JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
It's a special kind of begged, circular argument. In all his threads here, Jabba essentially tries to cajole his critics to agree, before any actual debate ensues, that he is correct on any given point as a matter of definition rather than of facts and inference. That is, he tries to foist his argument at the outset in the form of a definition and then tries to trick someone into agreeing with the definition and thereby obviating debate. He claims his conclusion must follow inevitably if you but agree that his definitions are correct. He characterizes what he's doing as "agreeing on terms before we start." This lulls his more inattentive critics into thinking he's doing nothing more than setting ground rules when he's really trying his whole case as a preliminary motion.
This is why his argument requires so frequent a change in nomenclature, which he disguises as "communication problems" or his own alleged difficulty in finding the right words. As the facts show over time, these changes in nomenclature occur at the peaks of opposition to his foisting. As soon as it is clear his critics have settled upon an interpretation and analysis of his latest wordplay, he upends the table and insists on new cryptic names ("...what I'll call SSA"), catch phrases ("But it wouldn't bring ME back to life!") and so forth. That's why materialism -- which is a reasonably well-formed concept -- is so constantly shuttered behind Jabba's own homegrown acronyms, terms, and abbreviations. Today materialism is known as "NR" for the "non-religious" hypothesis. That doesn't inherently mean anything while "materialism" does.
Jabba does this so that he can, from time to time, attempt to redefine the language of the debate in terms of his own desired meanings. He wants to stop the trial and go back to change all his preliminary motions to things the court won't have tested. Similarly "experience" is the new "data," and includes -- if his critics would have it -- the notion of an individualized entity separate from the organism (i.e., a soul). And thus, just like Perry Mason, he hopes to win the trial in the preliminary hearing by fiat-definitions -- rulings in limine -- that preclude all the anticipated rebuttals and make it so it's simply impossible for him to lose regardless of how the facts look.
Perhaps that, but certainly also because he understands just enough to think that allowing "subjective information" in the model means he can just shove whatever numbers he wants in for the priors and the likelihoods and that the result must mean something his critics are bound to accept. That's the common application of Bayesian methods in fringe argumentation. Fringe claimants misunderstand what Bayesians mean by "subjective information." Then they usually also go on to ignore the degrees of freedom in their model and consider that although it's flapping in the breeze, so to speak, it momentarily pointed in the direction they desired and so we have to consider it proof.
His real purpose here is to show the world that skeptical thinking is inferior, and that individual skeptics are no match for his superior "holistic" intellect. There's really no point anymore, aside from respecting the MA, to pretending this isn't anything more than an attention-grabbing ego-reinforcement exercise. It's not so much that he thinks he's winning. He admitted both in this debate and in his Shroud debate that he had lost the debate on the merits. It's more about assigning blame for the loss in his mind: Jabba wants to pretend he would have won if not for the treachery of his critics (in one version) who dismiss all his good evidence with fingers in ears; or the supposed unsophistication displayed by everyone else who just can't appreciate his "holistic" genius.
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