Proof of Immortality, VI

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godless dave said:
There's really nowhere to go. You still can't explain why being very unlikely (calculated from the beginning of the universe) makes the existence of a self questionable. Your argument fails because it's based on a premise you can't support...
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Dave,
- I think you've been asking me to explain why I think that I'm a legitimate target -- why the likelihood of my particular current existence is a valid entry for P(E|H). Am I correct?
 
Jabba said:
Dave,
- I think you've been asking me to explain why I think that I'm a legitimate target -- why the likelihood of my particular current existence is a valid entry for P(E|H). Am I correct?
Click to expand...

I'm asking you why you think being very unlikely (calculated from the beginning of the universe) makes the existence of a self questionable.
 
Jabba said:
Dave,
- I think you've been asking me to explain why I think that I'm a legitimate target -- why the likelihood of my particular current existence is a valid entry for P(E|H). Am I correct?
Click to expand...

Sheesh. Here is a stick. I am holding it by one end and handing it to you. Which end will you grab? Your answer: Pineapple.
 
Jabba said:
Dave,
- I think you've been asking me to explain why I think that I'm a legitimate target -- why the likelihood of my particular current existence is a valid entry for P(E|H). Am I correct?
Click to expand...

An honest and well-educated claimant would answer the questions asked and reply to the rebuttals given.
 
To put it another way, the likelihood of your particular existence is a valid entry for P(E|H) but the likelihood of Mount Rainier's particular existence is a valid entry for P(E|G), where G is the current scientific consensus on how mountains form. So a very small number is what you would expect in both cases.
 
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Jabba said:
Dave,
- I think you've been asking me to explain why I think that I'm a legitimate target -- why the likelihood of my particular current existence is a valid entry for P(E|H). Am I correct?
Click to expand...

Jabba stop asking people the same questions, especially "Is this what you are asking me?" over and over.

No one buys this persona.
 
Right now he is just trolling for soundbites to put onto his edited version of the 'debate'
-on his private site
-redacted by him
-to support his victory
-for 'neutral' minds to see
 
The Sparrow said:
Right now he is just trolling for soundbites to put onto his edited version of the 'debate'
-on his private site
-redacted by him
-to support his victory
-for 'neutral' minds to see
Click to expand...

That's why I've asked (and of course got zero answer) why bother going through this act. Why not just write the whole narrative completely from scratch?

Jabba openly admits that his goal is collect enough out of context "soundbites" to edit into a fictitious "narrative" where he wins the argument for him to publish and brag about on his website where a bunch of "neutral" people are going to read it and be amazed at how he beat the big bad evil skeptics.

So seriously again I ask why not just make it up entirely? Why not just sit down and write this made up scenario where a bunch of skeptics crumble underneath his unstoppable "patented effective debate style?"

What purpose do we serve in this Jabba? Why is making up the actual people you are arguing with the line you won't cross? You are making up the arguments, motivations, and everything else we are using.

Here I'll do it for you.

"So today I went to the... Totally Real and Not Made Up Skeptics Board.com and I started a thread about how I can prove immortality. So these close minded skeptics... Tim Smith, Bob Stephens, and John... errr Johnson started arguing with me. But I broke out my patented effective debate style and they all agreed I was right. And then the whole bus clapped. The End."
 
The Sparrow said:
Right now he is just trolling for soundbites to put onto his edited version of the 'debate'
-on his private site
-redacted by him
-to support his victory
-for 'neutral' minds to see
Click to expand...

Look at the bright side - if Jabba is as good at generating internet traffic as he is explaining himself, virtually no one will ever see that site.
 
Jabba said:
- But then, I suspect that asking these questions of a human is like asking a chicken for the square roots of 3, and 7, and even 2.
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Jabba, if you can post the square root of 3, 7, or even 2 on this forum, not only will you have managed to demonstrate your superiority to a chicken, but you will also have proved immortality.
 
Jabba said:
I think you've been asking me to explain why I think that I'm a legitimate target -- why the likelihood of my particular current existence is a valid entry for P(E|H). Am I correct?
Click to expand...

And here we go with the endless "clarifying" questions -- stall, baby, stall. I've analyzed your formulation of P(E|H) in depth this week. Apparently it isn't neutral or well-educated enough for you.

The materialist hypothesis explains variations within entity types by noting the operation of chaotic systems in the production of those entities. A chaotic system is a deterministic system of a complexity sufficient to evade meaningful prediction from initial conditions. I've referred you several times to the science of chaotic systems so that you can learn its quantitative behavior, which applies to your argument.

