Human Knowledge:
Foundations and Limits

http://humanknowledge.net ©Brian Holtz  2005-07-09

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  • Why is there something rather than nothing? Might the world be an illusion or dream? What exists beyond the human senses? What happens after death? Does divine or supernatural agency exist? Is the future already decided?
  • What is the meaning of life? What is right and wrong? Is the world good or bad? Are humans good or evil? What beings should have what rights? What should one do?
  • What is truth? consciousness? intelligence? What are the limits of intelligence? Of logic? Could a machine think? Does free will exist?
  • How and when did the universe begin? What happened before it began? How and when will the universe end?
  • What does the universe consist of? What laws govern it? Why is the universe this way?
  • How big is the universe? Does it have a center or edge? What is outside the universe? Are there other universes?
  • What is life? How did life arise? What explains its complexity?
  • How did mind and language arise? How does the brain work?
  • Is there life and intelligence beyond earth?
  • What political system works best? What economic system works best?
  • Why do human individuals, groups, and sexes behave as they do?
  • Why have some human societies experienced more material progress than others?
  • Will humanity suffer cultural decline? economic crash? tyranny? resource depletion? overpopulation? runaway pollution? pandemic? interplanetary impact? nuclear catastrophe? nanotech plague?
  • Will humanity experience divine salvation? loss of faith? paranormal abilities? alien contact? time travel? warp travel? machine or human superintelligence? immortality?
  • What will happen in the next: hundred years? thousand years? million, billion, and trillion years?
    •  This living hypertext is a systematic statement of what humanity does and does not know, and can and cannot know, about the answers to these and hundreds of other such questions.  It summarizes the foundations and limits of what human civilization has learned, identifying for each subdivision of human knowledge its fundamental concepts, principles, mysteries, and misunderstandings.  It asserts a worldview of naturalistic positivism and libertarian capitalism that it predicts will guide future human thought and action.

    Outline

      0. Prologue
        0.1. Definition
        0.2. Assertions
        0.3. Scope
        0.4. Organization
        0.5. Questions Asked
        0.6. Audience
        0.7. Copyright
        0.8. Authority
        0.9. Criticism
        0.10. Motivation
      1. Philosophy
        1.1. Metaphysics
          1.1.1. Ontology
          1.1.2. Theology
        1.2. Epistemology
          1.2.1. Philosophy Of Mind
            1.2.1.1. Essence of Mind
            1.2.1.2. Accidence of Mind
            1.2.1.3. Relations of Mind
          1.2.2. Philosophy Of Science
        1.3. Axiology
          1.3.1. Ethics
          1.3.2. Political Philosophy
          1.3.3. Virtue Philosophy
          1.3.4. Aesthetics
      2. Mathematics
        2.1. Logic
          2.1.1. Formal Logic
          2.1.2. Metalogic
          2.1.3. Applied Logic
        2.2. Set Theory
        2.3. Algebra
          2.3.1. Arithmetic
          2.3.2. Number Theory
        2.4. Geometry
        2.5. Analysis
        2.6. Combinatorics
        2.7. Applied Mathematics
      3. Natural Science
        3.1. Physics
          3.1.1. Mechanics
            3.1.1.1. Rigid Mechanics
            3.1.1.2. Non-Rigid Mechanics
            3.1.1.3. Relativity
          3.1.2. Wave Physics
          3.1.3. Thermodynamics
          3.1.4. Electromagnetics
          3.1.5. Quantum Physics
        3.2. Astronomy
          3.2.1. Cosmology
          3.2.2. Galactic Astronomy
          3.2.3. Stellar Astronomy
          3.2.4. Planetary Astronomy
        3.3. Chemistry
        3.4. Geoscience
        3.5. Biology
          3.5.1. Molecular Biology
          3.5.2. Cellular Biology
          3.5.3. Physiology
            3.5.3.1. Reproductive Systems
            3.5.3.2. Respiratory Systems
            3.5.3.3. Digestive Systems
            3.5.3.4. Circulatory Systems
            3.5.3.5. Supportive-Protective Systems
            3.5.3.6. Actuating Systems
            3.5.3.7. Immune Systems
            3.5.3.8. Cybernetic Systems
          3.5.4. Ethology
          3.5.5. Evolutionary Biology
            3.5.5.1. Genetics
            3.5.5.2. Paleontology
            3.5.5.3. Taxonomy
          3.5.6. Anthropology
          3.5.7. Ecology
          3.5.8. Exobiology
      4. Technology
      5. Social Science
        5.1. Economics
          5.1.1. Macroeconomics
          5.1.2. Microeconomics
            5.1.2.1. Market Theory
            5.1.2.2. Market Imperfections
            5.1.2.3. Public Policy
        5.2. Political Science
        5.3. Sociology
        5.4. Psychology
        5.5. Linguistics
        5.6. History
        5.7. Futurology
          5.7.1. Impossible Advances
          5.7.2. Improbable Advances
          5.7.3. Academic Developments
          5.7.4. Technological Developments
          5.7.5. Industrial Developments
          5.7.6. Sociopolitical Developments
          5.7.7. Challenges
          5.7.8. Possible Catastrophes
          5.7.9. Timeline
      6. Epilogue
      A. Appendices
        A.1. Unanswered Questions
        A.2. References

    0. Prologue

    1. Definition.
    2. Assertions.
    3. Scope.
    4. Organization.
    5. Questions Asked.
    6. Audience.
    7. Copyright.
    8. Authority.
    9. Criticism.
    10. Motivation.

    0.1. Prologue / Definition

    This living hypertext is a systematic summary of the knowledge attained by human civilization. For each subdivision of human knowledge, the text identifies its fundamental concepts, principles, mysteries, and misunderstandings.

    Status. This draft contains

    A more detailed indication of what parts of the text have been completed is provided by the hypertext links in the Questions Asked section.

    Copyright.  This text is the copyrighted property of the author.  Certain forms of copying are permitted and even encouraged; see the Copyright section for details.
     

    0.2. Prologue / Assertions

    Positions
    This text aims to assert humanity's analyses and theories that are most valid (i.e. convincing and defensible, as opposed to merely logically well-formed). These analyses and theories are not necessarily the most widely-believed or well-known. Potentially contentious assertions are those sympathetic to ontological materialism, epistemological empiricism and positivism, mental functionalism, theological atheism, axiological extropianism, political libertarianism, economic capitalism, constitutional federalism, biological evolutionism, and technological optimism.

    Relatively uncontentious assertions appear as normal text.  Potentially contentious assertions appear like this. Denials of widely-held beliefs appear like this.Questions whose answers lie outside human knowledge appear like this.

    Innovations
    Almost all of the facts and analyses asserted in this text have of course been asserted before by other humans. Nevertheless, there are some things in this text that the author believes may be novel or at least independently original.

    Arrangements.  The text places various unoriginal pieces of information into some arrangements that might not have been presented elsewhere before. Among these are

    Analyses.  The text gives certain analyses and definitions that, while not wildly original, are nevertheless believed by the author to be improvements on any he had seen before.  Among these are Inventions. The text presents a few notions that may be wholly new.  They are Predictions.  The section on Futurology collects, filters, and refines many predictions by other humans, but also makes predictions that the author has never seen clearly stated by anyone else.  They are predictions of Judgments. The author naturally hopes that the most significant innovation of this text is the judgments it makes and the worldview it synthesizes them into. The text asserts a worldview it calls autocosmology that includes by endorsement the positions of positivism, empiricism, functionalism, atheism, capitalism, federalism, evolutionism, and evolutionary psychology. The text also advances as part of autocosmology some slightly customized versions of other positions. They are

    0.3. Prologue / Scope

    This text aims to survey the foundations and limits of the knowledge attained by humanity since the dawn of civilization. It does not bother restating what Stone Age humans already knew or what now constitutes common sense and folk wisdom. It does not include operational knowledge about using humanity's technologies or natural faculties. It does not include parochial knowledge about human practices and achievements in art, play, and subsistence. It does not include subjects (such as astrology and psychoanalysis) that do not constitute valid knowledge. It does not simply enumerate facts and ideas alphabetically. It is neither a compendium of trivia nor an almanac of ephemera. It does not attempt to correct or improve the reader's command of any particular human language. It does not try merely to fill the common or embarrassing gaps in people's knowledge. It is not a syllabus of cultural literacy for some particular human society. It is not a guide to understanding but rather a survey of what is to be understood. It does not give demonstrations but rather conclusions. It does not attempt to persuade or teach but rather to assert and inform. It aims to systematically and assertively summarize what humanity does and does not know.

    0.4. Prologue / Organization

    There are many equally valid ways to organize human knowledge.  Knowledge can be organized according to This text organizes human knowledge according to the domain to which it applies, and orders these domains roughly from the most universal to the most parochial. This text begins with philosophy, because philosophy addresses the fundamental and ultimate questions about what exists, what can be known, and what is to be valued. Philosophy is about the questions that would confront thinkers not only on any world in the universe but on any world in any possible universe. If philosophy is about necessary questions, then mathematics is about necessary answers: the rules of inference and the necessary deductions that all thinkers in all possible universes must acknowledge.

    Science is about truth that is not necessary but rather contingent, because it is based on actual observations and inductions about regular or pattern-following phenomena in the universe. The truths of science should be agreed upon by any thinkers in the universe that observe the same regular phenomena. The most interesting known phenomena in the universe are those concerning persons, and so science is divided accordingly. Natural science studies regular phenomena that do not necessarily involve persons and thus are likely to be universal (although many details of terrestrial life science are inevitably parochial). Technology applies mathematics and science toward accomplishing goals. Technological principles are likely to coincide wherever in the universe there are thinkers dealing with similar phenomena and desiring similar goals. Social sciences strive to induce truths that would apply to any kind of person anywhere in the universe, but this is not always possible because humans know of only one kind of person: humans. Most parochial of all would be topics relating to human arts and leisure, which this text excludes as not involving fundamental knowledge.

    0.5. Prologue / Questions Asked

    These are some of the questions that this text is intended to address. Many of these questions are included because of their importance, while others serve more as invitations to their respective areas of knowledge.

    0.6. Prologue / Audience

    A summary of the knowledge and ignorance of human civilization could be useful to many.

    0.7. Prologue / Copyright

    This text is the copyrighted property of the author, Brian Holtz.  This text asserts that copyright should give only the right to prevent reproduction in cases of a) competition that diverts commercial benefit from the owner to the competitor, b) attributed use with unattributed defamatory modification, and c) unattributed use of any kind. This text predicts that technological developments will force the adoption of this limitation on copyright for all inert linear data (as opposed to executable software and some interactive databases). One way copyrighted linear data will be distributed is as memeware. Memeware is shareware with a chain letter option, meaning users can propagate it as an alternative to paying for it.

    This text is memeware. You may reproduce or distribute this text only in complete and unmodified copies, only for non-commercial purposes, and only if you agree to the following memeware license.

    If you find this text useless, you owe the author nothing.  If you find it useful, you should do one or both of:
    The author believes and intends that this text violates no existing copyrights.  Any quotations, data, or images from copyrighted sources are indicated and are cited under fair use.  The cover's underlying image of the Earth is copyright The Living Earth, Inc.

    0.8. Prologue / Authority

    No statements should be believed or disbelieved simply because they are offered by a particular text or author. The statements in this text are no exception. They should be judged only by whether they are consistent with evidence, logic, parsimony, and other truth.  Even if most of the assertions in this text are valid (i.e. convincing and defensible), that is not strong evidence that none could be invalid.

    The number of possible valid human knowledge summaries no longer than this text is immense but finite. This text is certainly far from being the best possible such summary.  If the goal of approaching such an optimal summary is worthwhile, then an effective method might be to first produce a suboptimal summary and then to continually correct it or replace it outright with better ones.  Thus corrections and replacements of this text are welcome.

    At the end of this text is a list of some of the references used in writing it. Because this text attempts to say so much, it contains few references for particular statements. The text tries to explain or justify some of its statements, but most it merely asserts, due to space constraints.

    Words in single-quotes are being mentioned rather than used. ('Ten' is a word, while ten is a number.) Words in double-quotes are being used verbatim from some source. Words in italics are being used with emphasis.  Words in bold and used at the beginning of a sentence are being defined.

    0.9. Prologue / Criticism

    Many criticisms of this text are predictable. The most welcome way to criticize this text would be to offer an improved or alternative summary of human knowledge, one just as comprehensive and just as assertive.  Even more welcome would be vigorous competition between knowledge-summarizing treatises representing humanity's various contradictory schools of thought. These efforts would in effect "sequence" the most important human memes and their alleles, constituting a sort of Human Memome Project.  Such a competition would preserve a fossil record of dying worldviews even as it hastens what the author believes will be the inevitable ascendancy of naturalistic positivism and libertarian capitalism.

    0.10. Prologue / Motivation

    I began writing this text in order to add to, clarify and preserve what I know and believe. I had never found a single writer with whom I agreed along all the major dimensions of human opinions.  But I was surprised I also could not find a single text that systematically summarizes what humanity knows. Encyclopedias are too meek, seeking universal consensus and to alphabetize instead of analyze.  Textbooks are too narrow, mapping individual trees and not the forest.  Most treatises are too mystical or canonical, substituting intuition or revelation for skeptical rationality.  None of them seems to well capture the worldview emerging from the revolutions in physics and biology and from the successes of free markets and free minds.  I believe that a worldview of scientific positivism and libertarian capitalism will prevail in human thought and action in the new millennium.  Such a future will be good, and I hope to advance it in some small way with this text.

    1. Philosophy

    Philosophy: the study of ultimate reality and meaning.
    1. Metaphysics: the study of ultimate reality.
    2. Epistemology: the study of knowledge.
    3. Axiology: the study of values.
    Necessary Questions
    Philosophy asks the questions: The first two questions face anyone who cares to distinguish the real from the unreal and the true from the false. The third question faces anyone who makes any decisions at all, and even not deciding is itself a decision. Thus all persons practice philosophy whether they know it or not.
    Autocosmic Answers
    What is existing? Reality consists ultimately of matter and energy and their fundamentally lawlike and unwilled relations in space-time. To exist is to have a causal relationship with the rest of the universe. The universe is the maximal set of circumstancesthat includes this statement and no subset of which is causally unrelated to the remainder. Humans do not know why the universe exists or what it is for. The universe operates without supernatural intervention and according to lawlike regularities that can be understood through empirical investigation and without special intuition. Humans have no credible evidence of any supernatural agency or unity. Humans have no credible evidence that any minds enjoy eternal existence.

