The Sparrow
Graduate Poster
Proof of Immortality, VII
- Thread starter abaddon
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The Norseman
Meandering fecklessly
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True.
True.
I don't care which side you're on. We're not responsible for his floundering and pathetic repetition.
Dancing David
Penultimate Amazing
That is totally dependent upon the definition of 'you'.
The body changes constantly... so that 'you' changes constantly
The neurological structure changes constantly ... so that 'you' changes constantly
The psychological substrate of alertness and awareness changes constantly ... so that 'you' changes constantly
What 'you' would you say is persistent?
halleyscomet
Penultimate Amazing
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This thread reminds me of the following joke:
I'm still not sure which of us is the composer and which of us is the dictator.
I'm still not sure which of us is the composer and which of us is the dictator.
I know I'm late in replying to this, but honestly we all know it doesn't matter because this whole thread is just a "no exit" style looping torture machine.
May or may not have a body, and there's no such thing as a soul. So we have two possibilities based on Jabba's terrible formula:
1. This specific body exists.
2. This specific body doesn't exist.
Souls don't factor into it because under materialism they don't exist. They have no bearing on the possibilities. If you really want we could put (and we don't have a soul) after both of those or something but obviously that's pointless.
Again, we're talking about the specific combination of things that Jabba thinks makes him. So for this one it's:
1. This specific body exists and this specific soul exists and they're linked.
2. This specific body exists and this specific soul exists but they aren't linked.
3. This specific body doesn't exist, but this specific soul does.
4. This specific body does exist, but this specific soul doesn't.
For either of these Jabba would be looking at the likelihood of option #1, and for either of those we need to figure out how likely the existence of this specific body is (setting aside the fact that we're talking about someone we already know to exist and so obviously the answer is 100%). This is going to be the same regardless of the existence of a soul.
So then on the second one we *also* need to figure out how likely it is he'd have the same soul (or as he calls it, [INSERT RANDOM WORD]) which isn't going to be 100% according to Jabba. Therefore the odds of #1 under H will always be better than under ~H.
May or may not have a body, and there's no such thing as a soul. So we have two possibilities based on Jabba's terrible formula:
1. This specific body exists.
2. This specific body doesn't exist.
Souls don't factor into it because under materialism they don't exist. They have no bearing on the possibilities. If you really want we could put (and we don't have a soul) after both of those or something but obviously that's pointless.
Again, we're talking about the specific combination of things that Jabba thinks makes him. So for this one it's:
1. This specific body exists and this specific soul exists and they're linked.
2. This specific body exists and this specific soul exists but they aren't linked.
3. This specific body doesn't exist, but this specific soul does.
4. This specific body does exist, but this specific soul doesn't.
For either of these Jabba would be looking at the likelihood of option #1, and for either of those we need to figure out how likely the existence of this specific body is (setting aside the fact that we're talking about someone we already know to exist and so obviously the answer is 100%). This is going to be the same regardless of the existence of a soul.
So then on the second one we *also* need to figure out how likely it is he'd have the same soul (or as he calls it, [INSERT RANDOM WORD]) which isn't going to be 100% according to Jabba. Therefore the odds of #1 under H will always be better than under ~H.
Mojo
Mostly harmless
Monza
Alta Viro
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We've been round and round this so many times. Jabba can't grasp that a copy is a second thing. The first thing is the first thing and the copy is never actually the first thing. That is the definition of copy. If you copy a banana or a VW, there is still the first banana and the first VW. Yet, when the copy is of a person, Jabba thinks the first person has some magical property that the first banana and the first VW don't have, even though the scenario is the same.
Saying that the copy of a person isn't youuuuu is the same as saying the copy of a banana isn't the fiiiiirst banana.
Saying that the copy of a person isn't youuuuu is the same as saying the copy of a banana isn't the fiiiiirst banana.
Mojo
Mostly harmless
Toontown
Philosopher
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I don't hold you responsible for Jabba's floundering. I don't even hold you responsible for your own floundering. I merely joke about it occasionally.
