Proof of Immortality, VII

[halleyscomet]

Exactly what definition of 'immortal' are you using?

He's never really clarified that, but he has made vague references to his vague impression of the beliefs of what he terms "reincarnationists."

- What can I call the kind of thing/process that would not be me in my copy? I could call it "soul" with the stipulation that by definition, it may not be immortal.
- Whatever, it's what will come back to life according to reincarnationists, but not according to you. I need a word for that concept.

That's about as much detail as he's provided. It's been made clear elsewhere he's never actually researched the beliefs of any religions that include reincarnation as part of their dogma. It's part of his program to maximize wiggle room. Getting him to commit to anything is like nailing jello to a wall. Even when it does kinda-sorta hold, it only holds for a few minutes at best.

 

[theprestige]

You'd think that someone embarked on a postgraduate degree in Immortality would have written at least one mid-term paper on What Reincarnationists Believe, at some point in their 5+ years of academic effort .

 

[halleyscomet]

You'd think that someone embarked on a postgraduate degree in Immortality would have written at least one mid-term paper on What Reincarnationists Believe, at some point in their 5+ years of academic effort .

Or at least have read a pamphlet.

I mean, Jabba doesn't even DISCUSS the fact that many reincarnation beliefs include OTHER creatures you can come back as. Where, for example, do Hungry Ghosts fit into his narrative?

http://www.uncannyjapan.com/episode-10-hungry-ghosts-gaki/

What are the odds in Jabba's equations that he might come back not as a human being, but a gaki?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungry_ghost

There are downsides to having an immortal soul that can be reincarnated. Many of your possible forms suck big time.

 

[zooterkin]

He's never really clarified that.

That’s why I’m asking.

 

[halleyscomet]

That’s why I’m asking.

Your optimism is a credit to humanity.

 

[Jabba]

- Under which hypothesis is my current existence more likely -- OOFLam or reincarnation?

 

[JayUtah]

- Under which hypothesis is my current existence more likely -- OOFLam or reincarnation?

OOFLAM, since P(existence|reincarnation) would require the actuality of a proposed phenomenon for which there is no credible evidence. You might as well be asking whether your current existence is more or less likely if Spongebob Squarepants were real.

Your question is the raison d'être for Occam's Razor.

 

[Jabba]

I'm sure it was a typo. The problem is that it wouldn't really matter to your argument if it hadn't been. You're happy to let that value vary by hundreds of orders of magnitude with no rationale whatsoever. It might just as well be 1/10100 for as little rigor as you put into it.

It's clear what you're doing. Your critics rightly won't let you invent private mathematical concepts to make your "mathematical" proof come out the way you predetermined it should. So you're picking random small numbers to approximate your concept of "virtual zero." Picking them at random doesn't help your argument, as this variable then becomes one more unbounded degree of freedom. As you've been told now by two different bodies of statisticians: you can pick your priors arbitrarily, but then the likelihood ratio must be from actual data; or you can set your likelihood ratio arbitrarily and then the priors must be actual data. If neither of those is actual data, your model is underconstrained and therefore useless. Nothing about this criticism has the slightest to do with "holistic" thinking or any other imaginary bias you may want to grasp at. It's just basic mathematics.

Jay,
- If I'm right about potential selves being infinite, the order of magnitude hardly matters -- 10¹⁰⁰⁰ is still the tip of an infinite iceberg.

 

[jond]

- Under which hypothesis is my current existence more likely -- OOFLam or reincarnation?

OOFL. Which is the materialistic hypothesis. Reincarnation requires an unlikely and unevidenced extra element (soul) in addition to your body. OOFL only requires the existence of your body, however unlikely that is. But it certainly isn’t anywhere near as unlikely as you are making it out to be.

You’ll note that I refuse to add your (am) because that addition is based on your belief that selves exist as separate entities and that a pool of them exists and somehow gets added to your brain at some point. This is not at all how selves emerge in the materialistic model, which as you know and have agreed to, posits that selves are an emergent property of a functioning brain. Your self is the only self it could be because it is generated within your brain.

 

[JayUtah]

Jay,If I'm right about potential selves being infinite...

You aren't.

 

[godless dave]

Jay,
- If I'm right about potential selves being infinite,

The number of potential selves is irrelevant to the likelihood of a particular self existing.

The number of potential Volkswagens is infinite, but there's one parked in my garage right now.

 

[JayUtah]

The number of potential Volkswagens is infinite, but there's one parked in my garage right now.

And, ad infinitum...

Jabba: Volkswagens are different than people
Us: How so?
Jabba: Volkswagens don't have souls.
Us: You're begging the existence of souls.
Jabba: My claim is...

 

[godless dave]

An exact copy of my wife's Volkswagen wouldn't be in my garage. Therefore there's something about a Volkswagen that came from nowhere. Or something.

 

[RoboTimbo]

Jay,
- If I'm right about potential selves being infinite, the order of magnitude hardly matters -- 10¹⁰⁰⁰ is still the tip of an infinite iceberg.

Which woud also apply to mountains and Volkswagens and everything else.

Why can't you address that, Jabba? Why do you run from so many questions?

 

[JayUtah]

...the order of magnitude hardly matters -- 10¹⁰⁰⁰ is still the tip of an infinite iceberg.

