Proof of Immortality, VI

[zooterkin]

How is being born like a lottery?

Ask Cecil Rhodes.

 

[JesseCuster]

OK, lottery. I have asked you before, but I expect you will keep ignoring the question: Potential selves, whatever it is, are persons not born. They are non-players in the lottery. How can non-players affect your winning chances?

Hans

Jabba's analogy is that imaginary people (i.e. his increasingly tenuous and ever growing concept of 'potential selves') represent the pool of tickets from which a winning ticket (a real person) is drawn.

Potential selves aren't players. They're represent the pool of tickets from which a winner (a real person) is drawn.

It's hard to know where to start explaining to Jabba what's wrong with the analogy.

The concept of potential selves is incoherent in the first place, but even if it's granted for the sake of argument, he still isn't getting anywhere with his argument. Despite imagining up all sorts of fanciful ways to pad out his pool of potential selves (cloning people, freezing sperm and eggs and using them to make people in the future, etc.) he doesn't have an infinite pool of selves, and he needs that to make his calculation for the odds of his existence as X/infinity. He's going to need to get that imagination of his working if he wants to imagine up an infinity of potential selves.

It fundamentally doesn't make sense even if you agree with it. When I was born (or conceived), how would the fact that it's theoretically possible for someone to have frozen one of Cleopatra's eggs and used it in the future to make a person, affect my likelihood of existence? How does the fact that Jabba might be cloned in the future affect the likelihood of me existing when I was born (or conceived)? How does it affect the existence of likelihood of existence of my ongoing self? It doesn't, yet he's desperately adding all these things to his pile of potential selves as if it somehow gives him really long odds to work with.

It makes as much sense to calculate actually odds of winning the lottery by counting up the tickets from lotteries you never played. And then imagining that there are an infinity of potential tickets because the lottery makers could have designed a lottery with trillions or quadrillions or a googolplex potential winning numbers. Therefore if you win the lottery, your odds weren't one in some number of millions, it was one in some arbitrarily large number of tickets because you can imagine someone designing a lottery with a ridiculous number of potential winning tickets.

It's all very silly and makes no sense.

 

[godless dave]

And if drawing a ticket in a lottery were like existing, that would mean something. But it isn't, so it doesn't. Why isn't it? One more time, it's because in a lottery there is a pool of tickets.waiting to be drawn. Conversely there isn't a pool of things waiting to exist. By definition, because that's what "exist" means. Entities don't exist until they do. That's why you had to invent a whole new ad hoc notion of pseudo-existence for your argument.

And as we learned from Volkswagens and bananas, alleged "potential" pseudo-existence prior to actually existing doesn't have anything to do with the probability of bananas and Volkswagens coming into being, or with whether they actually do. Despite the "infinite" number of "potential" things that supposedly pseudo-exist before they exist, things manage to exist. Therefore the probability that they will exist cannot be zero, which is what your model results in.

That's one problem with the lottery analogy.

Another is that a lottery is a one-time event. If you know how many tickets there are you can calculate the odds of drawing a particular ticket without knowing anything about the conditions or outcomes of previous lotteries.

But being born is the result of a series of connected events. If you calculate the odds of me being born after a fertilized embryo is implanted you get one number (about 70%). But an embryo implanting depends on it being fertilized. If you go back in time and calculate the odds after the embryo is fertilized but before it implants, you get a different number cased on the chance it will implant and the chance it will be carried to term. But being fertilized depends on previous events. If you go back before it was fertilized, you have to make a calculation based on how many different sperm cells are vying for that egg, plus the chance it will implant, and the chance it will be carried to term. But even the opportunity to fertilize depends on previous events - my parents agreeing to have sex; my parents meeting; my parents being born; their parents being born; etc.

Nothing at all like a lottery draw.

 

[Jabba]

How is being born like a lottery?

Dave,
- This is one of those things that I think I have a 'feel' for, but that I don't yet have an easy, or effective, way to verbalize. Maybe, jt, caveman or Humots have an easy way... Or maybe, they can tell me (again?) why I’m wrong about this particular sub-issue.

