Proof of Immortality, VII

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Dave,
- I would vote on this sub-issue as our most important failure to communicate...

- Materialists accept the existence of particular awareness. That is the thing/process/whatever that OOFLam is addressing, and claims to be singular and short.

No. Your awareness is unique (just like your body), but it is not particular.

- I accept that my body never had to exist, will cease to exist and never exist again. I just think that there is more to my particular awareness than that. Materialists don't.

Not only do materialists don't think there is more to it, but they/we don't think it is particular.

- And, that's what this attempt to re-evaluate OOFLam is about. Is a particular awareness singular and short -- or, is it more than that?

You are not free to re-evaluate it. Not if it is supposed to represent the materialist standpoint.

- Where, in my formula, do you think that the materialist hypothesis is misrepresented?

Your formula is flawed and irrelevant, and there is no reason to discuss it at all, because it does not in any way represent the materialist standpoint.

Hans
 
Dave,
- I would vote on this sub-issue as our most important failure to communicate...

- Materialists accept the existence of particular awareness. That is the thing/process/whatever that OOFLam is addressing, and claims to be singular and short.
- I accept that my body never had to exist, will cease to exist and never exist again. I just think that there is more to my particular awareness than that. Materialists don't.
- And, that's what this attempt to re-evaluate OOFLam is about. Is a particular awareness singular and short -- or, is it more than that?
- Where, in my formula, do you think that the materialist hypothesis is misrepresented?

It's misrepresented every time you claim that a "particular awareness" comes from nowhere, that the number of potential particular awarenesses is relevant to the likelihood of one particular awareness existing, and that if we somehow made a copy of someone we wouldn't know who the copy is.

It's misrepresented when you try to overcomplicate the materialist hypothesis like this:

- Materialists accept the existence of particular awareness. That is the thing/process/whatever that OOFLam is addressing, and claims to be singular and short.

The materialist hypothesis is that functioning, living human brains are self-aware, and that each human lives only once for a finite amount of time.
 
I picked on that one statement, because it was refutable in, like, one equation.

Why the second one? The first one (for all E: P(E|D) = 1) seemed even easier by pointing to P(~E|D) which of course can not also be 1.
 
Because you're doing with Jabba's claims

I'm doing nothing with Jabba's claims. I'm just refuting your (general "you") claims - or rather refuting the most egregious claims held as "muh mathz" in this thread.

in yours it's that Jabba hasn't made an error that you initially failed to spot and have now staked your reputation on the absence of.

No idea what you're on about here, but if anything it seemed to be you and SOdhner in particular who failed to spot the error that E must include all outcomes consistent with the data.

<snipped uncivil comment>

Edited by TubbaBlubba: 
Moderated for rule 0.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
I would vote on this sub-issue as our most important failure to communicate...

There is no "failure to communicate." You simply lying about the position your critics take, and your critics are rightly not letting you get away with it.

Your argument works only if you can foist a straw man in place of materialism. Do not pretend that you can cajole your critics into letting you foist it by wrongly implying that they are somehow at fault here for pointing out your dishonesty. You are being refuted. If you consider being refuted a "failure to communicate" then you have no business in a well-reasoned debate. That instead signals that your idea of a "debate" is where you present your case and everyone pats you on the back for being so clever. That's not going to happen here.

Materialists accept the existence of particular awareness.

They expressly do not, as you've been told several times. You can't seem to find any argument other that lying about this.

I just think that there is more to my particular awareness than that. Materialists don't.

That is an accurate statement of the impasse. However, your feelings are utterly irrelevant to what materialism actually is, and that's how the impasse is resolved. You don't get to extend materialism to account for your feelings or misgivings about it, or your disbelief in it. This is why we tell you that you are letting your prior estimates of P(H) cloud your evaluation of P(E|H), where H is materialism and E is your present existence.

You are evaluating P(E|H). You must do so assuming that H is true. You must do so according to the mechanism that H proposes for how events such as E would happen. You expressly cannot do so from your point of view that there "must be more" to you than what materialism provides, or that there "must be more" to materialism than what there is to it.

So far you have been unable to do this. You are unable to formulate E as an observation containing no speculative or interpretive detail. You are unable to formulate P(E|H) such that it properly represents H. I have been telling you this for months, and included such inabilities as fatal flaws that you know exist and that you admit you cannot answer. Every single person you have approached with the belief that they are experts in statistics and statistical reasoning has told you that you are wrong -- not just a little wrong but "profoundly ignorant," in one person's words. What you're trying to pull in this post is just another example of such profound ignorance.

Where, in my formula, do you think that the materialist hypothesis is misrepresented?

In the P(E|H) term, specifically because the H you're using is a theory of your own contrivance, a straw man, not the actual theory under whose auspices you are trying to compute the probability of an observation occurring.

You've been told several times by several people over the last 72 hours in exactly what way you are misrepresenting the materialist hypothesis. You have been told again, today, in this post, by me. When you ignore reams of recent correction and demand every day that you be told anew where your errors are, you are wasting people's time and are rightly considered rude for doing so. Shape up, please. You owe your critics better attention than this to the arguments they are giving you.
 

The probabilities of complementary events must sum to 1. See the definition of a probability space, the probability of the universe is equal to 1. And remember that, by definition, U = A ∪ ~A for any A. So for any A: P(A) + P(~A) = 1.

The same holds true for a conditional probability, so for any E and D: P(E|D) + P(~E|D) = 1. Think of a conditional probability as constructing a new probability space restricted to, in this case, D. It then reduces to the paragraph above when you think of D as the "new" U (universe).
 
Dave,
- I would vote on this sub-issue as our most important failure to communicate...

- Materialists accept the existence of particular awareness.
This is your lie. You may keep it. Materialism wants nothing to do with it.