    What is knowing?  Knowledge is justified true belief. Truth is logical and parsimonious consistency with evidence and with other truth. Meaning is the context-sensitive connotation ultimately established by relevant denotation and use.  All synthetic propositions (including this one) can only be known from experience and are subject to doubt. A synthetic statement is propositionally meaningless if it is in principle neither falsifiable nor verifiable.  A mind is any volitional conscious faculty for perception and cognition. Minds and ideas consist ultimately of matter.  Mental states are functional states consisting of causal relations among components for processing information. Consciousness is awareness of self and environment. Intelligence is the ability to make, test, and apply inductions about perceptions of self and world.  There are no forms of reasoning or kinds of knowledge that are in principle inaccessible to regular intelligence.

    What is good?  As autonomous living intellects, we persons value intelligence and life and the autonomy they need to flourish. A person is any intelligent being with significant volitional control over how it affects other beings. All persons have the right to life and liberty. All beings have the right not to suffer torture or extinction. Liberty is volition in the absence of aggression. Aggression consists essentially of 1) coercion or 2) damage to a person's body, property, or rightful resources. Coercion is compulsion of one person by another through force or threat of aggression. Justice is the minimization, reversal and punishment of aggression. The purpose of the state is to effect justice, provide aid and sustenance to persons in mortal danger, protect species in danger of extinction, and prevent torture.

    Autocosmology is a synthesis of metaphysical naturalism, ontological materialism, epistemological empiricism and positivism, mental functionalism, theological atheism, axiological extropianism, political libertarianism, economic capitalism, constitutional federalism, biological evolutionism, evolutionary psychology, and technological optimism. Autocosmology is the worldview asserted by this text.

    Human Answers
    Most humans justify their answers to philosophy's questions using one of four methods. Faith is the most common mode of belief in the Western world, where the Abrahamic religions are prevalent. Mysticism is the most common mode of belief in the Eastern world. Skepticism is practiced worldwide (with varying amounts of rigor) by the minority of thinkers who have been influenced more by science than by tradition. Cynicism too is practiced by a worldwide minority, often as a simplistic reaction to the rigidity of faith, the emptiness of mysticism, or the relativism of skepticism.

    A skeptic believes what he sees. A mystic believes what he feels. A fideist believes what he hears.  A cynic believes nothing.  Thus faith fails in not questioning others, and mysticism fails in not questioning the self. Skepticism succeeds by exempting nothing from questioning, while cynicism fails by exempting no answer from disbelief.

    Darwin made faith essentially indefensible among Western philosophers. Modern Western philosophy is broadly divided into two traditions, each of which starts with skepticism and takes it to a certain extreme.

    Analytic philosophy takes skepticism to an extreme by saying that philosophy is only about necessary answers (logic and mathematics) and not necessary questions (metaphysics and axiology). Continental philosophy fails by turning methodological skepticism into mysticism (Phenomenology, Existentialism) and cynical relativism (Deconstructionism, Critical Theory).

    1.1. Philosophy / Metaphysics

    Metaphysics: the study of ultimate reality.
    1. Ontology: the study of being.
    2. Theology: the study of universal being and knowing.
    Reality
    Reality is everything that exists. Reality consists ultimately of matter and energy and their fundamentally lawlike and unwilled relations in space-time.
    Theories of Reality
    The primary distinction in theories of reality is between Nature and Spirit. Human theories of reality differ primarily according to how they analyze Spirit. Fideists usually believe in theism or deism.Theism stems from the human propensity to take any mysterious phenomenon as an indication of supernatural intentionality. Primitive humans invented supernatural explanations for: However, the Scientific Revolution had established by the middle 1800s that physics, chemistry, astronomy, meteorology, and physiology could be understood in naturalistic terms.  Supernatural explanations still seemed necessary for the origin and mechanism of life and mind, and for the origin of the universe itself. In the subsequent century, science outlined the basic answers for these questions, and theism began to be abandoned by serious thinkers. Always hoping that the gaps in scientific knowledge are about to miraculously stop shrinking, some fideists clung to a theism based on an increasingly irrelevant "God of the gaps".

    Deists retreat directly to the last trench, and use God only to answer the question of why there is something rather than nothing. Deism is unparsimonious, because it cannot answer the question of why there is God rather than not God.

    Mystics usually believe in pantheism or outright idealism.Pantheism and Idealism are incorrect because they too are unparsimonious.  They infer spiritual aspects of reality from psychological phenomena that can be explained more parsimoniously in materialist terms.

    Skeptics usually believe in naturalism. The varieties of naturalism differ primarily according to their explanation of how matter relates to mind.  While naturalists do not know why the universe exists, there is no credible evidence or convincing argument that its existence implies supernatural agency.  Parsimony demands that supernatural agency be held not to exist until shown otherwise. Agnosticism constitutes either ignorance of this demand, or a redundant restatement of the principle that synthetic propositions are subject to doubt.

    Paranormality
    Many humans believe in the existence of phenomena which lie outside the materialist reality of natural science.  The phenomena alleged include: Humans have no credible evidence for these phenomena. Over time these phenomena will recognized as delusions, hysteria, myths, nonsense, and hoaxes.

    1.1.1. Philosophy / Metaphysics / Ontology

    Ontology: the study of being.

    Understanding of reality and existence is built up according to experience from elements provided by logic: terms, their properties and relations, and the attributions and inferences that can be made among them.  From these can be derived the ontological notions of causality, existence, time, identity, and space.

    Causality
    A circumstance is a set of terms and their fixed properties and relations that as a whole can be distinguished from other such sets and identified with itself. A change is a relation between an ordered pair of distinguishable circumstances and is defined by the two circumstances that it relates. An effect is a change that can be attributed. A cause is that to which an effect can be attributed in whole or in part. An influence is that to which an effect can be only partly attributed. Attribution is a fundamental concept that underlies the notions of both ontological causality and logical properties.

    A necessary cause is one which can be inferred from the effect. A sufficient cause is one from which the corresponding effect can be inferred.  To determine is to be the necessary and sufficient cause for. Possibility is the property of not being contradicted by any inference. Logical possibility is the property of not contradicting the laws of logic. Physical possibility is the property of not contradicting the laws of nature.

    Is causality an illusion? Does every effect have a cause, or do some effects have no cause? Can there be a cycle of causality, in which an effect both precedes and contributes to its cause? Can one know the answers to these questions?

    Existence
    The universe is the maximal set of circumstances that includes this statement and no subset of which is causally unrelated to the remainder. To exist is to have a causal relationship with the rest of the universe.  An entity is any term that exists. Two circumstances are causally unrelated if neither could ever influence the other.

    It is unparsimonious to say other universes exist. One could imagine a set of circumstances causally unrelated to the maximal set that includes this sentence, and could choose to consider it a separate universe. But to say those imagined circumstances "exist" is to cheapen existence from causal reality to mere imaginability. An imagining does not establish the existence of the thing imagined.

    Why is there something rather than nothing? Is there an objective purpose for that which exists? How could one recognize an answer to these questions?  Are these questions meaningless?

    Humans do not know why there is something rather than nothing, or if the question is even meaningful.   If this question has a parsimonious answer, it must consist in a self-explaining fact or cycle of facts.  A candidate for such a fact would be the concept of God in the Ontological Proof, but that proof is not convincing.  Humans do not know any such fact(s), or even if they could possibly exist. If it is asserted that non-existence is more likely or natural than existence, one could ask why this asserted tendency (toward non-existence) itself exists.

    A possibly meaningful (but unparsimonious) answer to the Ultimate Why is that the universe exists (more precisely, is perceived to exist) roughly because it is possible. The reasoning would be as follows. Absolute impossibility -- the state of affairs in which nothing is possible -- is itself not possible, because if nothing truly were possible, then absolute impossibility would not be possible, implying that at least something must be possible. But if at least one thing is possible, then it seems the universe we perceive should be no less possible than anything else. Now, assuming that physicalism is right and that qualia and consciousness are epiphenomena, then the phenomenology of a mind and its perfect simulation are identical. So whether the universe we perceive existed or not, it as a merely possible universe would be perceived by its merely possible inhabitants no differently than our actual universe is perceived by its actual inhabitants. By analogy, the thoughts and perceptions of a particular artificial intelligence in a simulated universe would be the same across identical "runs" of the simulation, regardless of whether we bothered to initiate such a "run" once, twice -- or never.

    Thus, the universe might merely be the undreamed possible dream of no particular dreamer.

    Time
    An event is a change that cannot interestingly be subdivided into constituent changes. Time is the ordering of events according to the potential of some events to causally influence other events. If (as in this universe) causal influence propagates through space only at finite speed, then some events can be far enough apart in space as to be in principle unable to influence each other. In this case time is a partial order on events instead of a total order.

    An instant is a point on a linear continuum onto which events have been associated in a particular reference frame according to their order in time. Duration is a measure of the separation between two instants in time determined by counting intervening events of the kind that recur in proportional numbers to each other.  Examples of such events are the swings of a pendulum or the vibrations of an atom.

    Eternity is an entire linear continuum of instants. Thus by definition there is between any two instants another instant.  However, it is not necessary that between any two events there is another event.  Nor is it necessary that there be a first event, even if the past is of finite duration.  Just as there is no smallest positive real number, there might be no first event, because there might be no event associated with a first instant (t=0).  Instants are mathematical constructs that do not always have an associated actual event.

    The future is, from the perspective of a particular event, the set of all events that the event potentially influences.  The past is, from the perspective of a particular event, the set of all events by which the event is potentially influenced.  The present is, from the perspective of a particular event, the set of all events simultaneous with it.  Simultaneity is a relation enjoyed by two events if and only if they share identical sets of past and future events.

    Hypertime. Time is often said to pass or flow or to be moved through. This metaphor of motion is misleading, because motion is spatial displacement over time, measured for example in meters per second. But a 'motion of time' measured in seconds per second is nonsensical, and so temporal displacement 'over time' requires a notion of hypertime, measured in seconds per hyper-second. This is no help, because hypertime too will be said to flow -- through hyper-hypertime. There is no reason to posit an absolute or universal or extra-temporal or distinguished present that flows or passes or marches and continuously turns absolutely future events into absolutely past ones.  Past, present, and future are relations with a particular event and are not absolute properties in themselves.

    Changing the future. The present can affect a future event, but it cannot "change" a future event. An event is itself a change and time is no more than an ordering of these changes. If changes themselves can change, these hyper-changes are hyper-events that can be ordered into hypertime. Events cannot change over time because events are defined by their pre- and post-conditions. To talk of different post-conditions for an event is really to talk of a different event, just as to talk of different cardinality for a number is really to talk of a different number. This does not imply determinism, because determinism is a statement about inference and not about inevitability.

    Determinism is the thesis that a sufficient knowledge of any particular set of circumstances could be used to completely infer any subsequent circumstance. Some humans take determinism to be the thesis that the future is already decided, that the present was always going to be the way it is, that statements about probability and possibility are merely statements about one's incomplete knowledge, and that only actual possibility is that which is already inevitable.

    Such a notion of ontological determinism is different from epistemic determinism only if there is a hypertime in which different points of normal time can "already" coexist.  A notion of ontological determinism that is strictly different from epistemic determinism can have no practical consequences.  As a difference that makes no difference, ontological determinism is a thesis that parsimony demands be rejected.  Adopting the thesis makes as much sense as adopting the thesis that the universe is five minutes old.  It is inconsequential -- and thus meaningless -- to say the future is already decided.

    Some humans argue that if determinism is true, then no argument is to be considered valid as it is simply a train of statements following a predestined track.  First, this misconceived argument applies as well to itself as it does to any other argument.  Second, even in a deterministic system there can arise processes that tend to produce certain results. If viable organisms can arise, reproduce, and evolve due to natural selection in a deterministic universe, then surely viable arguments can arise, reproduce, and evolve due to competition in a marketplace of ideas.  The viability of an idea or argument is closely related to its epistemological validity, and so the opposite misconception could occur: an argument might be considered more valid merely because it is at the end of so many predestined tracks.

    Time Travel. Time travel would imply the existence of either hypertime or circular causality. Humans have no reason to think either exists.

    Temporal Anisotropy. In a short video clip showing two billiard balls bouncing off each other, forward and backward in time are indistinguishable if one ignores friction and inelasticity.  In a longer video of a billiards break, the future is the end in which the balls are no longer in a nicely ordered triangle. If causes can be attributed to effects as easily as effects can be attributed to causes, then causal laws do not distinguish past and future, and the future for an event is the direction of increasing disorder in the system.  Traces and memories of the past are a localized increase in order at the expense of an increase in system-wide disorder. Due to statistical considerations, some systems can cycle between order and disorder.  In such systems the direction locally considered to be future can vary over the timeline of the system.

    Temporal anisotropy is not determined by the expansion of the universe, nor by the direction of electromagnetic radiation. For electromagnetism, the attribution of influence works equally well in both time directions. There is no inherent difference between the absorption and emission of a photon. Boundary conditions are logically possible in which photons are set in motion without having been emitted from anything, and which converge in shrinking spheres on an anti-emitter.

    Identity
    Identity is the relation that obtains between two entities (or terms) that are the same instance, i.e., that could never be counted as two.  Leibniz's Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles states that if there is no possible way to distinguish two entities then they really are the same entity.

    A given entity is identified through time with its closest close-enough continuous-enough continuer. A continuer is an entity which is similar to a previous entity and exists because of it. A continuer is close enough if it retains enough of the original entity's properties. A continuer is closest if it retains more of the original entity's properties than any other continuer. A continuer is continuous enough if there is no extraordinary discontinuity in its relationship to the original entity.

