Proof of Immortality III

[HighRiser]

How did you arrive at those numbers?

Not by reasonable means?

 

[The Sparrow]

Bananas don't exist. too unlikely!!!!!

 

[Jabba]

- My reasoning for P(E|H):


Re P(E|H):According to science, I would never exist if
My parents had never met…
They had never had intercourse.
The necessary sperm cell (of the sextillion produced by my dad) had not met up with the necessary ovum (of the 500 carried by my mom).
The same three events (of above) had not occurred for both sets of my grandparents.
And all four sets of my great-grandparents.
Etc., etc., etc.
All the way back to the beginning of life on this planet.
And then, there’s the big bang.
And what if I had been (would have been?) the combination of a particular sperm cell of my dad and a particular ovum of Cleopatra?
How many human sperm cells and ova have existed since the beginning of (just) human life?
And, wouldn’t each potential combination of particular sperm cell and particular ovum represent a different potential person?
And what about all those potential persons of potential but unactualized persons?
However, my particular conscious existence probably doesn’t depend upon a particular sperm cell and particular ovum, anyway…
Rather, a certain organic state must naturally produce the emergent property of consciousness, and each new consciousness must produce its own, brand new, “self.”
IOW, there probably is no limited pool of potential beings – and consequently, the ‘number’ of potential beings is infinite…
Wow!
And then, there’s the anthropic principle.
And, what’s the likelihood that the 14 billion years of apparent universe existence would currently be within the years of my life.
And, what if time is infinite in both directions?

 

[godless dave]

- My reasoning for P(E|H):


Re P(E|H):According to science, I would never exist if
My parents had never met…
They had never had intercourse.
The necessary sperm cell (of the sextillion produced by my dad) had not met up with the necessary ovum (of the 500 carried by my mom).
The same three events (of above) had not occurred for both sets of my grandparents.
And all four sets of my great-grandparents.
Etc., etc., etc.
All the way back to the beginning of life on this planet.

So your existence is the result of a long series of events, just like everything else.

And then, there’s the big bang.

I don't see how that's relevant.

And what if I had been (would have been?) the combination of a particular sperm cell of my dad and a particular ovum of Cleopatra?

That would be impossible, because your dad's existence depends on the existence of all of his ancestors, some of whom were alive at the same time as Cleopatra.

How many human sperm cells and ova have existed since the beginning of (just) human life?

Trillions.

And, wouldn’t each potential combination of particular sperm cell and particular ovum represent a different potential person?

You could think of them that way.

And what about all those potential persons of potential but unactualized persons?

What about them?

However, my particular conscious existence probably doesn’t depend upon a particular sperm cell and particular ovum, anyway…

Under H it most certainly does.

Rather, a certain organic state must naturally produce the emergent property of consciousness, and each new consciousness must produce its own, brand new, “self.”

Not under H.

IOW, there probably is no limited pool of potential beings – and consequently, the ‘number’ of potential beings is infinite…

Not under H.

And then, there’s the anthropic principle.

What about it?

And, what’s the likelihood that the 14 billion years of apparent universe existence would currently be within the years of my life.

The time you exist now is the only time you could have existed, because your existence depends on all those previous events.

And, what if time is infinite in both directions?

It doesn't appear to be, but I don't see how that's relevant to the issue. Life on earth has existed for a finite amount of time.

 

[Peregrinus]

Bananas don't exist. too unlikely!!!!!

But...but...but...

They're "shaped just right [read here "designed"] as a fit for the human hand." Ray Comfort sez so!

 

[The Sparrow]

But...but...but...

They're "shaped just right as a fit for the human hand." Ray Comfort sez so!

So, now I'm confused then, they ARE immortal?

 

[JayUtah]

I've explained my reasoning before.

We know. Believe me, we know. Mindless repetition is one of your best-known features.

I'll try again.

No, don't. The problems with your reasoning have been made very plain by several people over the past four years. You're utterly incapable of fixing them, utterly disinterested in hearing the analysis, and at this point I daresay you're largely incapable of considering the possibility that you might be wrong.

 

[JayUtah]

- My reasoning for P(E|H):

Asked and answered. We're back to Mt Ranier again with you committing the same old Texas sharpshooter fallacy. When are you going to realize that "effective debate" is not just mindlessly spewing the same broken logic over and over again? You actually have to listen to your critics and apply their statements to your claims. You admit you don't even do the former. So can you explain why anyone should engage you, and not just point and laugh?