That is the thing/process/whatever that OOFLam is addressing, and claims to be singular and short.
No, it isn't a "thing". You continue to lie about that and dishonestly conflate thing with process. A process isn't a thing separate from the entity.

- I accept that my body never had to exist, will cease to exist and never exist again. I just think that there is more to my particular awareness than that. Materialists don't.
Materialism doesn't care what you think. It does care that you lie about it and wants you to stop. Processes aren't "particular" as you've lied about.

- And, that's what this attempt to re-evaluate OOFLam is about. Is a particular awareness singular and short -- or, is it more than that?
It isn't "more" than that because it isn't "that" in materialism.

- Where, in my formula, do you think that the materialist hypothesis is misrepresented?
Where do you think you've represented it honestly after being told hundreds of times exactly where you're misrepresenting it?
 
The probabilities of complementary events must sum to 1. See the definition of a probability space, the probability of the universe is equal to 1. And remember that, by definition, U = A ∪ ~A for any A. So for any A: P(A) + P(~A) = 1.

The same holds true for a conditional probability, so for any E and D: P(E|D) + P(~E|D) = 1. Think of a conditional probability as constructing a new probability space restricted to, in this case, D. It then reduces to the paragraph above when you think of D as the "new" U (universe).

So why does that make debunking one part of Jabba's nonsense any less of a viable option than debunking another?
 
Jabba: A potato, plus a Toyota Celica, divided by the Battle of Hastings equals Toe Fungus.
Us: No it doesn't.
Caveman: Let me tell you why your PEMDAS is wrong there skeptics....

IT'S NOT ABOUT THE EQUATION. Jabba's variables and conclusion are both made up nonsense. If doesn't matter if it's Nonsense+Nonsense/Nonsense = Nonsense or (Nonsense+Nonsense)/Nonsense = Nonsense or Nonsense to the Power of Nonsense = Nonsense.
 
So why does that make debunking one part of Jabba's nonsense any less of a viable option than debunking another?

It doesn't it just gives him some meaningless hijack to tsk tsk the Skeptics over.

But much as with the stupid "materialism" nonsense we hoisted our own petard on this one. We really just need to stop responding to Jabba's equation nonsense. He's functionally wrong, he's not wrong because messed up the math.

The equations matter even less than the made up words and phrases he's trying to sneak in as a soul.
 
Whatever the soul is, its existence can’t be proved or disproved by natural science

As a radiologist, I look at the interior of the human body every day, but have yet to see a soul. That does not mean it doesn’t exist. Taking the fact we cannot locate the soul on a CT or MRI scan as proof that it does not exist is as problematic as suggesting that the flaws in MacDougall’s experiment disprove the existence of the soul. Indeed, seeking physical evidence to prove the existence of the soul flies in the face of a great deal of philosophical and theological scholarship.
 
Dave,

- Materialists accept the existence of particular awareness. That is the thing/process/whatever that OOFLam is addressing, and claims to be singular and short.

Not under any stretch of your imagination! The materialist perspective is that there is a brief ephemeral and transitory "particular awareness". It lasts seconds and changes
 
The materialist hypothesis is that functioning, living human brains are self-aware

I think often in this thread due to the nature of this endless dance we lose sight of the above - or rather, we fail to word it in this simple way like we would in regular life. We're so tied up in trying to get through Jabba's convoluted and obviously incorrect mental gymnastics that we talk about being self aware in a really unnatural way.

So, thanks Godless Dave.

Jabba, look what Godless Dave wrote there. A brain is self-aware. It's like saying a frog is green or my kid is sticky. You wouldn't say that the self-aware is brain. You wouldn't suggest that once the frog has died and turned brown the frog's green is off somewhere eating flies.

You don't have to believe there's no soul - but if you're talking about the materialist thing you need to repeat: the brain is self-aware.

The self-awareness isn't something, it's a property of the brain. The brain is self-aware.

If there's no brain, there's nothing to be self-aware.
 
Not under any stretch of your imagination! The materialist perspective is that there is a brief ephemeral and transitory "particular awareness". It lasts seconds and changes

You've thrown the football (Handegg) to Jabba, but will he catch it?

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Jabba:

Sooooort of. I think your hypothesis ascribes meaning to an insignificant probability. The odds of virtually any micro event viewed from the universal perspective are, as you say, vanishingly small. I would take that as a given, not extrapolate from it. The specific existence of anything shares that probability (assuming chaos), and should be viewed as a shared neutral state, as opposed to a staggeringly unique improbability.
Thermal,
- I do think that's the weakest link in my argument, but I'd like to put off further discussion of that until I've given the other sub-issues my best shots.
 
- I do think that's the weakest link in my argument, but I'd like to put off further discussion of that until I've given the other sub-issues my best shots.

If you honestly wanted to fix your argument, you'd do the weakest part first.

Think of it like fixing a car. You get a used car and it's not running. It might be that the entire engine is fused into a useless lump of metal and is therefore totally worthless, in which case you would need to scrap the car because you wouldn't be able to ever get it running.

But instead you start out by fixing the tail light. Then you take a look at the tires. Maybe after that you'll check the windshield wipers.

Why? If the engine is a brick you're throwing the whole thing out anyway! You find the biggest problem, and you do that FIRST.
 
Thermal,
- I do think that's the weakest link in my argument, but I'd like to put off further discussion of that until I've given the other sub-issues my best shots.

What do you think about all the fatal flaws to your argument that you refuse to answer or even acknowledge?
 
What do you think about all the fatal flaws to your argument that you refuse to answer or even acknowledge?

It amuses him to watch us try desperately and futilely to explain it to him?

He's trying to understand the myth of Sisyphus from the rock's perspective?
 
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