    Space
    Space is the seemingly boundless and continuous three-dimensional extent in which all matter is located and all events occur. It seems logically possible that space could be not only boundless (like the surface of a sphere) but infinite (like an infinite plane). It even seems logically possible that space could be locally discontinuous.

    Do space and time have absolute existence independent of their contents? Or are they simply a system of relations among entities and events? Is there a way to answer these questions, or would any answer not make a difference?

    1.1.2. Philosophy / Metaphysics / Theology

    Theology: the study of universal being and knowing.
    God
    God is supernatural agency or unity, often considered necessary, perfect, timeless, omniscient, omnipotent, benevolent, and personal. A deity is a supernatural person, usually considered immortal, that demands or deserves human worship or reverence and that wields supernatural influence over human affairs.Divinity is the property of being supernatural and sacred. Sacredness is the property of being worthy of reverence or worship.

    Humans have no credible evidence or convincing proof of any deities, including a God, Creator, First Cause, Perfect or Necessary Being.

    Humans have proposed philosophical proofs of God as an alternative or supplement to historical revelation of God's existence.

    None of the proofs of God is generally accepted as convincing, due to various counter-arguments. Many humans claim to have evidence of revelation from their god(s). Any god could trivially inscribe or authenticate its revealed message through supernatural patterns (in cosmological or quantum phenomena) or ongoing miracles (such as prophecy or communication with a spirit world). There is no credible evidence that any such revelation has been competently attempted by any god(s).
    Afterlife
    Most humans believe that some form of reincarnation or immortality awaits them after death. Humans have no credible evidence of reincarnation or any kind of afterlife.
    Faith
    Faith is belief based on revelation and exempt from doubt. Skepticism involves zero faith because it holds not even a single belief that is based on revelation and exempt from doubt.  Skepticism holds that truth is not simply revealed but instead must always be subject to doubt, demonstration, and rederivation.  This belief about truth is itself neither revealed nor exempt from doubt, but is instead subject to continual test.

    It is possible (but unlikely) that this epistemological belief could one day stop yielding satisfactory results.  For example, if God appeared and started violating physical laws, predicting the future, punishing infidels, and rewarding believers, then faith would suddenly be more satisfactory than skepticism. Until such a development, skepticism continues to be more satisfactory than faith.

    Faith is not simply an absence of doubt, because tautologies are beyond doubt and yet are recognized not revealed.  Faith is not simply any confident reliance on authority, because an authority can be relied upon even confidently without being held exempt from all doubt. Faith is not simply any provisional hypothesis believed without complete evidence, because a proposition can be provisionally believed without being held exempt from all doubt.  Faith is not simply any affirmation of values, because to affirm a value is not to posit a proposition but to make a valuation. Faith is belief based on revelation and exempt from doubt.  Fideists often say skeptics too have "faith" in science or reason, but this corrupts the definition of 'faith'.  Faith must be embarrassing if its only defense is the claim that everybody is guilty of it.

    Origin of faith.  Humans' propensity for faith derives perhaps from their dependence on teaching by parents and society. In the absence of a biological mechanism for offspring to inherit knowledge directly, a predisposition for unquestioning belief in authority might help spare each generation from having to rediscover or verify everything.

    Mysticism
    Mysticism is belief base on private and direct experience of ultimate reality.  Mysticism holds that belief can be justified simply by the intensity or directness of an experience, and without a showing that the experience has any objective basis or consequences.

    Rejecting objectivity and the distinction between the experiencer and the experienced, mysticism thus mistakes feeling for knowing. Mystics are forever free to claim that anyone who doesn't feel what they feel is somehow "doing it wrong". The conclusions of mysticism are usually unfalsifiable or inconsequential and thus propositionally meaningless.

    Some mystics compare meditation to advanced mathematics and claim that both yield conclusions that can only be verified by adept practitioners. This claim is misleading. It is true that creating and even comprehending advanced mathematical conclusions usually requires specialized training. But all mathematical demonstration is by definition subject to verification through mechanical symbol manipulation. This symbol manipulation is not necessarily private or "interior" like the experience of a mystic, but is expressly public and exterior.

    Origin of mysticism.  Humans' propensity for mysticism derives perhaps from their nature as intelligent social animals who survive by detecting patterns and especially intentions in an environment dominated by their social interactions.  Humans appear biased to see intentionality not only in friends, foes, predators, and prey, but also in weather, the heavens, or the universe itself.  This bias is perhaps related to the general human tendency (known in psychology as the Fundamental Attribution Error) to incorrectly emphasize intentional explanations over situational or circumstantial ones.

    Religion
    Religion is any system of belief based on faith or mysticism, or involving worship of or reverence for some deity.

    Science and Religion.  A common misconception is that science might be an alternative to religion for answering questions about meaning and value.  Those questions are the domain of philosophy, whereas science deals with objective phenomena. Science depends on the epistemological principle of skepticism, and any "conflict" between science and religion is really a conflict between skepticism and faith (or mysticism).   Religion can be made superficially compatible with science by restricting itself to questions that are a) scientific but unanswered or b) philosophical.  However, faith- or mysticism-based religion can never be compatible with the skepticism on which science -- and all epistemologically valid philosophy -- is built.

    Belief Systems
    Most humans attempt to understand the world through faith or mysticism. Of the major groups of believers, only agnostics and atheists avoid both faith and mysticism.  This table summarizes the major human belief systems. Statistics on adherents are assembled from various sources, including Encyclopedia Britannica and adherents.com.  The 'Deity' column identifies each system's type of supernaturalism , except that for monotheisms it instead names the deity. The 'Fate' column tells what each system believes happens to a person after death.

    Belief System Millions % Where When Founder Scripture Deity Fate
    Christianity 1960 34% West c30 Jesus New Testament God judged
       Roman Catholicism    981    17%   c30 Paul, Peter      
       Protestantism    404    7%            
          Baptist       100       2%   c1611 Thomas Helwys      
          Lutheran       76     1517 Martin Luther (95 Theses)    
          Anglican       70   England 1534 Henry VIII      
            Episcopalian        3   USA 1789        
          Methodist       50     1738 John Wesley      
          Reformed       1536 John Calvin (Institutes...)    
            Presbyterian                
          Pentecostal         9   USA c1880 Charles Parham      
          Church of Christ        1.6   USA c1832 Campbell, Stone      
          Society of Friends     USA 1650 George Fox      
       Eastern Orthodox    123    4%   1054 Michael Cerularius      
       Mormonism    11   Utah 1831 Joseph Smith Book of Mormon    
       Jehovah's Witness    1.4 US   USA 1878 Charles Russell      
       Christian Science    0.4   USA 1879 Mary Eddy (Science & Health)    
    Islam 1130 19% Mideast 600 Muhammad Koran Allah judged
       Sunni      16%            
       Shiite      3%            
       Sufism                
    (Agnosticisms)  887 15%         non death
    Hinduism  793 14% India 1000 BCE (Aryans) Vedas, esp. Upanishads poly rebirth
       Hare Krishna                
    Buddhism  325 5.6% E. Asia 525 BCE Buddha Tipitaka pan rebirth
       Zen Buddhism                
       Amidism                
    (Atheism)  222 3.8%         anti death
    Chinese folk religions  221 3.8% China          
       Confucianism     China 500 BCE Confucius Analects; I Ching non death
       Taoism     China 550 BCE Lao Tzu Tao-Te-Ching poly immort
    Asian New Religions  106 1.8%            
    Animisms  103 1.8%            
       Shamanism                
       Voodoo                 
    Sikhism   19 0.3% Punjab 1604 Guru Nanak Adi Granth Sat-Kartar rebirth
    Judaism   14 0.2% Israel 1800 BCE Abraham Old Testament Yahweh death
    Spiritism   10              
    Bahaism    6   Persia 1863 Baha Ullah Kitabi Ikan Allah?  
    Jainism    5   India 550 BCE Mahavira Purvas et al. pan rebirth
    Shintoism    3   Japan <500 (Japanese)   poly commun
    Cao Dai    3   Vietnam 1919 Ngo Van Chieu   God? rebirth
    Tenrikyo    2.4   Japan          
    Scientology    1   USA 1954 L. Ron Hubbard Dianetics (aliens) immort
    Unitarianism    0.8              
    Rastafarianism    0.7              
    Zoroastrianism    0.2   Persia 1000 BCE Zarathustra Avesta Ahura Mazda judged
    Parsee    0.19              
    Mandaeanism    0.045   Iraq c300    Haran Gawaita mono? immort 
    Other    1.9              
       Eckankar     USA 1965 Paul Twitchell   God immort 
       Heaven's Gate     USA 1971 Marshall Applewhite   (aliens) immort 
       Mithraism     Persia          
       Raelianism     France 1973 Rael  True Face of God (aliens)  
       Rosicrucianism     West  1614 Johan Andrea  Confessio rosae crucis    
       Santeria     Cuba          
       Satanism                
    Fideisms
    Judaism is the Semitic monotheistic fideist religion based on the Old Testament's (1000-600 BCE) rules for the worship of Yahweh by his chosen people, the children of Abraham's son Isaac (c1800 BCE).

    Zoroastrianism is the Persian monotheistic fideist religion founded by Zarathustra (c628-c551 BCE) and which teaches that good must be chosen over evil in order to achieve salvation.

    Christianity is the West Eurasian monotheistic fideist religion professing that Jesus of Nazareth (c6 BCE - c30 AD) is the descendent of Abraham and the Son of God whose sacrifice for humanity's sins was recorded in the New Testament (c50-100), and who fulfilled the prophecies of the divinely inspired Old Testament.

    Islam is the Middle Eastern monotheistic fideist religion professing surrender to the will of Allah (God), whose revelations in the Old and New Testaments were superseded by the Koran revealed to Muhammad (c570 - 632-06) for his chosen people, the children of Abraham's son Ishmael (c1800 BCE).

    Sikhism is the Punjab monotheistic fideist religion founded by Guru Nanak (1469-1539) and whose sacred Adi Granth (1604) overlays a spartan righteousness onto Hindu cyclical cosmology.

    These religions place unwarranted faith in purported revelations for which there is no credible evidence of authenticity or validity.

    Mysticisms
    Hinduism is the South Asian polytheistic mystical religion based on the Veda scriptures (c1000 BCE) and professing a cyclical cosmology, an ultimate reality called brahman, gods Vishnu and Shiva, and reincarnation of atman (soul) under the influence of karma.

    Taoism is the Chinese polytheistic mystical religion based on the Tao-Te-Ching ascribed to Lao Tzu (c550 BCE) and which advocates a path (tao) of minimalist serenity and reverence for various deities.

    Shintoism is the Japanese polytheistic mystical religion involving mainly the observance of customs and festivals honoring various deities.

    Jainism is the Indian pantheist mystical religion founded by Mahavira (599-527 BCE) and which blends monastic asceticism with Buddhist cyclical cosmology.

    Buddhism is the East Asian nontheistic mystical religion founded in India c525 BCE by the Buddha, who taught that existence is cyclical suffering caused by desiring and can be overcome by the "eightfold path" of right thought and deed.

    Confucianism is the Chinese nontheistic mystical religion based on the sayings of Confucius (c500 BCE) recorded in the Analects, and which teaches social order, scholarship, filial reverence for family and ancestors, and divination.

    These religions posit entities (such as gods or spirits or forces) to explain subjective mystical experiences which have simpler naturalistic explanations. These religions allege phenomena (such as rebirth and divination) for which there is no credible evidence. Of the belief systems in the world that currently have mass followings, Buddhism and Confucianism) are the least misguided. For this reason, thet are attractive to Westerners who recognize the bankruptcy of revelation-based religion but who are still looking for an off-the-rack worldview rather than learning enough philosophy to assemble one themselves.

    Evidence For Christianity
    Since Christianity is the most prevalent belief system among humans, it deserves special attention.  The best evidence for the Christian doctrine of a divine Jesus is: There are at least eight insurmountable problems within the extant evidence that each independently refute the Christian doctrine of a divine Jesus: An omnipotent omniscience benevolent deity competently attempting a revelation would have foreseen and corrected all of these problems. The existence of any one of them implies that Christian doctrine is false. The reasons not to believe the Christian doctrine of a divine Jesus can be divided into four categories: In addition, the Christian gospels themselves are suspect because of their sources, contradictions, and apologetics.

    Naturalistic explanations. Jesus of Nazareth was a faith healer and self-proclaimed divinely-special savior who tried to reform his native Jewish religion. However, the evidence about Jesus is less likely to have resulted from divinity than from misinterpretation, exaggeration, rationalization, delusion, deception, and mythologizing. Indeed, perhaps the greatest weakness of the claims for Jesus' divinity is the gospels' reliance on and vouching for the Old Testament, a patchwork of folklore, legends and myths about a tribe whose patriarch Abraham turned to monotheism because of fertility problems. Jesus was a Jewish prophet who affirmed Jewish law [Mt 5:17-18; Lk 2:27,39; Jn 10:35], observed the Jewish calendar [Lk 4:16, Mt 24:20], and preached about the God of Israel [e.g. Mk 12:29] in Jewish synagogues [Mk 1:21, 1:39, 6:2; Mt 4:23, 9:35, 13:54; Lk 4:15, 4:44, 6:6, 13:10, 19:47; Jn 6:59, 18:20] exclusively for Jews [Mt 10:5, Mt 15:24]. Jesus no doubt echoed the Torah theme that "all nations" would witness the majesty of Israel's God, but his only command to actually convert and baptize "all nations" is in a post-Easter speech alleged only in one gospel [Mt 28:19] (and in an appendix later added to Mark [16:15]).

