Proof of Immortality, VII

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JayUtah said:
His entire argument is based on his need to count "potential selves" as they supposedly exist in materialism. Except that no such thing exists in materialism, and the sense of self is a property, not an entity -- countable or otherwise.
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It's not even relevant, anyway. The question he asks is unaffected by the existence of potential selves, because that doesn't change anything about the answer.
 
Argumemnon said:
It's not even relevant, anyway. The question he asks is unaffected by the existence of potential selves, because that doesn't change anything about the answer.
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Agreed; it's almost as if there could be multiple things wrong with his argument at the same time. :)

But he's obviously bristling at the charges of straw-man argumentation. He wants desperately to portray the illusion that he's refuting off-the-shelf materialism. But the only way he can think of to do that is with his standard equivocal word games. "Here, let me use 'experience' to mean 'thing,' and see if I can get you to agree with it." He doesn't seem to appreciate that his carefully contrived version of materialism is so very far off that it stands out quite obviously.
 
Loss Leader said:
I disagree. Because you're lying.

You're using the word "experience" when you actually mean "thing." Only a thing can exist through time, let alone immortally. An experience is constantly changing. Which are you talking about?

You're talking about something that exists in time. You refuse to define what it is, how we could recognize it, or what evidence you have that it is an unchanging thing. You just state it, hide behind a misuse of the word "experience" and hope that your lies are not apparent.

They are.
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LL,
- Apparently, we all experience an ongoing process that we call self-awareness. Do you disagree with that?

- From the book I'm currently reading, "Reality Is Not What It Seems."
It is only in interactions that nature draws the world.
In the world described by quantum mechanics, there is no reality except in the relations between physical systems. It isn’t things that enter into relations, but rather relations that ground to the notion of thing. The world of quantum mechanics is not a world of objects: it is a world of events. Things are built by the happening of elementary events. As the philosopher Nelson Goodman wrote in the 1950s, with a beautiful phrase: “An object is a
monotonous process.” A stone is a vibration of quanta that maintains its structure for a while, just as a marine wave maintains its identity for a while, before melting again into the sea. What is a wave, which moves on water without carrying with it any drop of water? A wave is not an object, in the sense that it is not made of matter that travels with it. The atoms of our body, as well, flow in and away from us. We, like waves and like all objects, are a flux of events; we are processes, for a brief time monotonous. . . . Quantum mechanics does not describe objects: it describes processes and events that are junction points between processes.

Rovelli, Carlo. Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity (pp. 135-136). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
 
Jabba said:
Apparently, we all experience an ongoing process that we call self-awareness.
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Equivocation. You want to co-opt "experience" to mean a discrete, countable entity so that you can pin that concept onto materialism where it doesn't belong. You do nothing but play word games, and then you insult your critics when they catch you doing it -- which they invariably do. Fix your argument and quit trying to entrap your critics into some pointless "gotcha!" moment.

From the book I'm currently reading...
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Quantum physics is irrelevant to the problems with your argument. It does not let you use "process" and "thing" interchangeably as you see fit. You seem to have time to quote at length from irrelevant pseudo-philosophy woo written by physicists but you don't have time to give me the answers I've waited six months for.

Quit stalling and do what I asked, in the way I asked you to do it.
 
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JoeBentley said:
If Jabba actually brings "Solipsism therefore immortality" out of the subtext and into the text of this argument I say we burn the internet down for the insurance money.
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IMO an argument that invokes solipsism should treated like a Godwin. Instant fail.
 
Jabba said:
Mojo,
- I think that the answer is that others observe my body. It is only me that observes my self -- and, it's that observation to which I'm referring.
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Anyway, how do you know that it is your "self" you are observing and not somebody else's? After all, if it was somebody else's you wouldn't know the difference. Whichever "self" occupied your body would think it was you.

Given your claim that there were an infinite number of "selves" that could have occupied your body, the likelihood that you are not, in fact, observing one of the other ones is so small that you must be mistaken, or lying, about your observation that you exist - at least under any model in which "selves" exist.
 
Jabba said:
- But, do you disagree that they're talking about the same experience?
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Do you agree that materialism, which is what you're trying to falsify, doesn't include a soul?

Do you agree that you're using your failed bait and switch attempt to try to paste a soul onto materialism?

- I'm trying to answer other objections by other members, but I am trying to answer your objections also.
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You're actually trying your best to avoid answering them because they are fatal to your arguments.
 
