Proof of Immortality, VII

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Jabba said:
- So is winning the lottery.
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A lottery is specifically engineered so that the drawing of each number is unpredictable, and the drawing of a set of numbers is not influenced by any previous events. All the factors that led to the lottery existing are not included in the odds given for drawing a particular set of numbers. At any particular drawing, the same numbers are available for random selection, with the same odds.

This is not true for your existence. Your existence depends on your parents' existence and behavior, which depends on their parents' existence and behavior, back through time. There is only one time you could have existed. Whether or not you existed at all might not have been a sure thing, but the time you existed was. There is no other time when Jabba could have existed. It was now or not at all.
 
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- Ask jt, humots or Caveman about the nature of likelihood. The likelihood in Bayesian inference depends only on the given -- cause and effect is not taken into account.
 
godless dave said:
A lottery is specifically engineered so that the drawing of each number is unpredictable, and the drawing of a set of numbers is not influenced by any previous events. All the factors that led to the lottery existing are not included in the odds given for drawing a particular set of numbers. At any particular drawing, the same numbers are available for random selection, with the same odds.

This is not true for your existence. Your existence depends on your parents' existence and behavior, which depends on their parents' existence and behavior, back through time. There is only one time you could have existed. Whether or not you existed at all might not have been a sure thing, but the time you existed was. There is no other time when Jabba could have existed. It was now or not at all.
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- No. You're wrong. The particular 'ticket' selected depends on physics.
 
Jabba said:
- No. You're wrong. The particular 'ticket' selected depends on physics.
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For a lottery? Yes, it does. And they work very carefully to make sure the ticket machines select numbers in an unpredictable way, so that for purposes of calculating odds you can ignore all the details of how ticket numbers are selected or how winning numbers are selected.
 
Jabba said:
- Ask jt, humots or Caveman about the nature of likelihood. The likelihood in Bayesian inference depends only on the given -- cause and effect is not taken into account.
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Jabba people recognize what you are trying to do.

You're pulling what SMBC calls a "Bayesian Overload."

Take something overwhelmingly likely to the point of practical certainty (You will die) and make up as many inane alternatives and assign them random "probabilities" and compare them to the original.

It's as if I have a standard 6 sided die. I'd say if I roll the die I have a 1 in 6 chance of rolling a 3.

You say nay, nay you say! Sure I could role a 3. Or 1. Or 2. Or 4. Or 5. Or 6. But the die could also quantum tunnel through the table. So it's 1 in 7. Also the die could crack on the table and split in two. So 1 in 8. Or the die could land perfectly balanced on one of it's edges. So that's 12 more possibilities giving us 1 in 20. Or one of it's 8 edges. So I have a 1 in 28 chance of rolling a 3.

And you do this on and on making up more and more outlandish scenarios about what could theologically happen when I roll the die until the "Bayesian Probability" of me rolling a 3 is so unlikely that you slip into the dishonest "Virtually impossible" and claim rolling a 3 is impossible.
 
Jabba said:
- So again, what is the random likelihood of now being during my lifetime -- given OOFLam, the big bang and a lifetime of 100 years?
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Defining "now" as "the moment that Jabba is making the statement 'So again, what is the random likelihood of now being during my lifetime -- given OOFLam, the big bang and a lifetime of 100 years?', we can very easily determine that the random likelihood of this moment occurring during Jabba's lifetime as 1.

Dave
 
Jabba, how does OOFLam impact all the things that had to happen from the Big Bang forward that led to your existence? Even if you have a soul, all those same unlikely events still have to happen.
 
Jabba said:
Ask jt, humots or Caveman about the nature of likelihood.
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We're asking you to demonstrate expertise in likelihood. You have already admitted you don't understand what these named posters have said. You just glom onto them because they occasionally correct your critics dispelling skepticism is your real goal. Just today one of these authorities has reiterated his conclusion that you simply don't get how the likelihoods work in your model. Are you really sure you want to be invoking someone who just told you that you were wrong?

The likelihood in Bayesian inference depends only on the given -- cause and effect is not taken into account.
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Causes and effects, if any, are folded into the reckonings of the various terms of the inference. The physics of a lottery ticket are folded into the model for the denominator of the likelihood ratio. The cause-and-effect genetics are folded into the model as well. They may be a probability distribution reckoned over a number of parameters. They may be approximated in some cases by a random variable to within an acceptable margin. But that does not mean that cause and effect do not play into a Bayesian inference.

Again take the Bayesian search, which is a better example for this than lotteries or card drawings. A house consists of 5 rooms: a living room, kitchen, dining room, bedroom, and bathroom. The cat is somewhere in the house and it's your job to find her. Randomly distributing a cat among the five rooms would yield over time an evenly distributed probability of finding the cat in any one of the five rooms. But that's not how cats work. The cat doesn't like the dining room because it's all hard surfaces. She abhors the bathroom because she associates it with baths. She likes the living room and bedroom because they have soft padded surfaces to nap on and windows to stare out of. Based on what we know about the cat, we can adjust the probability distribution accordingly for the priors. This is akin to the example jt512 gave you more than a year ago, where he was able to state the priors of a coin toss based on information about the physics of a coin.