    Miracles. In the gospels Jesus heals the sick (possession, blindness, skin disorder, bleeding, fever, paralysis, withered hand), revives the recently deceased, calms a storm, multiplies food, and walks on water. The miracles ascribed to Jesus seem not to have been very convincing [Mt 11:20, Lk 10:13, Jn 6:66, 10:32, 12:37, 15:24], and seem explainable by a combination of conventional faith healing, exaggeration, and mythologizing. The three people Jesus allegedly reanimates [Mk 5/Lk 8; Lk 7; Jn 11] might not actually have been clinically dead, and the gospels report not a single indication supporting such a diagnosis. Any cases of blindness, paralysis, or demonic possession cured by Jesus could have been psychogenic. Jesus apparently admits [Lk 11:24-26] that his cures for demonic possession are often not permanent, and in the synoptic gospels there is only one mention [Mt 21:14] of a cure being performed in Jerusalem. The one case of congenital blindness is recorded as disputed, and only in the latest gospel [Jn 9].

    God? The Christian doctrine of the "trinity", attempting to reconcile Jewish monotheism with Jesus' self-revelation, holds that Jesus 1) is both fully human and fully divine, and 2) is God (in a different "person"). The former is a contradiction, and the latter has no scriptural basis. In the gospels Jesus never claims identity with God or even explicit divinity, but rather a divinely special status as "the Son of God" and the "Anointed One" (Hebrew: messiah; Greek: christos). Jesus repeatedly distinguishes himself from God:

    When Jesus' opponents say his assumption of authority could be interpreted as a claim of divinity, all three synoptics agree [Mk 2:10, Mt 9:6, Lk 5:24] that Jesus merely asserted "authority on earth", and none intimates that his accusers concluded he was affirming their accusation.  In the one instance in the gospels [Jn 10:33ff] in which Jesus' identity with God is explicitly discussed, Jesus cites a Psalm [82:6] as a precedent for his metaphor, and hastily retreats to his formulation of being "God's Son", adding vaguely that "the Father is in me, and I in the Father". However, 1 Jn 2:15 says this is true of anyone who acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, and Jesus used the same mutual inclusion poetry about him and his disciples [Jn 14:20].  When at another time [Jn 5:18ff] the Jews characterized the "Son of Man" title as "making himself equal with God",  Jesus answered not by claiming identity but by drawing distinctions: Thus Jesus retreats the only two times he is accused of claiming identity or equality with God. In the Passion story, Jesus was mocked or accused as a faith healer, prophet, king of the Jews, Messiah, and "Son of God" [Jn 19:7] -- but never as divine or as a god. When Jesus died, onlookers are said to have exclaimed not that Jesus was God, but rather the "Son of God" [Mat 27:54].

    The title of 'God' is never reliably applied to Jesus anywhere in the New Testament. (In many translations of 2 Pet 1:1 and Titus 2:13, the description "God and Saviour" is seemingly applied to Jesus, but the scholarly consensus regards these two letters as late and pseudoepigraphic.) Acts quotes [2:22, 2:36, 3:13, 10:38, 17:31] Peter and Paul describing Jesus in terms of a man appointed to an office, but never calling him God.  The gospel authors never explicitly claim Jesus to be God, and the closest they come is the vague language of Jn 1: "the Word was God" and "became flesh". John quotes Thomas exclaiming [Jn 20] "my Lord and my God", but immediately states [20:31] as a creed merely "that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God". The "mystery" of Jesus' nature was hardly clarified by the Apostles [e.g. Phil 2:6, Rom 1:4, Col 1:15, Col 2:9], whose epistles never claim Jesus has any kind of identity with God. (Christian scribes tried to change that; cf. the differing manuscripts for Rom 9:5, Acts 20:28, and 1 Tim 3:16.) Even the alleged angelic annunciation of Jesus to his parents ommitted [Lk 1:32, Mt 1:20, Mt 2:13, Mt 2:20] the claim that Jesus was Yahweh incarnate.

    Thus, just as Jesus failed to leave clear teachings about salvation, hell, divorce, circumcision, and diet, he also did not effect a competent revelation of who precisely he was. Depending on e.g. various 4th-century Roman emperors, there waxed and waned such christological heresies as Ebionism, Docetism, Adoptionism, Dynamic Monarchianism, Sabellianism, Arianism, Marcionism, Apollonarianism, Nestorianism, Monophysitism, and Monothelitism. The doublethink of the "trinity" is not found in the Bible, but instead was invented to reconcile Jewish monotheism with Jesus' idiosyncratic Sonship claims.

    "Son of God". Jesus seems to have been illegitmate, and to have been known to be such in his community [Mt 1:18-24, Jn 8:41]. His only recorded words before his ministry concern his disobedience [Lk 2:48,51] at age 12 to his mother and stepfather, whom he denied [cf. Mt 23:9] by calling the Temple "my Father's house". He spurned his stepfather's trade of carpentry to take up a ministry proclaiming himself the son not of Joseph but of God. Despite angelic revelations [Lk 1:32, Mt 1:20, Mt 2:13, Mt 2:20] to Mary and Joseph, Mary's knowledge [Lk 1:34] of the virgin conception, and Mary's witness of at least one miracle [Mk 2], they (and Jesus' siblings) did not believe in him [Jn 7:5, Mt 13:57] and thought him "out of his mind" [Mk 3:21], leading Jesus to repeatedly stress [Mk 3:33, 10:29; Mt 10:37, 12:48, 19:29; Lk 11:27-28, 14:26] that one should choose God over one's biological family. Only on the day of his death do the gospels record a single friendly word [Jn 19:26] from Jesus to his family.

    Delusional Schizophrenic?  Jesus began his (apparently one-year) ministry as a follower of John the Baptist (whose embarrassing baptism of Jesus is played down or not mentioned in the later gospels). In the earliest gospel (Mark), Jesus never calls himself Christ/Messiah, is reluctant for his special nature to be known, and (as he does in Matthew) despairs on the cross. (By contrast, in the later Luke and John, Jesus asserts he is Christ, and confidently assures a co-crucified convict of their impending ascension.) Jesus "could not do many miracles" in his hometown [Mk 6:5, Mt 13:58, Lk 4:24], and he at times was considered mad by other Jews [Jn 8:48, 10:20]. Jesus' movement seems not to have been joined in his lifetime by a single family member or prior acquaintance, but only by strangers. Jesus satisifed the diagnostic criteria of paranoid schizophrenia:

    However, Jesus was not so mentally ill as to believe he was omnipotent. The gospels say repeatedly [Jn 7:1, 8:59, 11:53-54, 12:36; Mt 12:14-15, Mk 3:6-7, Lk 13:31,33] that Jesus retreated from or avoided danger. He was secretive and evasive about his special nature [Mk 3:12, 8:30, 4:41; Lk 9:21, 10:22-24; Mt 16:20; Jn 2:24, 8:25-29, 10:24-38, 12:34], and reluctant to have his powers tested [Mk 8:12; Lk 11:29, 23:8; Mt 4:7, 12:39, 16:4; Jn 2:18]. He was likely neither liar nor lunatic, but rather a preacher, faith-healer, and apocalyptic prophet who in the months leading up to his anticipated execution came to believe he was the Jewish Messiah and even the divinely-special savior of mankind.

    Resurrection. At his death the apostles abandoned Jesus in panic, even though they should have been expecting his resurrection if they had indeed witnessed his miracles, heard his divinity claims, and heard him say at least four times [Mk 8:31, 10:34; Mat 16:21, 17:23, 20:19; Lk 9:22, 18:33, 24:7, 24:46] that he would "rise from the dead" or be "raised to life" "on the third day". The New Testament accounts of the resurrection appearances develop over time from silent to vague to contradictory to fantastic. The Empty Tomb story could have resulted from a discreet reburial or removal -- perhaps by a disciple, as in a rumor reported in Mt 28. Possible conspirators were Joseph of Arimathea and Mary Magdalene, a longtime disciple [Lk 8:2] "out of whom [Jesus] had driven seven demons" [Mk 16:9, Lk 8:2] and who (unlike any apostle) attended both the crucifixion and entombment. She was the first to visit the tomb on Easter [Mt 28:1, Jn 20:1], and the possibility of removal [Jn 20:2,14,15] was not unimaginable to her. She weepingly lingered [Jn 20:11] after the apostles left the empty tomb, and thereupon was the first [Mk 16:9, Mt 28:9, Jn 20:14] to claim seeing an appearance. The appearances were suspiciously exclusive: "He was not seen by all the people, but by witnesses whom God had already chosen" [Acts 10:40-41] "Why do you intend to show yourself to us and not to the world?" [Jn 14:22]. Many of the "appearances" seem to have been unimpressive to the disciples who heard about them (and should have been expecting them) and even to those who witnessed them:

    What probably happened is that some disciples began having epiphanies, perhaps involving the occasional dream, ecstatic vision, encounter with a stranger, case of mistaken identity, or outright hallucination (or fabrication). The disciples in their desperation and zeal initially interpreted these experiences as manifestations of a triumphant and vindicated (but not necessarily reanimated) Jesus, who had apparently predicted that he would in some sense return or at least that his ministry would require but survive his death. If a tomb had in fact been found empty, that doesn't necessarily imply that these early manifestations were initially interpreted as experiences of a physically reanimated corpse. The disciples might have just believed that Yahweh had “raised” Jesus' body to heaven so as to not “abandon [it] to the grave” and to “decay” [Ps 16:10, cited in Acts 13:35-37]. An empty tomb belief would greatly have helped the early epiphanic experiences be misinterpreted, exaggerated, and embellished over the subsequent half century into the reanimated corpse stories that appear only in the two oldest gospels (Luke and John).

    The gospels themselves give precedent for the idea of a dead person being “raised from the dead” [Mk 16:14] by inhabiting the body of some other person currently living. When some [Mk 6:14, Mk 8:28, Mt 16:14, Lk 9:19] -- including Herod [Mk 6:16, Mt 14:2] -- thought  that John the Baptist had been "raised from the dead", at least a few of these people would have known that Jesus' body had (like the Easter gardener's) been animate before the Baptist's death. There is no record that anyone ever considered checking the Baptist's body (the grave of which was known to his disciples [Mk 6:29, Mt 14:13]), and there is no record that anyone wondered why Jesus' neck did not show signs of John's earlier beheading.

    Missing evidence. A divine Jesus could trivially create new miracles to unambiguously vouch for some modern school of Christianity. For the gospel accounts of Jesus to be believable, two kinds of evidence would have to surface:

    However, available extra-scriptural records do not corroborate the gospel miracles. Christian apologists often claim that if false, the gospel traditions would have been refuted and discredited by skeptics in 1st-century Palestine. However, there is no indication that the Jesus movement was important enough then to merit the sort of early written debunking that would have been preserved despite skeptical apathy and Christian hostility. Except for the stolen-body rumor denied in Mat 28, the earliest records of anti-Christian skepticism date after the first century and are preserved mainly as excerpts in Christian rebuttals. Celsus (quoted by Origen) dismissed the miracles as the "tricks of jugglers" that he said are "feats performed by those who have been taught by Egyptians", and the Jewish slander reported by Tertullian claimed the empty tomb was faked.

    The 1st-century Jewish historian Josephus is hard to count as anti-Christian, even after discounting his affirmation (unnoticed by all of his earliest Christian commentators) of the resurrection as an interpolation. Josephus may have written that Jesus "performed surprising works" and even that Jesus was believed to have been resurrected, but the (possibly interpolated) mention is only in passing. Josephus devotes more space each to John the Baptist and James, and while reporting much minutiae over the entire period during which Jesus lived, does not mention:

  • the Christmas Star that disturbed Herod and "all Jerusalem" [Mt 2:3],
  • Herod's massacre [Mt 2:16],
  • Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem [Mt 21:8-11],
  • the Good Friday earthquake [Mt 27:51],
  • the Good Friday resurrectees that "appeared to many people" in Jerusalem [Mt 27:53], or
  • the Good Friday 3-hour darkness "over all the land" [Mk 15:33, Lk 23:44, Mt 27:45].
    • These events in fact went unnoticed by every non-Christian writer, including the historians Seneca and Pliny the Elder. Contrast this with the supernova of 1006CE that was noted in China, Egypt, Iraq, Italy, Japan, and Switzerland. (Syncellus quotes a lost text of the Christian historian Julius Africanus which itself cites a lost text by Thallus: "Thallus calls this darkness an eclipse". The identification of Thallus' eclipse with "this darkness" might just be in the mind of Julius Africanus, and Thallus at any rate cannot be reliably dated as writing independently of the gospels.) The Alexandrian philosopher and commentator Philo outlived Jesus by 15 or 20 years, and as a visitor to Jerusalem should have met witnesses to the Easter miracles. His silence suggests that Jesus and his followers did not make the early impression that they should have if the gospels were true.

    Implausibility. The gospel story of a secretive unpublished family-resenting bastard faith healer in the rural outback of a peripheral province of a regional empire seems an unlikely self-revelation for the omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent Creator of the universe:

    The God of the Torah's holy scrolls is far too pedestrian in his works, parochial in his concerns, petty in his decisions, and primitive in his policies.

    Works. In the gospels Jesus heals the sick, revives the recently deceased, calms a storm, walks on water, and multiplies food. The god of the Torah makes appearances, speeches, promises, and predictions; raises the dead; and takes credit for various plagues, fires, floods, astronomical events, victories, healings, and deaths. It is implausible that the Creator's works would be so confined to ancient times and so apparently constrained by ancient imaginations.

    Concerns. After creating billions of galaxies in Genesis, the god of the Torah is implausibly obsessed with the family of Abraham and the Jordan valley where they live. It seems implausible that an omnibenevolent, omniscient, infallible deity would entrust a few fallible men in a backward corner of the world with such paltry evidence and then demand that everyone else either hear and believe them or suffer eternal damnation.

    Decisions. In the gospels Jesus damns entire towns [Mt 11:23], compares non-Israelites to dogs [Mt 15:26], and affirms even "the smallest letter" [Mt 5:18, Jn 10:35] of the Torah. The god of the Torah tests and torments his followers, commits mass murders of e.g. Noah's flood victims [Gen 6:7, 7:21] and the firstborn sons of Egypt [Ex 12:29], creates linguistic division for fear of an ancient construction project [Gen 11:6], and curses mankind because Adam dared to "become like one of us, knowing good and evil" [Gen 3:22]. It is implausible that the Creator of the universe would be so petty and wicked.