- Here's how I see it so far -- as well as I can say it.
- We can’t figure the likelihood of your current existence the cause and effect way.
- Here, we have no idea how many events had to occur for you to be born, and to currently exist – and, for our purposes here, we need to start at the very beginning, and we don’t even know that there is a very beginning... IOW, there is no way in Heck that we can estimate your probability of currently existing based upon cause and effect.
- We are left with the lottery and chance, and we’re stuck with the number of tickets to be drawn, over the number of tickets in the container. And, my claim is that there is no limit on the number in the container.
- If you accept determinism, I have a slightly different explanation.

- Again, that’s my best guess at the moment.

 

[Hokulele]

Dave,
- This is one of those things that I think I have a 'feel' for, but that I don't yet have an easy, or effective, way to verbalize. Maybe, jt, caveman or Humots have an easy way... Or maybe, they can tell me (again?) why I’m wrong about this particular sub-issue.

- Here's how I see it so far -- as well as I can say it.
- We can’t figure the likelihood of your current existence the cause and effect way.
- Here, we have no idea how many events had to occur for you to be born, and to currently exist – and, for our purposes here, we need to start at the very beginning, and we don’t even know that there is a very beginning... IOW, there is no way in Heck that we can estimate your probability of currently existing based upon cause and effect.
- We are left with the lottery and chance, and we’re stuck with the number of tickets to be drawn, over the number of tickets in the container. And, my claim is that there is no limit on the number in the container.
- If you accept determinism, I have a slightly different explanation.

- Again, that’s my best guess at the moment.

You are arguing that materialism isn't true, because you don't understand it?

Hm...

 

[godless dave]

Dave,
- This is one of those things that I think I have a 'feel' for, but that I don't yet have an easy, or effective, way to verbalize. Maybe, jt, caveman or Humots have an easy way... Or maybe, they can tell me (again?) why I’m wrong about this particular sub-issue.

- Here's how I see it so far -- as well as I can say it.
- We can’t figure the likelihood of your current existence the cause and effect way.
- Here, we have no idea how many events had to occur for you to be born, and to currently exist – and, for our purposes here, we need to start at the very beginning, and we don’t even know that there is a very beginning... IOW, there is no way in Heck that we can estimate your probability of currently existing based upon cause and effect.

Isn't that true of absolutely everything that exists?

- We are left with the lottery and chance, and we’re stuck with the number of tickets to be drawn, over the number of tickets in the container. And, my claim is that there is no limit on the number in the container.

That doesn't answer how being born is like a lottery. You've explained that we don't have enough data to estimate the likelihood of me being born based on all the events that had to occur for me to be born, but you haven't explained why this lottery approach is a good substitute.

There are an infinite number of possible snowflakes. Does that mean the likelihood of a particular snowflake existing is some number of over infinity?

 

[zooterkin]

- We are left with the lottery and chance, and we’re stuck with the number of tickets to be drawn, over the number of tickets in the container. And, my claim is that there is no limit on the number in the container.

A claim which you have been shown, repeatedly, is incorrect, for the way you are attempting to calculate it.

 

[Jabba]

Isn't that true of absolutely everything that exists?...

- Yes.

 

[godless dave]

- Yes.

So you could pick anything - a tree, a rock, a planet, a star - and, in your scenario, the likelihood of it existing would be some number over infinity.

 

[JayUtah]

This is one of those things that I think I have a 'feel' for, but that I don't yet have an easy, or effective, way to verbalize.

No, the problem is not that your theory is too nuanced to express in English. The problem is that you decided ahead of time what the outcome was going to be, and you're having a hard time equivocating past people's nonsense detectors, here or anywhere else. Your changes of language always come after some exactitude of meaning is reached, and serve only to shove it back out again into the realm of ambiguity. There is no incentive for you to reach a final conclusion, because you confessed you had a strong emotional investment in not losing this debate. Therefore a better explanation for your constantly shifting language is that you want to prolong the admission of defeat and maintain the delusion that you still have a viable argument.

We can’t figure the likelihood of your current existence the cause and effect way.