 

[Loss Leader]

- My reasoning for P(E|H):


Re P(E|H):According to science, I would never exist if
My parents had never met…
They had never had intercourse.
The necessary sperm cell (of the sextillion produced by my dad) had not met up with the necessary ovum (of the 500 carried by my mom).
The same three events (of above) had not occurred for both sets of my grandparents.
And all four sets of my great-grandparents.
Etc., etc., etc.
All the way back to the beginning of life on this planet.
And then, there’s the big bang.
And what if I had been (would have been?) the combination of a particular sperm cell of my dad and a particular ovum of Cleopatra?
How many human sperm cells and ova have existed since the beginning of (just) human life?
And, wouldn’t each potential combination of particular sperm cell and particular ovum represent a different potential person?
And what about all those potential persons of potential but unactualized persons?
However, my particular conscious existence probably doesn’t depend upon a particular sperm cell and particular ovum, anyway…
Rather, a certain organic state must naturally produce the emergent property of consciousness, and each new consciousness must produce its own, brand new, “self.”
IOW, there probably is no limited pool of potential beings – and consequently, the ‘number’ of potential beings is infinite…
Wow!
And then, there’s the anthropic principle.
And, what’s the likelihood that the 14 billion years of apparent universe existence would currently be within the years of my life.
And, what if time is infinite in both directions?

You contradict yourself at least twice within this wall of nonsense.

 

[abaddon]

- My reasoning for P(E|H):


Re P(E|H):According to science, I would never exist if
My parents had never met…
They had never had intercourse.
The necessary sperm cell (of the sextillion produced by my dad) had not met up with the necessary ovum (of the 500 carried by my mom).
The same three events (of above) had not occurred for both sets of my grandparents.
And all four sets of my great-grandparents.
Etc., etc., etc.
All the way back to the beginning of life on this planet.

Here we go again. uo had two parents, 4 grandparents, 8 great grand parents, 16 great, great grandparents and so on for successive generations. By the time you get as far back as Roman times, you have more ancestors than humans that have ever existed on the planet over all time with a further 100,000 plus years yet to account for.

And then, there’s the big bang.

What about it?

And what if I had been (would have been?) the combination of a particular sperm cell of my dad and a particular ovum of Cleopatra?

That's silly. Cleopatra is thousands of years dead. You are building speculation upon fantasy.

How many human sperm cells and ova have existed since the beginning of (just) human life?

It doesn't matter.

And, wouldn’t each potential combination of particular sperm cell and particular ovum represent a different potential person?

Not really, unless you wish to collect every ovary and testicle along with every menstruation and masturbatory ejaculate ever, chuck them all in an enormous vat and figure out how to keep them all alive.

And what about all those potential persons of potential but unactualized persons?

They remain unactualised.

However, my particular conscious existence probably doesn’t depend upon a particular sperm cell and particular ovum, anyway…

Unevidenced claim.

Rather, a certain organic state must naturally produce the emergent property of consciousness,

Now you claim that the self is a product of organic processes.

and each new consciousness must produce its own, brand new, “self.”

True in every case, on every side of the argument That triviality does not help your case.

IOW, there probably is no limited pool of potential beings – and consequently, the ‘number’ of potential beings is infinite…
Wow!

Totally ignoring several things If, say, your fertilized zygote had been transplanted into an impoverished Bangladeshi woman and you had bee raised in that circumstance, do you think that person would be the same as you?

And then, there’s the anthropic principle.

What about it? Did locks evolve to suit keys? How likely is it that any lock exists which just happens to fit the keys in my pocket?

And, what’s the likelihood that the 14 billion years of apparent universe existence would currently be within the years of my life.

Suppose you were born on the 1st of January 2016, What are the chances of that, that you would be 8 months old? How about if you were born 2 months premature? Or 1 month overdue? What makes you think this is even any kind of argument?

And, what if time is infinite in both directions?

Demonstrate that it is with associated maths and evidence. You cannot and the evidence that we have to hand disagrees with you. You have simply returned to the realm of speculation as evidence in much the same way as Lionel Hutz, Attorney at law.

 

[Thor 2]

- My reasoning for P(E|H):


Re P(E|H):According to science, I would never exist if
My parents had never met…
They had never had intercourse.
The necessary sperm cell (of the sextillion produced by my dad) had not met up with the necessary ovum (of the 500 carried by my mom).

bla bla bla bla bla ..............

And, what’s the likelihood that the 14 billion years of apparent universe existence would currently be within the years of my life.
And, what if time is infinite in both directions?

Yes well if all these things didn't happen we would not have a Jabba here today.