    Policies. The god of the Torah promotes or demands extravagant worship, dietary taboos, animal sacrifice, repressive sexual codes, human mutilation, monarchy, subjugation of women, slavery, human sacrifice [Lev 27:29, Jud 11:30-39, cf. Heb 11:17, Jam 2:21], and mass murder of even infants [Gen 6:7, 7:21, Ex 11:5, 12:29, 1 Sam 15:3, cf. Heb 11:7,28]. In the gospels Jesus affirms the Torah [Mt 5:18, Jn 10:35], endorses the murderous flood of Noah [Mt 24:38, Lk 17:27], and promises sinners not a thousand years' unrelenting torture, nor a million or a billion, but an eternity of excruciating torture by fire [Mk 9:43, Mt 18:8, 25:41, 25:46]. It is implausible that a competent and benevolent deity would in his revelation allow the endorsement of such heinous crimes and evil policies.

    Cascading implications. If the existing evidence about Jesus of Nazareth is considered a convincing proof of his divinity, then many other things can be proven with similar evidence.

    Gospel sources. The gospels were stitched together decades after the crucifixion by non-eyewitness zealots freely borrowing from oral traditions and now-lost earlier texts. Gospel contradictions. Among the many minor contradictions and inconsistencies in the gospels are several that cast significant doubt on the gospels' central message of a divine messiah foretold by the prophets. Gospel apologetics. Certain assertions and omissions in the gospels seem to either suspiciously deny or unwittingly create embarrassing alternative explanations for the claims therein.

    1.2. Philosophy / Epistemology

    Epistemology: the study of knowledge.
    1. Philosophy Of Mind: the study of the faculty for thinking and knowing.
    2. Philosophy Of Science: the study of scientific knowledge.
    Knowledge
    Knowledge is justified true belief. Belief in a proposition p is justified if 1) it is developed though a process that reliably yields truth, 2) it is appropriately caused by the fact that p is true, and 3) it would generally not be held if p were false.  The reliability criterion entails that synthetic (i.e. inductive) knowledge is always provisional. The causal and counterfactual criteria entail that whether a true belief counts as knowledge depends on inherently imprecise judgments concerning whether the believer is accidentally right. Operationally, a belief is justified if and only if it is convincing and defensible.
    Truth
    Truth is logical and parsimonious consistency with evidence and with other truth. Evidence is any and all perceived circumstances.

    The Principle of Parsimony (or Occam's Razor) is that the simpler of two explanations is to be preferred when they are otherwise equivalent.

    Humans have proposed several criteria for truth.

    The Correspondence Theory begs the question by assuming we have access to reality that is sufficiently direct and certain to dispose of the problem of the nature of truth.  Depending on the meaning of 'complete', the Coherence Theory either reduces to the Correspondence Theory, or it makes truth a purely social (or divine) construct.  The Pragmatic Theory either underdetermines the truth of certain propositions, or it reduces to a variant of the social version of the Coherence Theory.  The proper notion of truth is coherence grounded in correspondence, and its propriety is justified by the pragmatic meta-consideration of which truth theory to endorse (as opposed to which particular propositions to endorse as true).
    Origins of Knowledge
    Propositions can classified according to the dependence of their truth value on their terms: Epistemic Provisionality. All synthetic propositions (including this one) can only be known from experience and are subject to doubt. It is logically possible that all experience is deceptive and that the world is illusory. The only absolutely certain truths are true analytic propositions and the synthetic proposition that something exists.

    Cogito Ergo Sum. Descartes argued "I think, therefore I am". However, "I" could be illusory, and the fact of my thinking only warrants the certainty that something exists: cogito ergo est.

    Meaning
    The denotation (or extension) of a term is the set of entities it refers to. Theconnotation (or intension) of a term is the properties and concept(s) associated with it.

    The meaningof a term is the context-sensitive connotation ultimately established by its relevant denotation and use.

    The Verifiability Principle holds that a statement is propositionally meaningless (i.e. states no proposition) if it is neither logically decidable nor empirically verifiable. Positivism is a stricter form of Empiricism that asserts the Verifiability Principle.

    Theories of Meaning
    Humans have proposed three sorts of explanation for meaning: The Referential Theory is confounded by terms that have the same referent but different meaning, such as 'morning star' and 'evening star'. The Conceptual Theory reduces to dictionary-like circularity for many concepts that can only be described by the word(s) to which they help give meaning. The Behavioral Theory is undermined by behaviors and dispositions that underspecify the meanings they are supposed to impart.
    Theories of Knowledge
    Humans fall into two camps depending on whether they believe synthetic a priori knowledge is possible: Rationalism incorrectly assumes that existence arranges for reason to discover the nature of reality through introspection alone.

    1.2.1. Philosophy / Epistemology / Philosophy Of Mind

    Philosophy Of Mind: the study of the faculty for thinking and knowing.
    1. Essence of Mind.
    2. Accidence of Mind.
    3. Relations of Mind.
    Minds and ideas, like all of reality, consist ultimately of matter.  Mental states are functional states consisting of causal relations among components for processing information.
    Theories of Mind
     Philosophers often divide all phenomena into three kinds: Human theories of mind differ according to how they explain these phenomena in general and the Mind-Body Problem in particular.  The Mind-Body Problem is the problem of explaining how mindless unconscious matter can give rise to or interact with mind and consciousness.  Human theories of mind include: Idealism is incorrect because its explanation of matter is either inadequate or unparsimonious.  Dualism is incorrect because it unparsimoniously posits a realm of the ideal.  Logical Behaviorism is unsatisfactory because behavioral explanations are too unwieldy.  Identity Theory is incorrect because it holds that the essence of mind is its construction instead of its function.

    1.2.1.1. Philosophy / Epistemology / Philosophy Of Mind / Essence of Mind

    A mind is any volitional conscious faculty for perception and cognition.
    Cognition
    Cognition is the process of learning, reasoning, and knowing. Learning is the processing of experience into an increase in knowledge or behavioral effectiveness. Reasoning is the process of making and evaluating valid inferences.
    Perception
    Perception is the process of organizing sensation into experience. Sensation is the process of external influence on a monitoring or control system. Experience is any relatively unified and coherent interpretation of related contemporaneous sensations.
    Consciousness
    Consciousness is awareness of self and environment. Awareness is the direct and central availability of information in a monitoring or control system.
    Volition
    Volition is the power or act of making decisions about an agent's own actions.  A decision is the causing by a system of events which were not physically determined from outside the system but rather were at least somewhat contingent on the internals of the system, and which were not predictable except perhaps by modeling the internals of the system.

    Free will is either of the doctrines that human choices are a) determined internally rather than externally (volitional free will) or b) not pre-determined at all (indeterminate free will).  Determinism is incompatible with indeterminate free will, but is compatible with volitional free will if agents have internal state that influences (and thus helps determines) their actions.  Volitional free will is also compatible with forms of indeterminism in which the acausality is not so rampant as to undermine agent self-influence.  Indeterminate free will requires indeterminism, but degenerates into uncaused chance if acausality confounds not only prediction of effect but also attribution of cause.

    Since most effects seem caused rather than uncaused, and since the complexity of minds makes them hard to predict, minds appear to have at least weak free will. Weak free will is sufficient for assigning ethical responsibility to decision-making systems even in the face of complete determinism.

    Do minds have strong free will, or can their decisions in principle be inferred from sufficient knowledge of prior circumstances?

    Anti-materialists posit an immaterial soul or will that is free from both deterministic causality and random acausality. This notion violates the law of the excluded middle. Either the immaterial will is subject to (perhaps probabilistic but nonetheless causal) causes, or it is not. The same is true of material minds. The actions of an immaterial will could be said to be caused by its own internal causal processes, but the same can be said of material minds.

    1.2.1.2. Philosophy / Epistemology / Philosophy Of Mind / Accidence of Mind

    Non-essential but perhaps inevitable aspects of mind include subjectivity, intentionality, and affect.
    Subjectivity
    Objectivity is independence from a point of view or perspective that is inherently private. Subjectivity is dependency on a point of view or perspective that is inherently private. Subjective experience is the private phenomenal aspect of experience, the vivid feeling of what an experience is "like".

    Subjective experience consists of complex associations among perceptions, and necessarily occurs in systems having such associations.  If a subjective experience is not "like" anything (i.e. not associated with any other perceptions), it is not a subjective experience at all.

    Physicalism is the thesis that all facts can be described in physical (and thus non-subjective) terms. Some humans have what they call a "natural belief that collections of cells do not generate minds" [McGinn 1999] and that therefore physicalism must be false.

    Such a belief seems only as "natural" as the belief that collections of atoms do not generate life, and just as unjustified. The operation of e.g. the human brain does not mysteriously causeconsciousness, but rather it simplyconstitutes consciousness.

    Qualia are ineffable intrinsic subjective qualities of perception, such as the redness of red, beyond the functional or dispositional properties of perception. Qualia are taken by opponents of physicalism to be a mysterious phenomenon that physicalism cannot explain.

    However, qualia do not exist, because the functional and dispositional properties of perception can, in fact, explain the subjective qualities of perception. The functional role of certain sorts of perceptions in a conscious system necessarily and understandably entails that the system will report qualia. Thus there are no ineffable intrinsic subjective qualities of perception beyond its functional qualities.

    The Knowledge Argument is an argument made by Frank Jackson in 1982 purporting to show that physicalism is false because knowledge of all the relevant physical facts does not include, for certain experiences such as the redness of red, knowledge of what it is like to have them before they are had. Jackson hypothesizes in the distant future a brilliant neuroscientist Mary spending her whole life in a colorless room learning all the physical facts about seeing the color red.  Jackson claims that only when Mary sees something red can she learns the new fact of what redness is like, and that therefore physicalism is false.

    Jackson's argument fails because it ignores the difference between memorizing an algorithm and executing it.  The experience of the redness of red consists in the operation of a complex set of functional components for processing information.  While we can conceive of Mary having serial access to arbitrarily many memorized facts about such components, we cannot conceive of her having a large enough working memory or a fast enough mind to "manually" perform the operations "in her head" in order to recreate the experience of redness. Similarly, Mary could memorize the sequence of pixels in a monochrome bitmap and yet still not be able to mentally visualize what the bitmap will look like -- even if it is an image of a favorite drawing which she had already memorized in arbitrary detail.

    A zombie is a hypothetical creature that is stipulated to lack subjective experience but is behaviorally and physically indistinguishable from a human. The conceivability or logical possibility of zombies is taken by opponents of physicalism to show that physicalism is false.

    It seems impossible to conceive of a creature that lacks subjective experience but nevertheless exhibits all the self-reporting behaviors of humans that help us to ascribe subjective experience to them.  Therefore, zombies are inconceivable and do not show physicalism to be false.

    Intentionality
    Intentionality is aboutness -- the property of being about, directed at, or suited for.

    A system has intentionality by virtue of its potential and actual causal relations with the world.

    The Chinese Room is a thought experiment devised by John Searle in 1980 to show that there cannot be intentionality or understanding in a formal symbol manipulation system such as a room in which a speaker of English manually executes an algorithm allowing the room to pass the Turing Test in Chinese. Searle claims that intentionality "is a biological phenomenon, and it is as likely to be as causally dependent on the specific biochemistry of its origins as lactation [or] photosynthesis". Searle charges that functionalism is a form of dualism because it says mind is in principle independent of the specific biochemistry of the brain.

    The human in the Chinese Room does not understand Chinese, but the human running the algorithm implements a system that does indeed understand Chinese. The system has intentionality by virtue of the causal relations that allow it to correctly answer questions posed to it in Chinese. Intentionality is a formal or informational property, whereas lactation and photosynthesis involve chemistry and energy. Simulated thinking can indeed produce understanding, just as simulated musical composition can indeed produce a sonata. If a functional explanation of mind is "dualistic", then so is a functional explanation of long division or carburetion.

    Affect
    Affect is a general and often undirected negative or positive attitude, beyond overall sensory or cognitive state, that influences motive and colors perception. Is affect indeed an inevitable property of any volitional system with complex motives?

    1.2.1.3. Philosophy / Epistemology / Philosophy Of Mind / Relations of Mind

    Mind and Object
    Concepts are abstractions induced by minds from instances. Concepts are the products of
    the not-fully-understood facility by which a mind induces general properties from instances, and are themselves the not-fully-understood facility by which a mind recognizes those general properties in other similar instances.Ideas are concepts. Universals are kinds or categories of terms that are related according to shared properties. Human theories about universals are of three general kinds: Universals do not exist independently of the instances that instantiate them and the minds that conceptualize them.
    Mind and Minds
    The Other Minds Problem is the problem of ascertaining whether external realty and other minds actually exist or merely appear to exist. Solipsism is the thesis that external reality and other minds do not actually exist. Solipsism incorrectly concludes not-X simply because X cannot be known with absolute certainty, and thus ignores the preferred conclusion of probably-X.
    Mind and Identity
    A mind is identical with its closest close-enough continuous-enough continuer.  Processes that preserve mental (and thus personal) identity include: By contrast, the following processes do not preserve identity, usually because of being not continuous or not continuous-enough: It is perhaps logically possible for a single mind to fission continuously into more than one, or for more than one to continuously fuse into one, with identity being preserved in both cases. Chaotic or quantum effects probably make such fission or fusion physically impossible, since they might make it impossible to precisely synchronize the functioning of the duplicate components during the transition.
    Mind and Spacetime
    As noted by Dennett, the subjective sense of here -- the observer's spatial location -- is fixed by the content of mental events, and not by their spatial location. The subjective sense of now -- the observer's temporal location -- is similarly fixed by the content of mental events, and not by their temporal location.

    Materialism implies that consciousness is distributed over space and time in a material substrate of mind such as the human brain. Thus there is no moment in time or point in space at which a thought enters consciousness.  Asking when precisely did a material mind become conscious of an event is like asking when precisely did the British Empire learn of the signing of the treaty that ended the War of 1812.  (The Battle of New Orleans was fought two weeks after the treaty was signed, by soldiers that had not yet heard of the signing.)

