterial elements in the model you define as its alternative. You've gone from false dilemma to contradiction.

My target audience would be people who don't believe in immaterial selves, and that's pretty much every one here.

No. We don't believe in the model you're trying to pin on us, which includes the notion of immaterial souls. You are trying to differentiate between the two by saying its adherents don't believe in the immaterial aspect of the one finite life model. That means that essentially your model and the one you're trying to disprove, in order to prove yours, are fundamentally identical for that reason. It is more accurate to say your opponents don't believe the one finite life model has or needs an immaterial aspect.

As usual, you're trying to equivocate.

 

[Loss Leader]

- I accept that natural law operates just as completely on material selves as they do on mountains. I just believe that there is an immaterial self that science either denies or is confused about. .

Then show your evidence for an immaterial soul. No made up numbers, no dividing by infinity - just real, measurable evidence.

 

[godless dave]

Dave,
- I'm just saying that OOFLam refers to everyone's sense of self -- but, it implies that whoever has an immaterial sense of self is wrong.

- My target audience would be people who don't believe in immaterial selves, and that's pretty much every one here.

Then the likelihood of a self given OOFLam should be calculated the same way as the likelihood of Mount Rainier.

 

[JoeMorgue]

*CONFESSION*

Why I get from context what "OOFLAM" is referring to in general, I don't know what the literal acronym means and at this point I'm afraid to ask.

 

[JoeMorgue]

- My target audience would be people who don't believe in immaterial selves, and that's pretty much every one here.

We don't "don't believe in immaterial selves." We've been shown no evidence of immaterial selves nor even a concrete definition of what a "immaterial self" is.

 

[halleyscomet]

For those who want the tl;dr -- a bunch of glittering New Age generalities with no evidence or argument. It does, however, accurately represent Jabba in a few ways, such as the admission that consciousness is currently known to come from the brain, "...but I believe otherwise."

Insert "King of Wishful Thinking" song reference here.

 

[JayUtah]

*CONFESSION*

Why I get from context what "OOFLAM" is referring to in general, I don't know what the literal acronym means and at this point I'm afraid to ask.

Only One Finite Life At Most. It's the acronym Jabba uses to refer to what he thinks his critics believe. While that's what it expands to, what it actually means varies according to whatever straw man Jabba needs from day to day. Today it means "Life that incorporates an immaterial self that is denied by its believers."

 

[Loss Leader]

Only One Finite Life At Most. It's the acronym Jabba uses to refer to what he thinks his critics believe. While that's what it expands to, what it actually means varies according to whatever straw man Jabba needs from day to day. Today it means "Life that incorporates an immaterial self that is denied by its believers."

I feel that its genesis came during the great P ~P wars of the early part of the decade. Jabba was trying to define the opposite of his life in a way that included reincarnation but excluded everything else. In so doing, he avoided having to confront the fact that immortality wasn't the complement to his existence.

We never really got back to just how much of the middle (all of it) he was trying to exclude.

 

[JoeMorgue]

Jabba - Why do you feel that so many people who believe the same thing you do are comfortable simply calling it a "soul" and treating the belief as a religious/mystical/metaphysical one while you feel the need to generate an elaborate pseudo-mathematical justification for it?

 

[caveman1917]

Prosecutor's Fallacy.

Prove or retract. You do understand that all I did was tell you a well-known result about probabilistic entailment reducing to logical entailment in the limit where probabilities are 0 or 1? All deductive arguments are probabilistic arguments.

The limit you describe identifies the difference in modes of reasoning that, say, a court would allow to be employed. But more importantly there are qualitative differences in how we reason when probability is equivalent knowledge, so there isn't really any useful tooth to the "special case of" proposition.

As if a court is the standard for what is "useful" - that particular result is an expected property of probabilistic logics, that they reduce correctly in that limit.

Define "qualitative differences."

The only reason you would be making a probabilistic argument is if the probabilities aren't 0 or 1.

If you are making a deductive argument then you are making a probabilistic argument, that's the point.

Using my example above, I can compute any arbitrarily high probability (even approaching 1) that a message is spam, and that's one mode of obtaining belief. But if the customer says, "No, that email from my uncle's business in Vietnam is not spam," then that's a completely different mode of reasoning. Hence whitelists, where we can rely upon knowledge (not belief) that a particular origin is legitimate. Saying that this belief is tantamount to a probability of 0 (for spam) is just empty rhetoric. It's numerically true, but misses the point.

Meh, there's still a non-zero probability that the customer's statement is wrong - for various reasons. In fact it may very well be true, if you consider the probability of the customer being wrong, that it's still more likely to be spam than not.

Define "different mode of reasoning."

 

[Mojo]

Only One Finite Life At Most. It's the acronym Jabba uses to refer to what he thinks his critics believe. While that's what it expands to, what it actually means varies according to whatever straw man Jabba needs from day to day. Today it means "Life that incorporates an immaterial self that is denied by its believers."

The "at most" bit is Jabba's attempt to invoke an infinite number of competing "selves", only one of which can be lucky enough to occupy a particular body, and therefore the vast majority of which have less than one life. Such a "pool of souls" is, of course, nothing to do with any scientific model of consciousness. It's just another of Jabba's attempts to beg the question. As is his claim that science "can't predict who Jabba's self will be". Science just predicts that a functioning human body will produce a human consciousness. The idea that there is a choice of them is just Jabba's strawman, and if course requires the immaterial be therefore immortal "potential selves" that is Jabba"s desired result.