By "I would have to exist again," you mean that your physical body/brain would have to live again.
Which is analogous to saying that Mt Ranier would have to form again. I think we're in agreement that, in materialism, neither a human brain nor a mountain is likely to arise again that is an exact copy of any that came before. However, that is entirely beside the point.
But that is just another way of expressing your opinion re this issue...
No, it is a prediction of H, the materialist hypothesis. If you are reckoning P(E|H), you must do so as if H were true. That includes granting its predictions in determinable cases. The materialist hypothesis predicts that if all the causes that contribute to the formation of a mountain were to be recreated, we can expect the mountain to exhibit all the properties, emergent or otherwise, of its predecessor. That is, the materialist hypothesis demands that if the material is the same, all that matters about the entity must be the same, as all properties are determined by material alone.
Once again you're trying to cast aspersions on H, picking away at P(H), as if that had any bearing on P(E|H). Some time ago I presented to you a list of individually fatal flaws in your argument. One of those was the observation that you do not understand the different components in an inferential model and the role each plays in the quantitative behavior of the model. You alluded to this lack of understanding when you presented the formulation of Bayes' theorem and admitted that you did not understand it. Your argument today is simply another in a long series of examples underscoring this point.
You said that if you could just get past the Texas sharpshooter fallacy, your argument would fall into place. Today's argument, which replicates another fatal error, says otherwise. Given the discrepancy between what we can observe about your proof and your expression of confidence in it, please take the time to go back to those dozen or so individually fatal flaws and write a sentence or two explaining how you plan to correct your proof to remedy those flaws.
Thusly expressing your opinion, does nothing to negate the critical differences between you and Rainier, and in no way sets Rainier apart from other geological formations.
You've shown no critical difference.
The point your critics have successfully made is that in materialism there is no critical difference between a human being and a mountain as far as your proof goes. Both are entities. Both exhibit emergent properties. The precise configuration of each is the product of a chaotic system that is unlikely to repeat. In neither case was any specific entity "set apart" in a way that allows the probability of its having arisen to be significant.
Because each entity is the product of a chaotic system, we can imagine that the system has the capacity to produce great variation. However, that is not a basis from which to reckon the probability of any particular specimen as meaningful information. Meaningfulness of that probability requires the precise specimen to have had meaning before the system operated. This does not happen in materialism in the case either of mountains or of human beings. Preference doesn't work that way in chaos theory.
In each case the chaotic system has produced many different specimens. There are different mountains. There are different human beings. Some categories of properties belonging to each type of entity do not vary in fine as the specimen varies. Each mountain, for example, has the property of causing local gravitational deflections, proportional to its mass. This is a property of all mountains of similar mass, regardless of their specific shape.
Similarly, all human beings exhibit the emergent property of emitting heat; each functioning body emits heat, roughly 80 watts in the typical ambient. This is because humans are endothermic, and in normal operation each functioning human body undergoes metabolism, an (ironically) exothermic chemical process. That property is roughly the same for all humans, regardless of otherwise observable differences. This property of human bodies is said to be emergent because the process of metabolism requires sufficient composition of different body parts before it can operate.
Further, each nominal human being exhibits the property of self-awareness. This too is an emergent property because it requires a functioning body up to the point where the process of conscious brain operation occurs. There is no operative difference between the self-awareness exhibited by one human and that exhibited by another human in equal working order. Just as there is no difference between the "going 60 mph" exhibited by one Volkswagen on the highway and other mechanically equivalent Volkswagen. This is the meaning of "property" that you simply refuse to listen to.
You concede that all the above regarding the emergence of properties should be the case for mountains, but you insist that such should not be the case for human beings because of some imagined critical difference between them.
You cannot show any critical difference. You
imagine that there is one. You ardently allude to the supposed nobility of man -- "We all take our existence for granted, but we shouldn't" -- as a means of pleading that such a difference must be present, even if you can't put your finger on it. You spout all kinds of babble purporting to be this magical difference, but in five years you haven't been able to define it, prove it exists, or show where any formulation of materialism involves it. In short, you just make stuff up and try to discredit materialism because it cannot explain your made-up, deliberately ambiguous, emotional life raft. An existential crisis is not evidence.
Now let's examine (for the umpteenth time) how your argument specifically errs.