    Mind and Artifact
    Functionalism implies that, in principle, an artificial mind is possible, and that therefore a machine could think.

    TheTuring Test is an assay for intelligence in which an interrogator using teletyped queries attempts to distinguish between a certified intelligence and a candidate intelligence. A rigorous interrogator can pose lines of questioning that can only be answered by use of the perceptive inductions that are the essence of intelligence. Not every intelligence could pass such a rigorous Turing Test, but everything that passes such a Turing Test is an intelligence.

    Roger Penrose argues that the human mind is not computable because, given a formalization of one's mind and the Godel sentence for one's mind, a human mind allegedly could recognize the sentence as true whereas the formalized computation could not. Penrose errs in assuming one could know a formalization of one's mind and correctly believe in its consistency. Godel's Theorem merely shows that any formalizable reasoning faculty could not correctly believe in its own consistency.

    Mind and Supermind
    These are some of the levels of information-processing ability: Automentation can be superior to regular intelligence in efficiency, flexibility, speed, capacity, bandwidth, and network associativity, but not in cognition. There are no forms of reasoning or kinds of knowledge that are in principle inaccessible to regular intelligence.
    Mind and Limits
    There are several ways in which minds are limited in theory and in practice.

    1.2.2. Philosophy / Epistemology / Philosophy Of Science

    Philosophy Of Science: the study of scientific knowledge.
    Definition of Science
    Science is the study of regular objective phenomena through empirical induction and logical deduction.  The scientific method consists of observation and measurement, induction of hypotheses and deduction of consequences, experimental or empirical testing of those consequences, reproducibility of results, and competition for agreement in the marketplace of ideas.

    Discovery is the learning of a principle or fact that was already in effect. Invention is the creation of a method or mechanism that was not already in operation. A hypothesis is a rigorous explanation that has not already been proven.  'Theory' can mean either a proven or unproven hypothesis.  A fact is a synthetic proposition that is demonstrably true.  Principles and facts are discovered (not invented) because they were already in effect. Theories are invented (not discovered) because the explaining that they constitute was not already happening, even though the principle they describe might have been.  Thus, Darwin can be said both to have invented the theory of evolution and to have discovered the principle of evolution.

    Scientific Provisionality
    The propositions of science are mainly synthetic ones, and the truth of any synthetic proposition is provisional and subject to revision according to new evidence or better interpretation of evidence.  Science tends to converge asymptotically and almost monotonically on truth.

    Critics of skepticism point to the scientific revolutions in the past to question the validity of what science asserts in the present.  They cite Kuhn's theory of paradigms, Einstein's transcendence of Newton, discoveries of unforeseen physical forces and particles, various premature announcements of the end of physics, and various incorrect predictions of technological barriers.

    First, technology and science are different.  Those who incorrectly denied the technological possibility of powered or supersonic flight did not deny the scientific reality of birds or gunshots.

    Second, science in the past left vast swaths of phenomena unexplained. The darkness of infinite star-filled space was considered Olber's Paradox until well into the 20th century. The Sun was a marvel of inexplicable energy as recently as 1900. Disease and heredity and the blueness of the sky were still unexplained in 1850. Electricity and magnetism were spooky curiosities as recently as 1800. In 2000 there were still big mysteries about purposes and origins, but fewer marvels about what some phenomenon might possibly be.  Perhaps humanity's biggest marvel in 2000 was quantum action at a distance, followed distantly by minor marvels like dark matter, gamma ray bursters, and high-temperature superconductivity. Even a phenomenon as marvelous as mind has been demonstrated to be neurological -- although diehard dualists insist that consciousness is a true marvel.

    Third, science converges toward truth even across some paradigm shifts.  The Earth is still spheroid and still moves around the Sun, even though the Sun is now known to not be the center of the universe. Gravity still obeys Newton's inverse square law, even though relativity now explains gravity as geometry instead of as force. Momentum is still conserved, even though mass and energy are interconvertible.  Since roughly the time of Darwin, there have been very few big questions for which science gave answers that were not even approximately correct. Perhaps the biggest mistakes in this time were the underestimations of the age and size of the universe.

    Finally, humanity is now clearly converging on answers to the biggest scientific questions.

    Science's Big Questions
    The most interesting phenomena in nature are mind, life, and the universe itself.  The big questions of natural science seek the origin, mechanism and fate of mind, life, and the universe.  Before the 1860's, humans had only the beginnings of an answer to only one of these questions.  Newton and a few others had figured out part of the mechanism of the universe, but the other eight questions were answered with a combination of biblical myths and wild guesses. By the end of the 1960's, humanity had, for all nine questions, outlined answers that will probably still be considered correct in two hundred, two thousand, and two million years.
    Why Science Works
    Humans sometimes ask: why does science work so well?  The answer has two parts.  First, the universe turns out to consist fundamentally of Nature and not Spirit: of lawlike and unwilled objective regularity, as opposed to randomness or mysterious volition.  Second, science's method of skeptical empiricism and competition between ideas is better at elucidating the universe's regularity than are alternative methods like faith and mysticism.  If the universe were in fact fundamentally controlled by volition, then faith would work better than science.  If the universe were in fact fundamentally subjective (at the level of understanding and not merely observation), then mysticism would work better than science.  Note that a very important aspect of the universe is in fact mysteriously volitional: the behavior of living and conscious systems. However, the volition of these systems is now confidently believed to be not a fundamental aspect of the universe, but rather an epiphenomenon of fundamental lawlike and unwilled regularities.  While science can show that life and mind arose as epiphenomena, science must work hard to find regularities in the complex behaviors of such systems.  The complexity appears irreducible, and there is no prospect that faith or mysticism will in these areas ever work better than science.

    Science has been so spectacularly successful in the last 150 years that people tend to consider it to be a self-contained worldview independent or inclusive of its entire philosophical foundation. Science as a method would still work quite well if naturalism and materialism were false in the ways proposed by their opponents. The success of science is not a completely dispositive argument against supernaturalism or anti-materialism, though it of course provides much of the raw materials for attempting such an argument. We should resist the urge to say that some philosophical positions are more scientific than others, because philosophy is more fundamental than science and deals with issues that are almost entirely outside science's domain.

    1.3. Philosophy / Axiology

    Axiology: the study of values.
    1. Ethics: the study of how individual persons should affect other persons and other beings.
    2. Political Philosophy: the study of how groups of persons should affect persons and other beings.
    3. Virtue Philosophy: the study of how individual persons should conduct themselves.
    4. Aesthetics: the study of beauty.
    Definition of Values
    A value is, in Philosophy, a principle or standard for considering something good or bad. Good is being pleasant or fit for a chosen purpose. Bad is being unpleasant or unfit for a chosen purpose. Right is accordance of a decision or outcome with ultimate (and not just proximate) goodness. Wrong is discordance of a decision or outcome with ultimate (and not just proximate) goodness.
    Origin of Values
    Values derive from intentions and appetites. Appetites are desires arising from capacities for pleasure and pain.  Innate appetites are usually the result of evolutionary pressure for inclusive reproductive fitness.  However, appetites can conflict with each other, with long-term inclusive fitness, and with intentions.  An intention is a desire for a chosen goal.  Happiness is the tendency of a being to have its appetites satisfied and intentions fulfilled.

    The ultimate goal of most humans is self-preservation in any of three ways:

    A minority of humans choose alternative goals, such as pleasure, pain, knowledge, beauty, compassion, justice, ecosystemic survival, capability, serenity, or annihilation

    An intrinsic value is a value which derives from an intention or appetite that is an end in itself, and is not purely instrumental to other intentions and appetites. An ultimate value is an intrinsic value the pursuit of which is not compromised by the pursuit of any other value.

    Justification of Values
    Humans have no evidence that the universe has an inherent objective purpose, and so the universe has no goal whose desiring could be the basis of a value. The universe is not inherently either good or bad, and neither are the appetites of humans and other known beings in it.

    In the absence of objective purpose or inherently good or bad appetites, humans seem free to choose their own purposes and values. Can there be an objective rational basis for values? It does not seem impossible, but no human choice of values has been shown to be justifiable through objective reason alone. Instead, such choices must ultimately be based at least in part on appeal to appetites rather than to reason. This resort to arational appeal can be minimized by using it just to choose fundamental values, or better yet the criteria for choosing fundamental values. Several criteria for choosing fundamental values seem appealing:

    Humans divide into several schools of thought regarding the justification of values. Naturalism is incorrect because there is no compelling way to argue from 'is' to 'ought'. Intuitionism is incorrect because the axioms about values are not self-evident in the way that are, say, the axioms of mathematics. Both Emotivism and Prescriptivism are partially correct, because assertions of values indeed have emotive and prescriptive force, and are not objectively descriptive.
    Asserted Values
    In a universe condemned to inexorably increasing entropy, we value extropy. Extropy is the amount of a system's intelligence, vitality, and capability for increasing its intelligence, vitality, and capability. As autonomous living intellects, we persons value intelligence and life and the autonomy they need to flourish.

    Intelligence. We value not just information and knowledge. We value understanding and wisdom and especially the intelligence that both produces and includes them. Understanding is knowledge that is fundamental, recursive, and reflexive: it is central and irreducible, it supports and implies much other derivative knowledge, and it fixes itself and its knower in the landscape of other knowledge. Wisdom is the understanding of both one's purpose and how best to pursue it.

    Life. We value the complexity and organized diversity that lies between rigid order and random chaos. Systems like life that undergo evolution by natural selection are the best source of such complexity and organized diversity.

    Autonomy. We value the autonomy that is required by life and intelligence in order for them to flourish. Life needs autonomy to pursue the self-interest necessary for preservation of self and kind. Intelligence needs autonomy to question assumptions and authority. We value justice, which allows each agent to enjoy the reasonably expectable results of its decisions and non-coercive actions.

    Value Systems
    The major human value systems are: Pietism fails because there is no credible evidence of any supernatural agency. Collectivism fails because it is incompatible with the rights and incentives of individuals. Utilitarianism underdefines goodness as happiness. Hedonism fails because simple sensual pleasure eventually conflicts with more complex goals. Asceticism fails because it attempts to suppress natural appetites and intentions. Egoism fails because the inviolability of personal liberty eventually conflicts with its maximal protection. Stoicism underdefines goodness as virtuousness. Existentialism and Pessimism mistake important insights to be the last word. Survivalism commits the Naturalist Fallacy that the way things are naturally is the way one should want things to be. Deontologism too is a form of Naturalism that wrongly concludes 'ought' from 'is'. Altruism both conflicts with and fails to harness natural appetites and intentions.

    If the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics didn't guarantee that entropy effectively always increases, then life would perhaps evolve runaway godlike powers, and those gods might not value extropy so much. What would an omnipotent omniscience value? worship? companionship? beauty? serenity? forgetfulness? oblivion?

    1.3.1. Philosophy / Axiology / Ethics

    Ethics: the study of how individual persons should affect other persons and other beings.
    Nature of Ethics
    Ethics consists in identifying the rights that each kind of entity has. A right is an entitlement of a being that persons will or will not affect it in a specified way.
    Extropian Ethics
    A being is any entity possessing life, sentience, or intelligent volition, and are the only entities that have rights. There are two classes of beings: persons and organisms. A person is any intelligent being with significant volitional control over how it affects other beings. Thus persons are obligated to minimize the incidence of
    Subjects of Ethics
    Groups. Groups of individual beings do not have volition or sentience, and cannot be subject to coercion or torture except insofar as their individual members are so subject. Thus groups per se have no separate right against coercion or torture. There is a sense in which some groups -- species -- are alive, and so species have the right not to suffer extinction.

    Sub-Persons? A dependent person is a person who has less than the normal amount of intelligence, volition, or physiological independence. A guardian is a person who is responsible for the well-being of a dependent person and to that end may coerce that dependent person. Minor children are dependent persons, and their parents are usually their guardians. The other major group of dependent persons are the mentally disabled. Cetaceans and apes are not intelligent enough to be considered even dependent persons.

    Super-Persons? No amount of mental or physical power makes any entity deserve more rights than persons. Bioengineered and artificial beings are fully persons if they meet the tests of intelligence and volition.

    Pre-Persons. A being is also a person if it is of a kind that ordinarily are or become persons and has either significant cognition or both sentience and physiological independence.  Viable human fetuses thus are dependent persons, in the same sense that minor children are. Genotypes of persons are not themselves persons, and have no right not to be modified.

    Post-Persons. A person ceases to be a person when it permanently loses its life, intelligence, or volition. A person must be considered a dependent person if he does not want personal responsibility for any intermittent loss of intelligence or volition.

    Personal Identity. A person is identified through time with its closest close-enough continuous-enough continuer. A person P1 constituted from the description and even materials of a person P0 is not identified with P0 if the constitution process is discontinuous. It is logically possible to duplicate a person, even though the duplicate would not share in the identity of the person and would have the ethical status of a child of the original's age. It is also logically possible to split a person such that all continuers are equally close and all are close and continuous enough to preserve identity. In this case the continuers would share equally the predecessor's identity, and would have to assign among themselves all of the predecessor's unsharable personal and property relations. Similar reasoning applies to joined persons.

    Organisms. Impersonal organisms may be owned by persons, and may be coerced or killed by their owning person or (if unowned and unaccessed) by any person. Genotypes of organisms are not themselves alive, and thus have no independent right against extinction. Bioengineered and artificial beings have the full rights of organisms if they meet the test of being alive.

    Objects of Ethics
    Property is anything that an agency has the exclusive right to possess, use, and assign. A resource is any physical or logical supply or space which exists without intelligent sustenance and is easy to use in part but hard to control as a whole, such as air, land, water, pollution sinks, sunlight, wind, views, fish, game, minerals, meteorites, space, orbits, bandwidth, public namespaces, etc. Polluting or monopolizing a resource is aggression against the persons who have been exercising continuing access to it. A possessable resource is one, such as land or sunlight, of which a part may be controlled such that any outsider's use of it is easily detectable by the controller. Even privatized property interests in unpossessable resources are subject to the tragedy of the commons, because the owner cannot readily identify who is violating his interest.