The effect is the observation that everyone is self-aware. The cause proposed in materialism is that everyone is alive. To wit, self-awareness is a property of highly evolved organic life. The likelihood of the observation under materialism, for any given case, is exactly the likelihood that organic life will occur. There is no magical "pre-existence" in materialism to muddy up the waters.

The likelihood of existence that you're trying to reckon is P(E|H). You have told us that your argument requires this to be a very small number. So now you're just making up a bunch of irrelevant nonsense to attribute to P(E|H) so that you can argue it must be small. The insinuation that such a likelihood would be incomputable and must therefore be assumed to be small is just one example of your imagination masquerading as fact. This is one of several fatal flaws I previously identified in your argument.

Here, we have no idea how many events had to occur for you to be born...

But as has been explained to you multiple times, the probability of a fait accomplit is irrelevant, as is quibbling endlessly about the probability of organic life arising. Yes, I understand that you want to use the allegedly small probability of a hypothesis predicting an event to draw conclusions via Bayes about the overall probability of the hypothesis. You imagine that you're computing a posterior probability based on the prior probability of H and the foisted notion that H doesn't predict the observed outcome. But as I laid out in describing another of your fatal flaws, you don't know how to structure an inference properly to obtain a reliable posterior probability. You arbitrarily set both the prior and the likelihood, and wrongly decide that what comes out of there must be a fact that proves your belief.

We are left with the lottery and chance, and we’re stuck with the number of tickets to be drawn, over the number of tickets in the container.

No, we aren't. The "number of tickets to be drawn" has no analogue in materialism. The one that you tried to invent and frantically paste onto materialism is demonstrably absurd.

And, my claim is that there is no limit on the number in the container.

And so you divide by infinity, which you say gives you "near zero." It doesn't; where division by infinity is defined (which is not in this case), it is defined as exactly zero. And as we've discussed at length, this would mean anything that could "potentially" exist before it existed would have a zero likelihood of existing, and therefore not exist. But things clearly do exist, and you patch that up by declaring that your magical divide-by-infinity-and-get-an-arbitrary-answer mathematics applies only to souls.

Your "claim" is simply pseudo-mathematical and pseudo-philosophical nonsense. It's not about your inability to express it in the proper words. It's a matter of the concepts being patent nonsense you made up on the fly to try to cobble together a proof for your preconceived outcome.

Again, that’s my best guess at the moment.

That's been your best guess for years, and it's not good enough. I was kind enough to compile a list of a dozen or so reasons why it's not good enough. Unfortunately you paid attention to it only when it seemed it would serve your publicity purposes. You have yet to pay attention to it as a comprehensive answer to your theory.

Instead we have to suffer through this endless litany of your confessed shortcomings. We're not interested in your perceptions of why you can't make your point. We're not interested in confessions of forgetfulness. We're not interested in endless repetitions of your claims without any proof. All that is just desperate distraction from your inability and unwillingness to address any of your critics, anywhere.

 

[JesseCuster]

- Yes.

Therefore, according to your own argument, the chances of anything existing is 1/infinity.

So you should conclude that everything is immortal, e.g. bananas and Volkswagens, not just people, according to your own argument.

But you obviously don't want to come to that conclusion, so instead you have to resort to desperate attempts at special pleading to try and explain why people are different than bananas and Volkswagens. Because people have selves, which makes them immortal, unlike bananas and Volkswagens which don't, which absolves them from the conclusion you should be drawing about them.

People having a sense of self makes your argument not apply to Volkswagens and bananas. For reasons you can't articulate. Just because. For some reason.

 

[carlitos]

That's one problem with the lottery analogy.

I'm just going to through this out there - maybe the posters here could collectively refuse to discuss Jabba's analogies to keep him on the topic? The topic isn't volkswagens or lotteries or twins; it's (essentially) proving immortality using Bayesian statistics. Such a topic should be straightforward and include a lot of equations I would think.

 

[JesseCuster]

Dave,
- This is one of those things that I think I have a 'feel' for, but that I don't yet have an easy, or effective, way to verbalize.