The aim of the Bayesian search is to optimize the search path to find the cat as quickly as possible. The events that drive the likelihood ratio from step to step are the observations that the cat was not found in the room just searched. The posteriors guide the next step of the search given a failed search of some room. The process is Bayesian because our probability distributions are not based on frequentist modeling but rather on knowledge.

Armed with the prior, we search the living room first and fail to find the cat. However, we have to consider false negatives when reckoning the effect of that observation on the probability distribution. The living room is brightly lit, but large and full of places for cats to hide. Conversely the dining room is also brightly lit but has few places for a cat to hide undetected. So in transforming the prior distribution to the posterior distribution, we have to consider the difficulty of searching each room, since that affects whether we get a false negative. Our posterior distribution would then include elements such as "likelihood that the cat is in the dining room given that the cat was not observed in the living room." And that would guide where we search next. But the key is that none of that estimation was based on a random variable. In this case it was based on subjective knowledge of the particular house being searched. In other cases it can be based on discernible cause-and-effect "physics" of the problem, even if those physics are quite complicated. If an operative cause is "the room is dark" or "the room has lots of hiding places," the relevant effect will be that there is a greater probability of a false negative in searching that room. The model must reflect such things if it's to be useful in a Bayesian sense. The utility of Bayes is precisely that it is not bound to frequentist modeling.

Incidentally because our likelihood included the possibility of a false negative, the posterior probability that the cat is in the living room is still non-zero. And that's where it gets interesting, because in this particular example that posterior may still be higher than the ongoing likelihood that the cat will be in the bathroom. At some point our model may even suggest searching the living room again before searching the bathroom just once.

Your problem, Jabba, is that you simply don't understand how these things are model. At the conceptual level. I told you this as Fatal Flaw no. 1. The answer you finally gave for that was simply to quote chapter and verse from some source about what a statistical inference is. Telling us what constitutes a valid inference does not prove you've formulated one.
 
jond said:
Jabba, how does OOFLam impact all the things that had to happen from the Big Bang forward that led to your existence? Even if you have a soul, all those same unlikely events still have to happen.
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Yes, that's another fatal flaw I've been trying to highlight. It seems to me that the a priori probability of Jabba's existence now given the existence of the immortal soul is the product of the probability of his body existing now, which is the same as the probability of it existing given the nonexistence of the immortal soul, multiplied by the probability of his specific soul existing. In other words, Jabba's committing the conjunction fallacy.

Dave
 
JayUtah said:
I assume at some point your father sat you down and gave you the "birds and the bees" talk, which should have emphasized the cause-and-effect relationship of having sexual intercourse. Your existence is exactly a matter of observable causes and effects.
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Maybe Jabba thinks the stork brings babies. Under that hypothesis, you would never know which baby the stork was going to bring to which mother, when.
 
Jabba said:
jt,
- I looked through 'chapters' VI and VII and couldn't find anything about P(E|H) = P(E|~H) = 1. I don't understand what you're saying.
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Just ignore it, it's wrong anyway and it's already been refuted in an earlier iteration. jt512 is just a bit confused about this, in his logic he's replacing "you haven't supported that P(E|H) is different from P(E|~H)" with "P(E|H) = P(E|~H) = 1" because apparently "the data (you existing) is known before you enter it into the calculation". However if we go by that logic then statistics as a whole is impossible, because the data will always be known before you enter it into the calculation - otherwise you wouldn't be able to enter it into the calculation in the first place. Refer to my examples earlier with the electrical wire and such, if this logic were correct then P(E|L) = P(E|~L) = 1 and I wouldn't have been able to conclude that the wire likely wasn't live based on my existence, yet I clearly can.
 
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caveman1917 said:
Just ignore it, it's wrong anyway and it's already been refuted in an earlier iteration.
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I'm not going to get bogged down in this specific part of the conversation, but I think with Jabba's tendency to latch onto anything that sounds remotely like someone is agreeing with him this is a good time for a reminder:

Jabba,

1. caveman1917 thinks your formula is wrong. He doesn't agree with you about you being immortal.
2. He also hasn't been able to figure out whether or not 1/10 is more than 1/100 so I wouldn't put too much weight on anything he says.
3. Your argument still has MULTIPLE fatal flaws even if you could get someone to concede some minor point in a sub-argument.
 
Jabba said:
- So is winning the lottery.
Click to expand...

godless dave said:
A lottery is specifically engineered so that the drawing of each number is unpredictable, and the drawing of a set of numbers is not influenced by any previous events. All the factors that led to the lottery existing are not included in the odds given for drawing a particular set of numbers. At any particular drawing, the same numbers are available for random selection, with the same odds.

This is not true for your existence. Your existence depends on your parents' existence and behavior, which depends on their parents' existence and behavior, back through time. There is only one time you could have existed. Whether or not you existed at all might not have been a sure thing, but the time you existed was. There is no other time when Jabba could have existed. It was now or not at all.
Click to expand...

Jabba said:
- No. You're wrong. The particular 'ticket' selected depends on physics.
Click to expand...

Belz... said:
Good. Then given your stated parallel between it and a lottery, you agree that your existence is also a cause-and-effect certainty, with odds of 1.
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I think Jabba may be about to Virtually ProveTM that winning lottery tickets are immortal.
 
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