Because a chaotic system can produce great variation from the same initial conditions -- initial conditions here, in your argument, being the instant of the Big Bang -- it is licit to say the probability of one specific describable specimen arising is very small. However, that probability is meaningless. In order for it to have meaning, the significance of that one describable specimen would have to be established by criteria that existed before the system operated.

That doesn't occur for mountains and it doesn't occur for people, under materialism. There were no preordained criteria for what Mt Ranier is like today, and there were no preordained criteria for what you are like today. Therefore the probability you can compute for each specimen is essentially meaningless. Just because you have two numbers and can divide one by the other doesn't give you a probability that governs some arbitrarily identified system. Your critical error -- above the dozen or so fatal ones I keep having to remind you about -- is that you simply don't get how quantitative modeling works. At all. At the most fundamental level.

Again we have to go back to the card table. You and your friends Tom, Dick, and Harry sit down for a game of Ad Hoc Poker. The regular deck is shuffled and the hands are dealt. You get a random assortment of five cards that spell nothing according to the rules of classical poker. "I win," you declare. "The chances of being dealt the hand I'm holding are only 1 in 2,598,960. That is an extremely small probability, so the fact that I was dealt it must indeed be very remarkable. Because of that, I declare this to be the winning hand."

"Now hold on," says Tom, who's also holding a garbage hand. "The chances of being dealt my hand are also 1 in 2,598,960.* At best you have a tying hand." Dick and Harry similarly note that the probability works out the same for their hands. So the round is considered a draw and the cards are dealt again. Round after round is played, with the same "highly improbable" deals being declared winning hands on no basis other than the perception of the extreme unlikelihood of every hand.

The significance of the winning hands in poker are that they are reckoned in play according to criteria that predated the deal. In variants of poker that allow discards and draws, or which have hole cards or community cards, prestating the rules -- "Gentlemen, the game is Five Card Draw with deuces wild" -- allows the players to assess probability correctly during play because they know what targets they're aiming for and they know which of the equal probabilities of the random draw are to be considered favorable.

That's what it means to be a target, but you're trying to trump up a new concept of "targetness" that simply hides your obvious error in declaring the drawn sample to have been a target according to predetermined criteria, and remarkable simply by the magnitude of a meaningless quotient. Materialism is rock-solid (pun intended) on the concept that your mathematical exercise is no different for mountains than for people. And you know this, which is why your next step is always to gesticulate wildly and imagine new attributes that apply only to people.

We're not asking you to explain (again and again and again) why you think you're a legitimate target. You've already provided your explanation. We've told you in exactly what way it's wrong. What we're asking you to do is either provide a different explanation that isn't easily shown to be wrong, or to concede that you cannot support the major premise to your proof and that therefore your proof fails. Please do one of those, not simply repeat your claim for years on end and try to shame people into accepting it without proof.

_____________
* Not really, since four hands were dealt and this alters the probabilities for each subsequent hand. Just follow the spirit of the analogy because I need to move on to other things today.
 
godless dave said:
I'm asking you why you think being very unlikely (calculated from the beginning of the universe) makes the existence of a self questionable.
Click to expand...

godless dave said:
To put it another way, the likelihood of your particular existence is a valid entry for P(E|H) but the likelihood of Mount Rainier's particular existence is a valid entry for P(E|G), where G is the current scientific consensus on how mountains form. So a very small number is what you would expect in both cases.
Click to expand...
Dave,
- Why wouldn't P(E|G) approach 1.00?
 
Jabba said:
Dave,
- Why wouldn't P(E|G) approach 1.00?
Click to expand...

I thought we were calculating from the beginning of the universe. P(E|G) would approach 1.00 as the date approached 480,000 BC. Just as P(E|H) would approach 1.00 as the date approached your birth date.
 
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The Sparrow said:
Right now he is just trolling for soundbites to put onto his edited version of the 'debate'
-on his private site
-redacted by him
-to support his victory
-for 'neutral' minds to see
Click to expand...

Absolutely. You can't ever really do much to change how people behave. You can do slightly more to change how that behavior is perceived. But you have quite a lot of control over whether something is objectively justifiable. Part of maturity, in my book, is learning to be satisfied with that. I can walk away from this discussion with an entirely clean conscience.

JoeBentley said:
So seriously again I ask why not just make it up entirely?
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Going 5 miles per hour over the speed limit is morally forgivable. Going thirty over is not. Making up a story out of whole cloth is an outright lie. If you take the original source material and just, you know, "edit" it, then you're not doing anything that isn't already done in journalism or scholarship. You can rationalize that you're just tightening up the debate, eliminating the "extraneous" parts, making it flow better. It's easier to rationalize lying if you are just embellishing or editing the truth. And rationalization is the scrub brush for dirty consciences.
 
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