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Jabba said:
LL,
- Apparently, we all experience an ongoing process that we call self-awareness. Do you disagree with that?
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Yes, because you're still just moving words around to make it sound like a process but then throwing in "ongoing" so you can pretend it's a thing. Stop lying.
 
JayUtah said:
Equivocation. You want to co-opt "experience" to mean a discrete, countable entity so that you can pin that concept onto materialism where it doesn't belong. You do nothing but play word games, and then you insult your critics when they catch you doing it -- which they invariably do. Fix your argument and quit trying to entrap your critics into some pointless "gotcha!" moment.



Quantum physics is irrelevant to the problems with your argument. It does not let you use "process" and "thing" interchangeably as you see fit. You seem to have time to quote at length from irrelevant pseudo-philosophy woo written by physicists but you don't have time to give me the answers I've waited six months for.

Quit stalling and do what I asked, in the way I asked you to do it.
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- OK. This will take awhile.
 
Jabba said:
- Apparently, we all experience an ongoing process that we call self-awareness. Do you disagree with that?
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Not only do I disagree with it, but I can give specifics. Let's start with your initial assertion that the self and the soul are essentially the same:

Jabba said:
- I'm referring to what religious people call a "soul" -- but, what non-religious people call a "self." The two groups just disagree about its nature.
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I'm well aware of what it is to exist as a self, as I have over half a century's experience of it. I can therefore compare this with the statements you've made about the nature of this thing you call a soul, and see whether, as you claim, it is the same experience as a self; if so, then I should be able to identify its characteristics in my own experiences. So, some of the characteristics of a soul that you list are:

Jabba said:
- sure it is. It is always conscious.
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My experience of consciousness is not eternal. I can recall no events prior to about 1962.

Jabba said:
- You know my answer, "Not under the name of 'Jabba.'"
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I have no experience of being conscious but not under the name of Dave Rogers.

Jabba said:
- Arguably, I suppose, but not necessarily. We're addressing the same experience that reincarnationists think returns -- just without its previous memories.
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This is a tricky one, because how does one define the absence of memory? That being said, this suggests that the soul cannot be the same experience as the self.

Jabba said:
- Upon "Perfection," they reunite with the Source. They always exist -- either in or out of the Source. Then, I suggest that the Source is like an infinitely divisible bucket of consciousness, and more than one current self used to be Napoleon.
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And finally, I have no experience of reuniting with the Source, being part of an infinitely divisible bucket of consciousness, or of having previously existed as a different person.

So I can only conclude, based on the observation that the experiences you describe as characteristic of the soul are not present in my experience of being a self, that the experience you describe as a soul is in fact a different experience to the familiar one of being a self.

(I would also surmise that the former experience is no more than imagined, but of course I have only my subjective impressions to go on here.)

We now return you to the usual schedule of evasion of the requirement for a high-level set of responses to Jay's list of fatal flaws.

Dave
 
Jabba said:
- OK. This will take awhile.
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No.

As previously discussed, it should take you no more than an hour to compose your entire answer. If you had applied the efforts you evidently spent yesterday posting to this forum, you would have been done by now.

The exercise has been specifically formulated to not take a great deal of time. It is specifically formulated to disallow you from drawing it out as you typically do, so that momentum is lost. You agreed your previous depth-first approach has not been productive over the past five years. In response to that, I proposed an alternative. You are now demonstrating that you have no interest whatsoever in an alternative, and that your goal is the drawn-out, pointless exercise.

Now quit stalling, quit making excuses, and do what I asked you to do six months ago.
 
Filippo Lippi said:
My money's on a reposting of his numbered list
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I'm okay with a numbered list, as long as the numbers refer to the previously numbered fatal flaws and the items in the list describe -- in one or two sentences -- what he's going to do to address that fatal flaw. That would be ideal.

Obviously what I wouldn't accept is a numbered restatement of his argument, which is almost surely what we're going to get. Jabba has no smarts beyond simply repeating his claims and begging or tricking people into agreeing with them.
 
Jabba said:
Zoo,

- For "self," I've offered several definitions (self-awareness, identity, sense of self, particular sense of self, etc.) -- and since this is such a difficult concept to effectively define, I've offered two denotations(?): the experience that reincarnationists think returns and that solipsists think is all there is.
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And both those definitions are fictions with no demonstrable existence
 
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