Proof of Immortality, VI

Status
Not open for further replies.
Jabba said:
- Mt Rainier is assumed to not be conscious. OOFLam refers to conscious entities.
Click to expand...

Are dogs immortal? How about dolphins? Bees? Monkeys? All exhibit some degree of consciousness. And, as you know, the scientific consensus is that it is a process happening in brains. Not a separate entity. Unless and until you demonstrate the existence of consciousness outside of functioning brains, your entire multi-year debacle is moot. Because, as you have agreed, it is far more likely that we exist as entirely physical bodies then being a combination of a physical body and a non physical soul.
 
Jabba said:
- But, Mt Rainier is not conscious.
Click to expand...
Entirely irrelevant.

You have already agreed that there are infinite potential Volkswagens and bananas. The odds that you are attempting (and failing) to calculate are based upon your own idea of how the likelihood of your existence has something to do with the potential number of you that exist.

And because you think there are an infinity of potential Jabbas, you conclude that the odds of you existing are 'virtually zero' or 'teeny' (we won't get into how meaningless and incoherent those supposed odds are). You have somehow concluded from this that the odds are so stacked against your existence, this somehow means that you are therefore immortal.

However, because you have agreed there are infinite potential Volkswagens and bananas, so therefore you should be conclude that Volkswagens and bananas (and everything else) is therefore also immortal.

But that's obviously not the conclusion you want to draw, so you resort to special pleading. They're different because they're not conscious and you are, so the argument doesn't apply to them.

But your argument does apply to them, because the argument is not dependent upon you being conscious, it's dependent on your fanciful notion of potential existence, and potential existence has nothing to do with consciousness. As you yourself admitted when you concluded that there are infinite potential Volkswagens.

So you're left with an argument that has awkward implications. So what do you do? You resort to special pleading.

In case you don't know what special pleading is, here's the Wikipedia article on it. You should read it.

Wikipedia said:
Special pleading is a form of fallacious argument that involves an attempt to cite something as an exception to a generally accepted rule, principle, etc. without justifying the exception.
Click to expand...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_pleading

"But bananas and Volkswagens and Mount Rainier aren't conscious!" doesn't cut it because, like I said, your argument isn't dependent upon humans being conscious. There's no valid reason for you not to conclude that they are also immortal, based upon your own terrible argument.

You dug this hole and you're desperately looking for a way to dig yourself out of it. Each time you attempt to dig yourself out, you're just digging deeper.
 
Jabba said:
- Mt Rainier is assumed to not be conscious. OOFLam refers to conscious entities.
Click to expand...
The materialist hypothesis explains mountains and consciousness equally well. Any argument that applies to one applies to both. Any refutation of materialism that addresses one but not the other is fatally flawed. You try to avoid the fatal flaw in your argument by begging the question, among many other logical fallacies.

This signature is intended to irradiate people.
 
Jabba said:
- If I'm a legitimate target, OOFLam must be wrong.
Click to expand...
No. The only sensible meaning of "legitimate target" is "predefined". Otherwise, it cannot be a target. However, being predefined not only does not mean any kind of immortality, it has no bearing on it what so ever.

Even if you could show you were somehow predefined (and you know darn well you can't) it would say nothing about your mortality.

Hans
 
Why is Mt. Rainier assumed to have no soul, Jabba? Mountains have been holy, and addressed as concious beings, since the beginning of history. They might have souls, if you do.

If you do.
 
sackett said:
Why is Mt. Rainier assumed to have no soul, Jabba? Mountains have been holy, and addressed as concious beings, since the beginning of history. They might have souls, if you do.

If you do.
Click to expand...


One of the largest uranium deposits in the world is sitting under a mountain, completely inaccessible because the native Australians on that land believe the mountain has a soul.
 
godless dave said:
Why does OOFLam only refer to conscious entities?
Click to expand...
- I think that the way I first introduced the hypothesis was, "We each have Only One Finite Life to live (at most)." And, I was referring to human "selves."
 
Jabba said:
- I think that the way I first introduced the hypothesis was, "We each have Only One Finite Life to live (at most)." And, I was referring to human "selves."
Click to expand...

What is it about human selves that suggests the possibility of more than one life that is not true for mountains?
 
Jabba said:
But, Mt Rainier is not conscious.
Click to expand...
Jabba said:
- Mt Rainier is assumed to not be conscious.
Click to expand...

Since you've clearly labeled this as your assumption and not data, I would ordinarily join with my colleagues and say, "Oh yeah? Prove it." While they are quite right and within appropriate bounds to call this into question, I fear you'll use it as an excuse to debate pointlessly for six months whether a mountain can be conscious or not. You don't seem above such absurdity as long as it means you can stagnate the discussion indefinitely.

I'll take a different approach, which is to note that you just keep missing the point your critics are trying to make. There is nothing magical about self-awareness or consciousness in materialism. Consciousness is an emergent property of some organisms just like "going 60 mph" is an emergent property of other organisms. Under materialism, consciousness is no more profound an emergent property of the human organism than is, "is exothermic." And when you're reckoning P(H|E), that's the framework you have to use. You must reckon P(H|E) as if H (materialism) were true, whether you believe it to be or not.