I thought you were meant to be presenting a rigorous mathematical proof of immortality? Vague feelings you can't articulate have no place in mathematical proofs, or indeed in proofs in general.

This sounds like an admission that you don't have mathematical proof of immortality, but a warm fuzzy feeling that you're scrambling to try and scrape together some sort of proof for. Every time your attempt at a proof meets a dead end, you try some other approach.

You have already come to your conclusion and are trying to come up with an argument that ends in that conclusion. Which is doing it backwards as to how it should be done.

 

[Belz...]

- This is one of those things that I think I have a 'feel' for, but that I don't yet have an easy, or effective, way to verbalize.

If it takes you six years to verbalise a thought that's central to your argument, how about you give this all up now?

IOW, there is no way in Heck that we can estimate your probability of currently existing based upon cause and effect.

The universe is largely deterministic. So cause and effect are the only thing you have. If you can't estimate it, then your entire argument collapses.

- We are left with the lottery and chance, and we’re stuck with the number of tickets to be drawn, over the number of tickets in the container.

You don't get to pretend that the universe works differently because you can't draw your prefered conclusion otherwise.

 

[Mojo]

- We are left with the lottery and chance, and we’re stuck with the number of tickets to be drawn, over the number of tickets in the container. And, my claim is that there is no limit on the number in the container.

What is the likelihood that the ticket drawn is the winning ticket?

 

[jond]

Jabba, serious question for you: how is it that you think the sense of self develops? Do you think it's a process that the brain develops as the neural connections grow? Or do you think it's an entity that exists fully formed that at some point is connected to the brain? All your posts about lotteries suggest the latter, but you've stated that you think the self is an emergent property of the brain which would be the former.

 

[The Sparrow]

I thought you were meant to be presenting a rigorous mathematical proof of immortality? Vague feelings you can't articulate have no place in mathematical proofs, or indeed in proofs in general.

This sounds like an admission that you don't have mathematical proof of immortality, but a warm fuzzy feeling that you're scrambling to try and scrape together some sort of proof for. Every time your attempt at a proof meets a dead end, you try some other approach.

You have already come to your conclusion and are trying to come up with an argument that ends in that conclusion. Which is doing it backwards as to how it should be done.

Pretty much sums up the last 4 years perfectly.

 

[The Sparrow]

Oh and Jabba, "selves" are not "things". The sense of a self or identity, the awareness, the observer if you will, is a process, like a flame burning or a steam engine running.
There is no 'pool' of 'flames', or 'pool' of 'runnings'.

Did you read this far? Or are you already scrolling by looking for another gap to try to wedge your theory into? LOL

 

[Loss Leader]

- Here, we have no idea how many events had to occur for you to be born, and to currently exist – and, for our purposes here, we need to start at the very beginning, and we don’t even know that there is a very beginning... IOW, there is no way in Heck that we can estimate your probability of currently existing based upon cause and effect.
- We are left with the lottery and chance, and we’re stuck with the number of tickets to be drawn, over the number of tickets in the container. And, my claim is that there is no limit on the number in the container.

So, if an answer cannot be gotten one way, we are "stuck" with an inferior way? Why is that. Why can't we just declare the matter to be unknowable or, at least, unknowable at present?

What the heck good is a theory that we know is broken at the outset?

Before ultrasounds and DNA tests, pregnant women couldn't know the sex of their babies? Does that mean they were "stuck" with old wives' tales about carrying low and craving salty foods and such?

Your reasoning about why you're using your reasoning makes no sense.

 

[Jabba]

So you could pick anything - a tree, a rock, a planet, a star - and, in your scenario, the likelihood of it existing would be some number over infinity.

Dave,
- If I understand your question, we’re back to Mt. Ranier…
- For one thing, the likelihood of an event depends upon when we’re predicting from…
- In regard to the likelihood of your existence, I’m predicting from the apparent singularity ‘before’ the beginning of time and before the laws of physics…
- If I do the same in regard to the existence of a specific rock, or Mt. Ranier, the denominator will still be infinity – but, we’ll be forced to accept that the likelihood of either is not quite zero.
- I assume that you and I are upon different pages already—so, what are your thoughts so far?