And by all means let's examine the rest of this absurdity.

Order of magnitude matters if you're trying to call the number an estimate -- which exactly you are. Estimates are not just random numbers. Estimates are not just, "Well this is what I guess the value might be." Estimates are computed values that allow for some expression of uncertainty that arises from an error analysis. You're telling me you've "estimated" a number that can vary as much as three orders of magnitude in its order of magnitude. To put this in perspective, just the variance in the numbers you've quoted us amounts to 10 times the number of atoms in the universe. And you can't tell us what computation you used to arrive at it, obviously because there was no computation.

"Tip of the infinite iceberg" is just more of your homespun-sounding nonsense. You complain that no one takes your math seriously, but you don't take it seriously. If you claim that the number of potential souls is infinite, then any positive real number divided by that is zero, not "the tip of an infinite iceberg" or any other nonsensical expression designed to sneak "virtually zero" past your critics and enshrine zero-sorta-but-not-really as a key axiom in Jabbamathics. You simply don't know what the concept of infinity means in mathematics. Again, this is not your critics' bias or their failure at some magical mode of thinking. This is your failure to grasp elementary concepts in mathematics.

It's not as if we have to guess any of this. You told us up front you thought that P(you|materialism) had to be a very small number. And then you tried to cobble together some pseudo-mathematics to appear to support that. The difficulty you're having now is not "I can't communicate this effectively." The difficulty you're having is "I can't convince mathematically literate people with my hare-brained contrivances in support of my predetermined numbers." You've stooped to the absurdity of mixing dissimilar concepts left and right, then begging people to assure you it has curb appeal.

Your justification for infinity as a denominator is as contrived as the old joke syllogism

The more I study, the more I know.
The more I know, the more I forget.
The more I forget, the less I know.
Therefore if I study, I will know less.
​

You conjure up your infinity out of just that sort of Moebius-loop reasoning.

Then you pretend that you can take this purely sophistical infinity and redefine its arithmetic behavior with respect to division to yield not zero, but some arbitrary small number -- "virtual zero" -- that magically has all the arithmetic properties of finite numbers you would need to use it in Bayes' theorem, yet retains all the properties of infinity that absolve you from having to arrive at it arithmetically. There is no concept of "virtual zero" in mathematics, and there is no special footnote in the extended real numbers that allows division by infinity to be non-zero whenever it would suit some problem.

You either need to make friends with mathematics or stop insulting the people who already have.

 

[caveman1917]

Caveman,
- I am a currently existing human self. My claim is that this event is more likely if human selves are immortal than if each potential self has only one finite life at most. Do you still disagree?

Please refer to the following instruction:

You will refer to all such probabilities by these symbols.

(that is meant to include the events themselves as well)

I have rewritten your post accordingly as:

Caveman,
- E[*]. My claim is that P(E|I) > P(E|~I). Do you still disagree?

Please follow those instructions in the future. As to your question: yes, of course, but do let me know if you ever get around to supporting your claim rather than repeating it. Do you think repeating something makes it true?

* asserting the data

 

[Loss Leader]

Caveman,
- I am a currently existing human self. My claim is that this event is more likely if human selves are immortal than if each potential self has only one finite life at most. Do you still disagree?

Why, Jabba? Why?

You said there are an infinite amount of potential people. How many fewer than infinity would there be if such people were immortal. There are still just as many combinations of sperm and eggs as there were before (which you seem to think is somehow the definition of a person). So why would there be fewer combinations if people are immortal than if they're mortal?

 

[Loss Leader]

- Under which hypothesis is my current existence more likely -- OOFLam or reincarnation?

The one for which there is evidence.

 

[JoeMorgue]

Jabba,

If immortality makes us more likely then why has everyone so far... died.

Every person who has ever lived and died has existed under this made up ratio of potential human to existing human that you are still against all logic and sanity trying to shove into this discussion, but they all died. The "improbability" of their existence doesn't change the fact that the were born, lived for some period of time, and then died. The "improbability" of their existence didn't save them.

Wait...Jabba... do you think all the dead people are still here?

 

[Dave Rogers]

- Under which hypothesis is my current existence more likely -- OOFLam or reincarnation?

The fact that you're even asking this question means that your proof is nonexistent; your proof depends on the answer being "reincarnation," and you have not only failed to demonstrate that, but have specifically admitted that it cannot possibly be demonstrated.

And, of course, you're playing your usual game of bait-and-switch by randomly skipping between materialism/all non-materialistic hypotheses and reincarnation/all non-reincarnationist hypotheses as if they were identical compementary pairs, which they are not.

Jay,
- If I'm right about potential selves being infinite, the order of magnitude hardly matters -- 10¹⁰⁰⁰ is still the tip of an infinite iceberg.

If you're right about potential souls being infinite, then the same is true of the probability of your existence under reincarnation, because however the current existence of your own personal soul is chosen from the infinite pool of potential souls would be subject to the same infinite denominator.

Note that I agree that all of the above is meaningless under materialism; however, it's your reincarnationist hypothesis in which it actually makes sense. Ironically, the feature that you see as a fatal flaw in materialism is not only completely absent from materialism, but is also present as a fatal flaw in the hypothesis you're advancing as an alternative. Your argument is very precisely back-to-front.

Dave