The point your critics are making is that broad-strokes concepts like properties belonging to entities and emergence arising from the composition are universal principles in materialism, and serve quite well to explain everything from thermal emissions to consciousness to "going 60 mph," wherever those properties are appropriate. You're trying to make their argument be that anything we talk about has to have the same set of emergent properties or else the argument is invalid. That's neither true nor what your critics are arguing.

Specifically, if E is "going 60 mph" then you're all right with the ordinary operation of P(H|E) for some appropriate hypothesis regarding Volkswagens. But if E is "is self-aware," then all of a sudden that's a magical property that behaves completely differently and -- in your case -- arbitrarily, so that it can be tailored to fit your proof. If H is materialism, then you insist P(H|E) has to operate differently than if E were some emergent property other than consciousness or self-awareness. You specially-plead self-awareness to be something it isn't.

Anyone who has followed your argument this long can tell you why: you simply regard consciousness or self-awareness as different words for "soul." It's not like you're even very coy about it. And you do this even when you're trying to speak from the framework of materialism, such as to reckon P(H|E). Your argument boils down to materialism not being able to explain souls, therefore materialism is wrong. I shouldn't have to explain how that amounts to circular reasoning, but it's probably going to be necessary.

More than a month ago I outlined several fatal flaws in your argument, one of which was your inability to formulate the elements of a statistical inference correctly. You have not properly formulated E. You have instead festooned E with all sorts of assumptive hogwash and mystical nonsense that doesn't belong there, and you're trying to make science explain it. Science doesn't have to, because the stuff you've attached to self-awareness to place it beyond the realm of science simply doesn't exist except in your mind.

Jabba said:
OOFLam refers to conscious entities.
Click to expand...

Who says?

You know, for someone who complains periodically that his critics are biased and closed-minded, you spend a lot of effort trying to put words in their mouths. None of your critics embraces "OOFLam" or is trying to defend it. This is a silly word you made up to be the straw man. Rather than defer to what your critics actually espouse (materialism), you stick with this contrived term which you can make mean -- as today you're trying to make newly mean -- anything you like. What sort of debate is it when you get to dictate from day to day what your critics must somehow be obliged to prove in order to refute you?

One of your other fatal flaws -- the ones you keep assiduously ignoring because you can't answer them -- is the false dilemma. With one hand you paste "OOFLam" (however we're defining it today) onto your critics as the thing they have to defend, and with the other hand you poke only at materialism. You even once told us that the best you could hope to do would be to disprove materialism, knowing full well that wouldn't get you any closer to proving immortality.

I guess we have to start saying "OOFCLam" now, only one finite conscious life (at most) to accommodate your shifting goalposts. Please, if you're going to shift them tomorrow, please make sure the new ad hoc criterion fits the acronym.
 
Jay, how much would it cost to have you follow me around and say everything I want to say 1000% better than I said it?
 
Jabba said:
- I think that the way I first introduced the hypothesis was, "We each have Only One Finite Life to live (at most)." And, I was referring to human "selves."
Click to expand...

And that already begs the question. You introduced this hypothesis as the standard reversal of the burden of proof that many fringe theorists employ. You can't prove immortality directly, so you come up with some other affirmative conclusion that you say is the negation of what you're going to prove, and you throw as much mud as you can on it so that your desired proposition supposedly holds by default. "All I need is one reasonable alternative," is what you kept telling us. And you hide it all behind a wall of Bayes, so it doesn't look as much like the blatantly poor reasoning it is.

But you didn't pay close enough attention to where you drew the line, so you ended up -- as all fringe theorists do who try this method -- with a false dilemma. Materialism is what your critics actually espouse. The finiteness of life is a consequent of materialism -- the one consequent that happens to apply to your specific claim -- but certainly not the only consequent that's possible or relevant. The way materialism explains consciousness and other properties of living organisms is the same way it explains many things that don't have anything to do with your narrow proposition. And finiteness is a consequent of practically all of them.

You're trying say there's something about human life that materialism can't explain. But that's only because you've begged that question. You are trying to wedge your mystical explanation for human life into the equation as something materialism has to explain. Mountains and Volkswagens and bananas are all being brought into the equation in a clearly futile effort to educate you about how materialism views life. The bottom line is that if you refuse to learn about materialism, and insist on your straw men, then you can't in any way claim to have refuted materialism.
 
Last edited:
Jabba said:
- I think that the way I first introduced the hypothesis was, "We each have Only One Finite Life to live (at most)." And, I was referring to human "selves."
Click to expand...

You're missing the point, which is that you consider human "selves" special i.e. different from physical stuff, from the get-go. You can't do that under materialism. If you're looking at how things are under materialism, you have to realise that human "selves" and mountains aren't different as far as your argument is concerned.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Back
Top Bottom