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
Oh, I'm sure he has it figured out. He seems to have mistaken playground-level "I know you are, but what am I?" rhetoric for actual intelligent debate, and his evident goal is to keep misrepresenting materialism using different terminology every day until one of his critics unwittingly agrees to it in a way that lets Jabba spring his gotcha! trap. Alongside that we find his ongoing equivocations of "same" and "different." Every single one of his critics has emphasized his awareness of what Jabba's trying to accomplish by his blurring the important distinctions. But Jabba seems to think he's still fooling someone.
There is zero intellectual content in Jabba's argument, and little if any sincerity. He's obviously just looking to entrap some skeptics with puerile word games so that he can make us look like fools on blog he's writing about us.
Toontown
Philosopher
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Sentience is persistent.
This is not the beginning of an interrogation. It is the end of the interrogation.
The Sparrow
Graduate Poster
That's because they hypothetical we are discussing is copying the body and brain. Jabba insists that humans are MORE than just the body and brain, that they are receiving a "soul transmission". The soul would not be copied, therefore the copy would be an incomplete copy. It would be (as he has said) "missing something".
He is presupposing materialism is false in order to show materialism as false.
I realize you all know this. I'm just playing at arguing from Jabba's side as a learning exercise.
Everything he says is actually based on the brain is a radio receiver. If you read his posts with that in mind it is all so clear.
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Belz...
Fiend God
Yeah he still hasn't figured out, or is ignoring, that under H that isn't true.
The Sparrow
Graduate Poster
I think in some weird way he is trying to show that H is impossible. If you presuppose soul transmission/reception as part of what makes a human, then you presuppose materialism is false.
Actually, beyond the brain is a radio thing, I'm, not sure what the **** he is up to.
JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
Explicitly. His goal is to arrive at a posterior probability P(H) that is either zero or negligibly small. The problem -- among many others -- is that he leaks preconceptions from the prior P(H) into the likelihood P(E|H). Because he thinks P(H) is very small, he also thinks P(E|H) must be very small, although he doesn't explicitly formulate it to reveal that.
That's exactly what he's trying to do. We're fond of saying Jabba is misrepresenting materialism, and it's abundantly evident that he is. But the more egregious error he's committing is that he's also trying to make the soul part of E, the data. Rather than E being an observation or dispassionate data, such as "Jabba exists and has a sense of self," he wants E to incorporate his theories for how that sense of self arises, such that materialism would have to explain those theories too, not just the observation. This is the error he commits when he tries to say that the "experience" described by E is the soul as described by "reincarnationists." Theories as to where that sense of self arises cannot be part of the data; they must be part of H or R or some hypothesis that then goes into reckoning a likelihood P(E|H) or P(E|R) under the specific auspices of each hypothesis.
A number of the fatal flaws Jabba concedes he cannot answer deal with his inability to properly formulate a statistical inference. In his defense all he has been able to do is recite the basic theory behind such inferences, which can be copied from any elementary textbook or introductory web site. He can do no more than beg the question that his formulation follows the rules.
To illustrate, anyone can go find a Volkswagen repair manual and recite the section that describes how to change the timing belt. That might convince some people that the reciter has some knowledge of auto mechanics. But when he makes a mess of the car and hammers the valves, it's quite valid criticism to say he doesn't know what he's doing despite his prior recitation. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, not in the rote repetition of the recipe.
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Belz...
Fiend God
It's been clear for a while that he's doing that. He wants to make the existence of the soul implicit in E so that H is false by definition. That's his most basic and most persistent goal.
caveman1917
Philosopher
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Belz...
Fiend God
Wow, the same nonsense as last time, which has nothing to do with anybody's claim, ever, anywhere.
You're off topic.
Of course it bloody is.
The moment we put the "Under Materialism" disclaimer on our stance we delivered on a silver platter a meaningless distinction for Jabba to dance on forever.
I get that I harp on this a lot but it's just so functionally insane to me. We're stuck in an argument where we had to put "Unless reality doesn't exist" as a modifier in our argument. It's just inviting the idea that it's possible under some other... something. We've allowed "Invoking magic" into the discussion.
It's what Jabba and all the thread nannies are using against us the most.
Mojo
Mostly harmless
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