Edited by Agatha: 

Edited to remove breach of rule 0 and rule 12

 

[Jabba]

- My reasoning for P(E|H):


Re P(E|H):According to science, I would never exist if
My parents had never met…
They had never had intercourse.
The necessary sperm cell (of the sextillion produced by my dad) had not met up with the necessary ovum (of the 500 carried by my mom).
The same three events (of above) had not occurred for both sets of my grandparents.
And all four sets of my great-grandparents.
Etc., etc., etc.
All the way back to the beginning of life on this planet.
And then, there’s the big bang.
And what if I had been (would have been?) the combination of a particular sperm cell of my dad and a particular ovum of Cleopatra?
How many human sperm cells and ova have existed since the beginning of (just) human life?
And, wouldn’t each potential combination of particular sperm cell and particular ovum represent a different potential person?
And what about all those potential persons of potential but unactualized persons?
However, my particular conscious existence probably doesn’t depend upon a particular sperm cell and particular ovum, anyway…
Rather, a certain organic state must naturally produce the emergent property of consciousness, and each new consciousness must produce its own, brand new, “self.”
IOW, there probably is no limited pool of potential beings – and consequently, the ‘number’ of potential beings is infinite…
Wow!
And then, there’s the anthropic principle.
And, what’s the likelihood that the 14 billion years of apparent universe existence would currently be within the years of my life.
And, what if time is infinite in both directions?

You contradict yourself at least twice within this wall of nonsense.

LL,
- Where are my contradictions?

 

[JayUtah]

Where are my contradictions?

While you're waiting for him to answer, address the other posters' objections.

 

[John Jones]

LL,
- Where are my contradictions?

Right where Loss Leader said - in this wall of nonsense. Pay attention!

http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=11467890&postcount=2923

 

[Loss Leader]

Re P(E|H):
According to science, I would never exist if
My parents had never met…
They had never had intercourse.
The necessary sperm cell (of the sextillion produced by my dad) had not met up with the necessary ovum (of the 500 carried by my mom).The same three events (of above) had not occurred for both sets of my grandparents.
And all four sets of my great-grandparents.
Etc., etc., etc.
All the way back to the beginning of life on this planet.
And then, there’s the big bang.
And what if I had been (would have been?) the combination of a particular sperm cell of my dad and a particular ovum of Cleopatra?
How many human sperm cells and ova have existed since the beginning of (just) human life?
And, wouldn’t each potential combination of particular sperm cell and particular ovum represent a different potential person?
And what about all those potential persons of potential but unactualized persons?
However, my particular conscious existence probably doesn’t depend upon a particular sperm cell and particular ovum, anyway…Rather, a certain organic state must naturally produce the emergent property of consciousness, and each new consciousness must produce its own, brand new, “self.”
IOW, there probably is no limited pool of potential beings – and consequently, the ‘number’ of potential beings is infinite…
Wow!
And then, there’s the anthropic principle.
And, what’s the likelihood that the 14 billion years of apparent universe existence would currently be within the years of my life.
And, what if time is infinite in both directions?

Highlighted one, underlined the other.

 

[JoeMorgue]

Jabba every question you keep asking has already been answered. It's rude to keep asking them over and over.

STOP STALLING.

 

[Jabba]

I don't really have a problem with made-up priors. Priors are just an expression of personal belief. There's no hard reason that any two people should agree on them; after all, we each bring different background information to any particular problem.

Furthermore, with a little algebra, we can write Bayes Theorem in terms of the odds of H, like this:

P(H|E) / P(~H|E) = [ P(E|H) / P(E|~H) ] × [ P(H) / P(~H) ] .

This shows that the posterior odds of H can be factored into the likelihood ratio and the prior odds, each factor contributing independently to the posterior odds. Since the data only affects the posterior odds through the likelihood ratio, even people who hold radically different subjective prior odds of a hypothesis should be able to agree on how much their odds should change given new data E. In this sense, Bayesian inference still "works" in the face of disagreements about the priors. But it requires H and ~H to make unambiguous predictions about the data. Thus, lack of consensus on the priors is tolerable, even expected. But lack of consensus on the likelihoods, which implies that the models (hypotheses) have not been adequately specified, is fatal.

jt,
- I don't understand that. Please try again.

It means that we don't agree that P(E | H) < P(E | ~H) and that this is fatal for your argument.

caveman,
- I'll look for myself, but you can speed things up if you point me to your reasoning for why P(E | H) < P(E | ~H) is not true.

caveman,
- Does the following give your reasoning?

To be honest, I'm not really following the specific debate on your claims all that closely, I'm just here for the probability stuff. But since you asked, I took a look through the past couple of pages, and here's my 2 cents:

Mojo's quest for finding fallacies is counter-productive. When playing that game, at some point you just see what you want to see. The one that I can see to be well-supported is that you are assigning a lower probability to a compound hypothesis including a simple hypothesis to which you, on its own, assign a higher probability (ie body vs body + soul). The other ones seem to be pushing it a little, increasingly so as increasingly more are "discovered".

I find that Texas Sharpshooter/special case/HARKing argument unconvincing. One can certainly make deductions based on one's own existence, even probabilistic, and even after the fact.