Your argument relies upon observable differences in the entities necessarily reflecting in fine detail upon the exhibition of any given property. Some of your critics have indulged you in this reliance, owing in my opinion to their inattention to your various equivocations. You have tried to argue that materialism requires that a human being's "chemistry" or genetics must uniquely determine "a" distinct self-awareness. The question is meaningless in materialism, there is no concept of distinction for self-awareness any more than there is a distinction in the heat emitted by virtue of metabolism.
The article above is in cautionary quotes because "a" self or "a" consciousness is as grammatically valid under materialism, as "a going 60 mph" (as a property of cars) or "a heat" (as a property of endothermic organisms). (N.B., exothermic and endothermic have different meanings depending on whether the context is chemistry or biology.) Your argument simply ignores altogether what a property is. We say "consciousness or self-awareness is an emergent property of a functioning brain," and you blindly parse "self-awareness" as a reference to some entity that is, by your own admission, a flimsy synonym for a soul. This is the central question that you blatantly beg in your argument. The property of self-awareness under materialism is not anything like a soul, in any way, shape, form, or operation.
You have further conflated the
products of these processes and the
effects of these properties with the properties and processes themselves, in a further desperate effort to transform a property into an entity and thereby argue that they must be able to differ. Recasting properties as particularized entities is crucial to your argument, because your model is statistical and requires enumerability in order to work at all. Materialism does not provide you that enumerability, so your model -- any statistical model, in fact -- is the wrong tool to use.
You want to expand the notion of self, self-awareness, consciousness -- or any of the other in a long string of words you've worked your way through in an effort to keep ideas ambiguous -- to include the effects of properties in specific environments. Being self-aware causes us to make observations, form memories, experience emotions, make decisions, and so forth. Because each person experiences a different set of stimuli, the results of the process of consciousness differ in each case. In materialism these are reflected simply as physical and chemical changes in the brain that alter how the brain will process subsequent stimulus.
In your theory, that essence is what is preserved after death as the soul. But in materialism it cannot be preserved after death, because the death of the organism results in the degradation of the persistent chemical and physical states that embody that essence as materialism theorizes it to be held. You conflate your desired theory with materialism and argue that self-awareness includes the persistent state upon which the process operates. That, in your argument, converts self-awareness into a particular entity, even in materialism. But it does not, as materialism maintains the distinction between process and material. Process is abstract; the
effects of process do not have to be.
The proof is in the examples I raised earlier. Metabolic heat remains unchanged as a property regardless of the results of emission. Whether the heat from my hand warms a glass of overchilled wine or the cheek of my dog has not the slightest effect on the property of heat emission. There isn't a different "kind" of heat that goes into the wine versus the dog. Metabolism doesn't fundamentally change because a dog received the heat as opposed to wine. The concept of heat transfer doesn't suddenly have to be described differently depending on the arbitrary identity of its receiver. Yet a reasonably persistent effect is had
upon the environment. We can observe the wine warming, with the effect that some of its flavors are opened up. Or we can observe the dog to respond affectionately. Make no mistake: a different result ensues. But that difference doesn't transform the process.
Similarly "going 60 mph" had the result this morning of depositing me at work. In a few hours the result of "going 60 mph" will return me home. Right now, at this very hour, I'm sure the result of "going 60 mph" is having the effect of transporting a lovely family to the seaside in Blackpool, England. We can point out numerous results of different entities exhibiting the property of "going 60 mph" in different times and places. And those results have persistent, perhaps irreversible, perhaps irreproducible effects on the physical world. But luckily none of those affects the essence of the property. We don't have to rewrite Newton's
Principia Mathematica to reformulate the property of velocity in order to incorporate all the effects it may have. The effects do not retroactively affect the property, are not part of the property, and do not cause us to think differently about the property.
In sum, materialism holds as a matter of principle that there is no inherent difference between human beings and mountains in the ways that apply to the exhibition and observation of properties. It is according to those principles -- not those you invent yourself -- that you must evaluate P(E|H). Any other analysis is immediately invalid. Since you refuse to evaluate materialism except as you've improperly amended it (i.e., straw man), your argument fails.
...but there is reason to wonder about my self (and, I assume, your self) existing again...
The only reason you've ever provided to wonder about yourself existing again is your fervent desire to do so, which you admit is a strong emotional conviction. That is insufficient to support a mathematical proof that it will, in fact, happen.
