Tom4UHere,
Got it, the website, okay I like to see myself as open minded type of guy, so I give it a good look at it then on Monday I tell you what I observe>
I was reading some of that site yesterday and haven't looked at it in a few years and noticed that much has changed since it was written. Views are not quite the same but the information is still pretty accurate.
You might find the political and social sciences interesting.
Political Science: the study of the government of persons.
Roles of Government.
Political Forces.
Political Processes.
Forms of Government.
Branches of Government.
Levels of Government.
Jurisprudence: the study of laws governing persons.
International Relations.
World Politics.
Governments vary by who wields power:
Anarchy
Democracy
Republic
Oligarchy
Autocracy
Monarchy
Governments vary by how much power is wielded:
liberal
authoritarian
totalitarian
Governments vary by how their power is justified:
democracy
theocracy
aristocracy
tyranny
Social Science: the study of the regular behavior of persons.
Economics: the study of production, exchange, and consumption of goods by persons.
Political Science: the study of the government of persons.
Sociology: the study of human group behavior.
Psychology: the study of mind.
Linguistics: the study of language.
History: the study of humanity's past.
Futurology: the study of humanity's future.
5.7.1. Social Science / Futurology / Impossible Advances
Divine Salvation. Humans will never experience either collective or individual salvation by any divine or supernatural agency.
Paranormality. The paranormal phenomena alleged in 2000 by many humans will never prove to be real and will over time be recognized as delusions, hysteria, myths, nonsense, and hoaxes.
Reanimation. There will never be any reanimation of humans whose brains have suffered any of the degradation that occurs at normal temperatures when metabolism ceases. Human personalities may someday be crudely simulated, but such simulations will never have significant fidelity and would not in any event have the identity of the simulated personality.
Explanation of Somethingness. Humans will never have a definitive answer to the question of why there is something rather than nothing. Humans may, however, eventually be able to show that no definitive explanation of existence is possible.
Superluminal Communication. There will never be a way to travel or communicate through space at speeds greater than that of light. Nor will there be a way to warp spacetime to circumvent this restriction.
Temporal Travel. There will never be a way to travel or communicate backwards in time. While time travel is not explicitly impossible under the known laws of physics, the proposed wormhole mechanism for it would require energies and technologies that are simply not achievable. Note also that a wormhole time machine would not allow travel back to before the wormhole was created.
Teleporter Travel. There will never be a way for humans to travel via transmission of information describing their physical constitution. Quantum considerations almost certainly preclude the extraction of a sufficiently detailed description, and such a discontinuous process would not preserve personal identity. The only possible way would be a gradual and continuous disassembly and reassembly with an ongoing causal link between the two separated halves.
Uploading. Like teleportation, transferal of a human mind from a brain to an artifact is almost certainly impossible and would nevertheless not preserve personal identity. Were either technology possible, then a minor improvement would be a non-destructive version that preserves the original body and brain, thus revealing the technology to be a duplicator rather than a teleporter or uploader. The possible technology closest to uploading would be a (relatively) gradual and continuous transformation of the functioning human brain into another substrate.
Energy and Momentum Non-Conservation. There will never be a way to increase the available energy or change the net momentum in a closed system.
5.7.2. Social Science / Futurology / Improbable Advances
Designer Contact. In his novel Contact, Carl Sagan suggested that the universe could have been designed and that its designer could have encoded a message in a transcendental number such as pi or e. Such a situation does not seem logically impossible, in that it would not be on its face a logical contradiction if for example the Bible turned out to be so encoded. The existence of any such message would in fact have to be considered a logical necessity. If so, it could not be considered an act of designer volition, unless one granted degrees of freedom in the design of mathematical logic itself. Such freedom seems incompatible with the very notion of logic: rules of inference that are binding in all possible worlds.
Super-Intelligence. Cognitive ability can increase quantitatively in efficiency, flexibility, speed, capacity, bandwidth, and network associativity, but not qualitatively in its kind of reasoning or knowing. There are no forms of reasoning or kinds of knowledge that are in principle inaccessible to regular intelligence.
Human Evolution. Humanity is very unlikely to undergo significant further natural evolution. Since the beginning of the Neolithic Age, the development of humanity has been influenced much more by changes in culture than changes in genes. This will continue indefinitely, even considering genetic engineering.
Singularity. The Singularity is what Vernor Vinge describes as a moment in the future when the ongoing exponential increases in technological capability culminate in a discontinuity beyond which predictions based on continuous extrapolations do not apply. One candidate for the Singularity is when humanity improves artificial intelligence to the point that it is better than humans at improving artificial intelligence. Another candidate is when the world's computers are networked into a single self-conscious mind. A third is when runaway productivity is achieved through artifactual life or nanotechnology, perhaps provided by extraterrestrial intelligence.
The Singularity will not happen. First, the limits to intelligence apply to artificial intelligence as much as to natural. Second, intelligence is likely not to vary qualitatively as a function of things like processing speed or memory that are increasing exponentially. Third, the effort to make minds faster or smarter will quite likely be subject to diminishing returns. Fourth, artificial minds will at first not be designed but rather grown and evolved, and will be subject to most of the same limits as minds that are naturally grown and evolved.
Antigravity. There will never be a way to repel matter by virtue of its mass, or even to just shield the attractive gravitational force of mass. Nor will there be an inertial drive -- a way to accelerate an object uniformly, as in a gravitational field.
Vacuum or Zero-Point Energy. It is unlikely that humans will ever be able to extract useful amounts of energy from the vacuum or zero point.
Again, some views have changed since it was written but it does give you fundamental reasoning.