For example, suppose I have an electrical wire in front of me. If I touch it and the wire is live then I die, if it isn't live then I survive. I touch it, and I survive. I conclude that the wire wasn't live. Perfectly fine deduction. Making it probabilistic doesn't change this. Suppose that if it's live that I have a 99% chance of dying and 1% chance of surviving and vice versa for it not being live. I conclude that the wire likely wasn't live. Also a perfectly fine deduction. Even coming up with this after the fact doesn't change this. Suppose I remember now that, indeed, 10 years ago I touched such a wire and survived, then I can still reach the same conclusion, based on my current existence, regarding that wire from 10 years ago.

I think that the problem rather is that your conditional likelihoods are in fact equal, contrary to what you claim. Yes, the odds of you existing under the - as you call it - scientific explanation are pretty damn small. Out of the insanely large number of potential people which could have been created under the scientific explanation, it's a very small chance that you would have been among the actual people who got created. But then, the same argument applies for the immortal soul. Out of the insane number of potential immortal souls which could have been created, it's a very small chance (the same small chance) that you would have been among the actual immortal souls which got created.

Hence, I think the error is simply your claim that P(E | H) =/= P(E | ~H) whereas they are, in fact, equal. Given that the relative likelihood is 1, all you're getting out of this exercise is your own prior beliefs getting reflected back at you. As I've said much earlier here:



You can believe in immortality as much as you want, it is not a priori better or worse than to believe in mortality. But you're not doing what you seem to think you're doing, ie providing an argument as to why people should adopt your belief in immortality - and you sure ain't proving it mathematically.

Then on the other hand, people who self-identify as skeptics in this thread have a tendency to claim that science supports their case for mortality, forgetting that just because evidence is consistent with one hypothesis doesn't mean it is necessarily any less consistent with another. If I really had 5$ every time someone made that error I'd be rich now.

All in all, this thread is a huge exercise in futility, but the tangents on probability theory every once in a while are interesting though.

jt and caveman,
- Have you given up?

 

[JoeMorgue]

jt and caveman,
- Have you given up?

Unbelievable.

 

[JayUtah]

Jabba every question you keep asking has already been answered. It's rude to keep asking them over and over.

Agreed. It's clear his tactic is to wear down his critics with dogged repetition of long-debunked arguments, then claim victory when they flounce or simply drift away. That way he can tell himself it was his patience and perseverance that prevailed against those ideologically entrenched and biased skeptics.

While there's some justification to asking Loss Leader to specify his refutation, it's likely Jabba will use this to launch into another side debate over whether they really are contradictions, or whether they really are important, and ignore the more pressing refutation of this being simply a restatement of his Texas sharpshooter fallacy that has already been discussed to death.

 

[JayUtah]

jt and caveman,
- Have you given up?

You clearly don't understand their refutation.

Their argument is that if you claim the privilege of choosing priors as you will, P(H) and P(~H), then the only way your exercise has meaning is if there can be no substantial disagreement on the likelihoods P(E|H) and P(E|~H). That is, the model has to be evidently correct on those points such that both you and your opponents agree on the effect of new data on the hypothesis regardless of how probable you each believe the hypothesis to be in the absence of evidence.

Disagreement itself in the likelihoods is the refutation.

Caveman explicitly stated he did not agree with your premise that P(E|H) is necessarily less than P(E|~H), and went on to state explicitly that this is fatal to your claim. Do not continue to ask your critics the same questions they have already clearly answered, hoping for a different answer.

jt512 made a similar statement, which you originally ignored and had to be referred back to by your critics. He also explicitly stated that his disagreement was fatal to your claims. Do no keep pressing for favorable retractions, and certainly don't interpret as a retraction their unwillingness to play your nagging game.

I repeat, disagreement alone is the fatal blow. No further discussion or rationale is required. You cannot cure that failure by shifting the burden of proof or demanding rationales. In order for you to use Bayes as you propose to use it, your likelihoods must be self-evidently correct.

They are not.

Your behavior is frankly insulting, Jabba. You are behaving like a child, and I agree with Mr Bentley that it is literally unbelievable for a grown adult to gloat so shamelessly. Both jt512 and Caveman have expressed disinterest in your overall argument. As such they are not likely to read and respond here regularly. But in spite of that you ignore the critics who are interested in your argument and are engaging you regularly and insult them by holding up the debate while you wait for your ordained interlocutors to satisfy your arbitrary whims.

It should be apparent that no further discussion is needed from them to justify their judgment that their argument fails. If it is not apparent, I suggest you re-read my statements above until it is apparent, and resist the urge to adopt your Befuddled Old Grandpa persona as your standard feeble excuse to sidestep refutation.

Finally, it is the height of rudeness to insinuate that their unwillingness to play your incessant word games and faux-confused run-around in any way constitutes a concession on their part. I used to worry that I was being unfair to you by claiming that you always interpret your critics' resignation as your victory or their admission of defeat on the merits.

No longer.

You are clearly just trying to do exactly as I sad: create only the appearance of rhetorical success by some fairly standard ham-fisted stunts.