    Property can consist only of possessable resources, artifacts, and intellectual property. Anartifact is any material thing created by an intelligence. Intellectual property is property consisting of an original creation of information, including expressions (but not facts), inventions (but not discoveries), and reputations. Copyright is the right to reproduce an original expression such as text, images, audio, video, sculpture, or dance. Apatent is the property right over an original invention. A reputation is the public or commercial esteem or identity of a person or a person's property. Defamation is damage to a reputation through deceptive expression.

    Original expressions are the intellectual property of their creator or his assignee, but should not be granted full copyright. When media reproduction and distribution was expensive and its ownership concentrated, copyright had the primary effect of ensuring commercial exclusivity rather than preventing non-competing or "fair" use. Digital technologies have made media reproduction and distribution asymptotically free, and so archaic copyright doctrine finds itself opposed to uses which cannot be prevented. (Although not protected by copyright, there seems to be no shortage of expressions such as fashions, jokes, and bumper stickers.)

    Ownership of expression should give only the right to prevent its reproduction in cases of a) competition that diverts commercial benefit from the owner to the competitor, b) attributed use with unattributed defamatory modification, and c) unattributed use of any kind. Intellectual property in reputations should be recognized for as long as the commercial utility of those reputations. Anti-competition rights in expressions should be recognized for only as long as it might have taken before someone else created the same original expression. (For most expressions, this duration would be indefinite.) Intellectual property in an invention should be recognized for only as long as it might have taken before someone else invented it, or for as long as the ordinary product lifecycle in the relevant industry, whichever is longer.

    Ethical Relations
    Persons have no right to inflict negative externalities impacting property and resource rights, and no right to demand compensation for positive externalities.

    Cooperation is the interaction among persons for mutual benefit. Cooperation is usually positive-sum even for direct and reversible exchanges, because the exchanging persons have differing needs or values. The right of association is the right of persons, except in cases of anti-competitive monopoly, to cooperate or decline to cooperate with whom they choose. Cooperation can take many forms. A contract is an explicit understanding among consenting agents to exchange with or affect each other in a specified way. Marriage is a form of contract that unites many of the property rights and liabilities of the marrying persons.

    Aggression is the violation by a person of another person's rights, and consists only of: personal injury, damage to property, infringement of resource rights, coercion, fraud, anti-competitive monopoly, or inducement or deceptive incitement of third parties to any of these. Coercion is compulsion of one person by another through force or threat of aggression. Fraud is any attempt  to profit by deceiving a person into making a choice intended to cause him economic harm relative to what would have been his undeceived choice. Deception is the statement of demonstrable falsehoods or the omission of relevant truths that has the intentional effect of encouraging a false belief in another person. Theft is the unjust and non-consensual taking of property from its rightful owner. Anti-competitive monopoly is the intentional control or denial of a person's participation in an industry by the coordinated action of the person(s) controlling that industry. Torture is the infliction of pain on any being as a result of the sadistic intention or callous negligence of a person.

    Competition is the contrary efforts of persons to win the consent of some other person(s) to associate in some way. The infliction of opportunity costs through non-monopolistic competition does not by itself constitute aggression. Expression is only aggression if it involves deception that intentionally or negligently causes actual harm or serious risk thereof, for example by yelling "fire!" in a crowded (but not burning) theater. Non-deceptive incitement to aggression is not itself aggression.

    Justice is the minimization, reversal and punishment of aggression. Injustice is unminimized, unreversed, or unpunished aggression. The minimization of coercion can itself justify a minimal amount of coercion. Coercion should be reversed by payment of damages or, if possible, reparation of the original property or access rights to the coerced persons. Serious coercion should be punished by loss of freedom, personal interaction, and even life.

    Liberty is volition in the absence of aggression. Thus justice can also be defined as the most liberty for the most persons. Freedom is significant volition: the power of making significant decisions about an agent's own actions. The freedoms of two persons can be in complete conflict, but their liberties by definition cannot.

    1.3.2. Philosophy / Axiology / Political Philosophy

    Political Philosophy: the study of how groups of persons should affect persons and other beings.
    The State
    A state is an organization of persons that has control and sovereignty over a particular region and the persons in it.
    Purpose of the state
    To meet their obligation to minimize death, extinction, aggression, and torture, the persons in a region join together in a social contract to create or authorize the state. The purpose of the state is to
    Duties of the state
    The specific duties of the state are therefore to
    Powers of the state
    The powers of the state necessary for carrying out its duties are to
    Restrictions on the state
    In no case may the state
    Organization of the state
    The state should practice the principle of federalism, so that each governmental function is performed by  the most local unit of government that can perform it.  The state should have separate legislative, executive, and judicial branches.  The citizens of the state should exercise their power through elected representatives rather than directly through plebiscites.
    Laws of the state
    Contracts. The state should enforce contracts and thus prevent the coercion of one contracting person by the other.  A person must exist to be coerced, and so covenants are not enforceable if no person has been assigned the guarantee constituted by the covenant.  The state should regulate bankruptcy to prevent  the theft that occurs when a bankrupt debtor assigns assets to one creditor over another.

    Corporations.  The state should allow the incorporation of fictitious persons for commercial purposes, with limited liability and equal ownership and control for each shareholder, as long as at least one shareholder agrees to unlimited liability.  Thus corporations should be an elaborate form of limited partnership, where at least one full partner retains full personal liability for the corporation's debts.

    Monopoly. Artificial monopoly should only be regulated to the extent it is anti-competitive.  An important example of anti-competitive monopoly is when all the firms in an industry or region refuse to do commerce with employees or customers of a certain race.  A natural monopoly is a continuous physical network that needs to reach almost every piece of property in a region, such as roads and distribution networks (but not sources or sinks) for water, electricity, natural gas, sewage, and wired telecommunications. Since the market cannot efficiently regulate natural monopolies, the state should do so.

    Political Philosophies
    The most influential human political philosophies differ primarily according to the extent to which they advocate state control of resources and private economic associations. Libertarianism protects rights and promotes prosperity better than any other political system.

    1.3.3. Philosophy / Axiology / Virtue Philosophy

    Virtue Philosophy: the study of how individual persons should conduct themselves.
    Virtue
    Virtue is any tendency or capacity to choose or behave in a way that is good. In Greek philosophy the first four of these virtues were known as the natural or cardinal virtues. Christianity added the so-called theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity. Faith in and hope for divine providence are misplaced. Wisdom entails not faith but skepticism, and the combination of wisdom and fortitude yields an optimism that is better than empty hope. As a theological virtue, charity (or love of God) is also hollow, as God does not exist.

    The Eightfold Path is a prescription by Buddha of a middle path said to lie between asceticism and hedonism and said to end the suffering caused by desire.

    1. Right Understanding: see things as they are.
    2. Right Intention: resolve to follow the Path.
    3. Right Speech: abstain from deception.
    4. Right Action: practice compassion, abstain from aggression.
    5. Right Livelihood: choose work compatible with the Path.
    6. Right Effort: promote good and avoid evil.
    7. Right Mindfulness: be aware of your thoughts, words, and actions.
    8. Right Concentration: meditate on Oneness.
    The Eightfold Path mistakenly assumes that no value can be maximal -- that any value can be desired too much. This is not true for values like extropy, intelligence, and justice.

    The Golden Rule is the precept of reciprocity advocated by the Old Testament (Leviticus 19:18 c. 700 BCE), Jainism (Sutrakritanga 1.11.33, c. 500 BCE), Confucius (Analects 15:23, c. 500 BCE), Plato (c. 400 BCE), Jesus (Matthew 7:12, c. 30 CE) and others.

    The Golden Rule's ethical value of reciprocity does not satisfy the axiological criteria of maximality and compatibility and so cannot by itself be a satisfactory system of ethics.  However, when applied to meta-ethics it becomes the axiological criterion of universality, similar to Kant's categorical imperative.

    Vice
    Vice is any tendency to choose or behave in a way that is bad.  The major human vices include: Humans free to engage in vice can seriously harm themselves, as through intemperance or prodigality. Should every competent adult human be free to harm himself through vice, or are some vices so self-detrimental that the state should regulate them? Society and the state should try to use persuasion rather than coercion to discourage vice.

    The Ten Commandments are the rules of conduct given by Yahweh to Moses in Exodus 20:1-17, prescribing worship of Yahweh and honor for parents while prohibiting killing, adultery, theft, false witness, and covetousness.

    Of the Ten Commandments, the first four indicate an insecure god afraid of losing his authority.  Only three commandments can be related to sensible legal prohibitions (against murder, theft, and perjury/fraud).  The remaining three commandments should in a free society only have the force of good advice.

    Evil is either of sadism or injustice. Sadism is any person's practice of taking pleasure in another being's unhappiness as an end in itself.  Humans are not by nature necessarily sadistic or unjust, but they are, like all known organisms, naturally self-interested. Like being alive, being self-interested is almost always a necessary cause of being unjust, but that makes neither life nor self-interest necessarily evil.  Humans, like all known social organisms, are naturally cooperative.  Humans are not by nature necessarily evil, but their natural self-interest gives them a natural capacity for evil.  In their natural social environment of family and community, humans tend naturally to be more good than evil, and to cooperate for mutual benefit.

    Choosing Human Values
    All persons should Humans should value love, family, fellowship, and industry.

    Love is strong affection and devotion. Romantic love is deep and intimate affection and devotion involving sensual passion, reproductive desire, and mutual unity of interest. Each human should seek a mate with whom he or she has mutual sensual attraction, shared values, and compatible temperament. Humans should seek a mate by applying a balance of these three criteria, and by balancing short-term pleasure and convenience against long-term happiness. Romantic love is worth making efforts and taking risks, and finding it thus requires wisdom and fortitude. If circumstances preclude finding it, then living happily without it also requires wisdom and fortitude.

    Family. Humans should honor the memories of their ancestors. Humans should respect and repay the devotion of their parents. Human siblings and cousins should provide each other fellowship and aid. Humans should have as many children as they can provide with a materially and emotionally sound upbringing. Humans should instill in their children personal virtues and extropian and human values.

    Fellowship is the enjoyment of human company through the sharing of ideas, humor, competition, industry, or fun.

    Industry is economic, intellectual, or artistic production. Humans should practice industry to provide for their material well-being and to satisfy their appetite for learning and feeling useful. Humans should throughout their lives try to improve their understanding of the foundations and frontiers of human knowledge. Humans should choose careers that balance their personal interests and temperament with occupations of high or increasing economic productivity.

    Practicing Human Virtues
    Wisdom. Though humans know no easy formula for wisdom, certain practices recommend themselves. A person should seek knowledge, especially knowledge of self and meta-knowledge -- knowledge about one's and others' knowledge. A person should apply the methods of skepticism, positivism, empiricism, and science. A person should identify and question his assumptions, and test his most cherished beliefs against the best criticism of them -- and alternatives to them -- that he can find. For any proposition in question, a person should ask: Perspective is essential for conducting life wisely. For any decision which is (or might seem) important, a person should ask himself: A person should consider what he would want his tombstone and obituary to say. A person should minimize regrets, by balancing the expected outcome of each decision with any future regrets for not making alternative decisions.

    Fortitude. Misfortune inflicted by persons should be rebelled against. The cost of rebellion should be weighed against not just the direct benefits but also the opportunity costs to other persons of not rebelling.

    Natural misfortune exists for the same reason that natural fortune exists: the universe is neither benevolent nor malevolent. Misfortune inflicted by nature should not be compounded by useless resentment. The misfortunate should seek to evoke in others not co-misery but empathy and appreciation for relative fortune. The unrealized possibility of even worse misfortune should not make the misfortunate happy, but it should make them less unhappy and help them avoid compounding unhappiness. Suicide should only be considered as an alternative to unavoidable and terminal physiological torment.

    Misfortune is any harm one experiences, other than injustice, that can be seen as beyond one's control. Some of the dimensions of misfortune are:

    Fear is natural and healthy, but should be overcome through wisdom when it is not fully warranted. Similarly, wisdom should promote fear when ignorance or impulsiveness prevents it from mounting. Humans generally fear too little for their long-term safety and well-being, and too much for their short-term social repute. (Perhaps this is because the latter determined the former for much of the history of the human species.) Human adults only get around 20,000 days to spend, and any one of them wasted can never be refunded. No day should be pass unused simply for short-term fears, and future days should not be squandered on risk-seeking or revenge. Only for the protection of life and liberty is the risk of heroic self-sacrifice advisable -- and sometimes obligatory.

    Temperance. Humans should seek the maximum pleasure for themselves and other beings that is consistent with their fundamental human and personal values. Pleasure, even if natural, should not itself be a fundamental human value, for several reasons.

    If pleasure were one's ultimate value, then one would be agreeable to entering an illusory paradise. An illusory paradise is an artificial or virtual environment which one believes is real and which is actively and intelligently optimized for one's happiness. For example, in such a paradise one would have all (and only) the success and luck that is consistent with one's need for challenge and achievement. We who value intelligence and life more highly than pleasure would reject an illusory paradise, unless perhaps it were the only alternative to irremediable suffering.

    Fairness. Fairness is the most obligatory virtue, for two reasons.  First, much of fairness consists in practicing justice, which is itself obligatory.  Second, fairness derives directly from the meta-ethical values of universality and impartiality, as is reflected in the Golden Rule. For this reason, fairness is like wisdom a maximal virtue: it is impossible to be too wise or too fair.

    Kindness. Kindness is the most sublime of the virtues. Kindness includes being in a good mood and assuming in others the best motive that is consistent with available evidence.

    The virtue of kindness makes humans want to help their fellow humans, especially those in need. A common view is that the best form of kindness is charity. Charity is the sharing of material wealth with the needy. But throughout history the greatest improvements in human well-being have come not from charity but from justice and knowledge. Humanity's surplus of injustice, superstition, and ignorance is a far bigger problem than its deficit of charity.

    1.3.4. Philosophy / Axiology / Aesthetics

    Aesthetics: the study of beauty.

    Beauty is the quality of being pleasing to apprehend with the senses or contemplate with the mind.

    Origin of Beauty
    Beauty can vary in origin: Authenticity is the property that obtains when appearance reliably indicates essence, and when the responsible person (if any) has no intent to dissemble.  Many humans consider the authenticity of an artifact, and the intentions of its creator, to be important aspects of the object's beauty or lack thereof.  For such humans, beauty consists not merely in sensual appeal.

    Starting in the latter decades of the 1900s there was in Western culture an inordinate emphasis on authenticity.  People didn't ask if the food at a restaurant tastes good; they asked if it is authentic. Reviewers needed to know an author's life story before mustering an opinion on her novel. Ideas were judged less on their merits than on the resume of their advocate. People seemed not confident enough in their value judgments, and excessively afraid of feeling duped in any way. This was perhaps a consequence of the extreme relativism that developed as a reaction to the collapse in the 1900s of traditional absolutes and hierarchies concerning religion, ethnicity, and gender. Deconstructionism and Critical Theory are two examples of this extreme relativism.

    Appeal of Beauty
    Beauty can appeal to different faculties: The presence and nature of perceived beauty in the universe is likely an inevitable result of each perceiver's evolutionary history. Humans find an oak canopy beautiful and a muddy trench ugly, but an intelligent mole rat (lacking H. sapiens' arboreal past) would have the opposite opinion. Thus beauty, like all values, is ultimately subjective, as it depends on the faculties and preferences of the beholder.  However, beauty can in defined contexts be objective if there is among the beholders enough commonality of faculty and preference.  How different would be the aesthetic preferences of humans and non-human persons with similar faculties?

    2. Mathematics

    Mathematics: the study of necessary truths about inference, order, quantity, and relation.
    1. Logic: the study of valid inference.
    2. Set Theory: the study of sets and the most basic operations on them.
    3. Algebra: the study of operations on sets of numbers and symbols representing them.
    4. Geometry: the study of transformations of sets of points in space.
    5. Analysis: the study of infinite processes as they approach limits.
    6. Combinatorics: the study of selection and arrangement within finite sets.
    7. Applied Mathematics: the study of the sampling or processing of information.
    Mathematical objects exist only in the axioms and rules that imply them and in the minds that consider them.

    Humans have proposed various theories about the nature and basis of mathematics.

    Realism is wrong because no mathematical objects can exist independently of the axioms that imply them and the minds that consider them. Social Constructivism and Intuitionism both incorrectly hold that mathematical objects cannot exist implicitly in the axioms that imply them. Formalism fails in its ambition, because a mathematical formalization cannot be both complete and consistent. Logicism is the most satisfactory of these theories, because it recognizes that mathematical objects are implied by the axiomatic systems underlying them.
    Why Math Works
    Humans sometimes ask why mathematics works so well in describing the universe. First, the universe contains a lot of discreteness, invariance, and continuity, all of which are mathematical subjects. Second, mathematics is defined and designed to be nothing other than the study of the truths that are the demonstrably necessary consequences of any system of quantity, relation, and inference itself. So it is unsurprising and natural that mathematics describes the physical universe so well. Note that, like science, mathematics does not describe the social (i.e. volitional) universe nearly so well, and for the same reasons.
    History of Math
    Some of the discoveries or inventions of  fundamental mathematical concepts and problems are:

    2.1. Mathematics / Logic

    Logic: the study of valid inference.
    1. Formal Logic: the study of systems of valid inference.
    2. Metalogic: the study of valid inference about systems of valid inference.
    3. Applied Logic: the application of logic to special arenas of inference .
    Inference is the process of deriving a new proposition (the conclusion) from a given set of propositions (the premises). There are two forms of inference: Because induction is uncertain and depends so much on the specific nature of the premises, the topic of logic focuses almost exclusively on deduction and leaves induction to science.

    2.1.1. Mathematics / Logic / Formal Logic

    Formal Logic: the study of systems of valid inference.
    Propositional Calculus
    Propositional Calculus is a system of valid inference about propositions and operations on them. A proposition is a definite expression about particular terms that is either true or false.  Each operator of Propositional Calculus yields a proposition. All of the operators can be defined using only Axiomatization. An axiomatization of propositional calculus consists of some well-formed formulae designated as axioms, and transformation rules for deriving valid formulae (called theorems) from them. One axiomatization of propositional calculus by Russell and Whitehead includes Theorems. Important theorems of propositional calculus are: Predicate Calculus is a system of valid inference about propositions, their constituent terms, predicates and quantifiers, and operations on them. A term is a reference to that which can be considered as separate and distinct or counted as one, such as a person, place, instant, action, idea, or proposition. A predicate is an expression of one or more terms drawn from one or more sets denoting the membership of their permutation in a subset of the cross-product of those sets and connoting that permutation's enjoyment of the attribute associated with that subset. A property is any one-term predicate such as Red(). A relation is any multiple-term predicate such as Loves(,).  A variable is a symbol that stands for a term or predicate. A quantifier is an expression that, for a variable term in a specified proposition, tells how many definite terms (e.g. all, some) it applies to. Each of the two quantifiers may be defined in terms of the other. First-Order Predicate Calculus is the subset of Predicate Calculus in which no predicate variable is quantified. The First-Order Predicate Calculus is not decidable, but becomes so if predicate variables are restricted to being unary.

    A binary relation R over a a set's cross-product with itself may enjoy various attributes:

    Identity. First-Order Predicate Calculus can be extended with the two-term predicate identity (=). This predicate allows quantification to express precise numerical bounds, by saying that two variables must or must not identify the same instance. A proposition can contain what appears to be a term but that refers to no existing thing, such as "the present king of France". Such a phrase is not a term but a definite description. A definite description is an expression that appears to simply refer to some thing but instead actually makes a claim that the uniquely described thing exists.

    Is. There are at least four logical meanings of 'is':

    Second-Order Predicate Calculus is the subset of Predicate Calculus in which both term variables and predicate variables may be quantified. Second-Order Predicate Calculus can use Leibniz's Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles to define x = y as ("j)(jxºjy): "for all possible predicates, the predicate applies to x as it applies to y".
    Modal Logic
    Modal Logic is a system of propositional logic that adds operators concerning necessity and possibility. Modal Logic adds to Propositional Calculus the following: Stronger systems of modal logic (named S4, S5, and Brouwerian) can be obtained by adding axioms that the modality of a proposition is itself a necessary modal truth. S4 results by adding the axiom Lp ® LLp. S5 results by adding Mp ® LMp. The Brouwerian system results by adding p ® LMp. These modal propositional calculi are decidable, but modal first-order predicate calculi are not.
    Other Logics
    Many-Valued Logic. Some philosophers assert that propositions about future or non-existent things can be neither true nor false. For example, "there will be a sea battle tomorrow", or "the present king of France is bald". Propositional calculi can be defined in which there is a third truth-value (e.g. neuter, half-true) or even infinitely many gradations of truth-value. In such a propositional calculus the laws of noncontradiction and the excluded middle do not hold. Fuzzy Logic is a sort of many-valued logic in which truth or set membership is expressed as a probability rather than as all-or-nothing.

    Intuitionist Logic. Intuitionism rejects the validity of the laws of the excluded middle and of double-negation, and thus any reductio ad absurdam argument. Intuitionism rejects the use of truth tables for testing the validity of propositions, because truth tables assume one can exclude "middle" possibilities of neither truth nor falsity.

    2.1.2. Mathematics / Logic / Metalogic

    Metalogic: the study of valid inference about systems of valid inference.

    The decidability of a system of logic is the property of having an effective or mechanical procedure for deciding the truth value of any well-formed formula of the system.

    A system is consistent if ¬a is not a theorem whenever a is a theorem. A system is weakly complete if every valid wff is a theorem. A system is strongly complete if the addition as an axiom of any wff not already a theorem would make the system inconsistent. An axiom or transformation rule of a system is independent if it cannot be derived from the remainder of the system's axiomatization. The propositional calculus is decidable, consistent and strongly complete, and each of its axioms and transformation rules are independent. The first-order predicate calculus is undecidable, consistent and at least weakly complete.

    Godel's 1st Incompleteness Theorem states that all consistent systems of number theory include undecidable propositions. Godel's 2nd Incompleteness Theorem states that no consistent system of number theory can prove its own consistency.

    2.1.3. Mathematics / Logic / Applied Logic

    Applied Logic: the application of logic to special arenas of inference .
    Fallacies
    Afallacy is any potentially persuasive argument that is not a valid method of inference.
    Paradoxes
    A paradox is a statement or conclusion that seems false or contradictory but actually might be true.
    Mereology
    Mereology is the study of part-whole relationships. Mereology helps to resolve Russell's Paradox concerning the set of all sets not containing themselves. It does so by disambiguating the distributive and collective interpretations of "e is an element of the set of M's". The distributive (i.e. predicative) interpretation is "e is an M", while the collective interpretation is "e is a part of the whole consisting of all the M's".

    The fundamental definitions of mereology are:

    The fundamental axioms of mereology are:

    2.2. Mathematics / Set Theory

    Set Theory: the study of sets and the most basic operations on them.

    A set is a formally undefined notion in set theory that can intuitively be understood as a collection of terms. Membership (Î) is a formally undefined relation in set theory that can intuitively be understood as "being an element of", and is such that a given object either is or isn't a member of a given set.

    Axiomatization.
    Zermelo-Fraenkel Set Theory is the standard axiomatization of set theory, and when combined with the axiom of choice is designated ZFC. The axioms of ZFC are: The axiom of choice states that for any set S of non-empty sets, there exists a function F defined on S such that for each member X of S, F(X) is (i.e. chooses) a member of X. The axiom of choice is equivalent to the well-ordering axiom, in that each can be used with ZF to prove the other.

    type theory, classes, category theory, topos theory

    operations on, relations on,

    Relations and functions can be defined as sets of ordered pairs, and thus can be defined strictly within set theory.
    The Babylonian sexagesimal (base-60) numeric system is the basis of the modern measures of time and angles.

    The continuum hypothesis is that there is no set with cardinality greater than the set of natural numbers but less than the set of its subsets. The continuum hypothesis can be neither proved nor disproved by the axioms of ZFC.

    2.3. Mathematics / Algebra

    Algebra: the study of operations on sets of numbers and symbols representing them.
    1. Arithmetic.
    2. Number Theory.

    2.4. Mathematics / Geometry

    Geometry: the study of transformations of sets of points in space.
    1. Euclidean Geometry.
    2. Non-Euclidean Geometry.
    3. Topology: the study of invariance under non-discontinuous geometric deformation.

    2.4.1. Mathematics / Geometry / Euclidean Geometry

    2.4.2. Mathematics / Geometry / Non-Euclidean Geometry

    2.4.3. Mathematics / Geometry / Topology

    Topology: the study of invariance under non-discontinuous geometric deformation.

    2.5. Mathematics / Analysis

    Analysis: the study of infinite processes as they approach limits.
    1. Differential Calculus.
    2. Integral Calculus.
    3. Vector Analysis.

    2.6. Mathematics / Combinatorics

    Combinatorics: the study of selection and arrangement within finite sets.

    2.7. Mathematics / Applied Mathematics

    Applied Mathematics: the study of the sampling or processing of information.
    1. Information Theory.
    2. Statistics: the study of the samples and their representativeness.
    3. Optimization Theory: the study of increasing a valued quantity in a constrained system.
    4. Computer Science.

    2.7.1. Mathematics / Applied Mathematics / Information Theory

    2.7.2. Mathematics / Applied Mathematics / Statistics

    Statistics: the study of the samples and their representativeness.

    2.7.3. Mathematics / Applied Mathematics / Optimization Theory

    Optimization Theory: the study of increasing a valued quantity in a constrained system.

    2.7.4. Mathematics / Applied Mathematics / Computer Science

    3. Natural Science

    Natural Science: the study of the regular behavior of nature.
    1. Physics: the study of matter and energy.
    2. Astronomy: the study of extraplanetary space and its contents.
    3. Chemistry: the study of substances and their properties.
    4. Geoscience: the study of the physical composition and behavior of planets.
    5. Biology: the study of life.

    3.1. Natural Science / Physics

    Physics: the study of matter and energy.
    1. Mechanics: the study of the motion of matter.
    2. Wave Physics: the study of the motion of disturbances.
    3. Thermodynamics: the study of heat and its relationship to energy.
    4. Electromagnetics: the study of the behavior of electromagnetic charge.
    5. Quantum Physics: the study of the smallest amounts of matter and radiation.
    The universe consists ultimately of nothing but elementary particles interacting in space-time via fundamental forces.
    Elementary Particles
    Anelementary particle is a quantum of matter or energy that has no known structure or spatial extent and that is subject to one or more of the fundamental forces according to its fundamental properties. Elementary particles can be divided into three generations of increasing relative mass. An antiparticle of a particle is one identical to it (e.g. in mass) except for having negated values of quantized properties like electric charge (and thus magnetic moment). Every charged elementary particle has an antiparticle. Antimatter is matter composed of the antiparticles of the particles in ordinary matter. Theories beyond the Standard Model predict various new particles such as leptoquark bosons, sleptons, sneutrinos, squarks, selectrons, photinos, gluinos, charginos, neutralinos, axions, and magnetic monopoles.
    Fundamental Properties
    A fundamental property is a way that one elementary particle can differ from another. All other material properties, such as color, temperature, texture, and wetness are composite properties that do not apply to elementary particles. A quantized property is one that can only occur in discrete amounts that are either integral or an integral fraction of 2 or 3. The remaining fundamental properties are quantized. Other quantized properties serve only as "quantum numbers" that distinguish different particles and govern their conservation and combination.
    Fundamental Forces
    All interactions involving matter or energy are due to some combination of fundamental forces. A fundamental force is a force that is not known to be reducible to other forces. Humans know three fundamental forces. Unification. Human physicists strongly suspect that all three of these forces are merely different manifestations of a single underlying unified force, just as the electric and magnetic forces are different manifestations of the electromagnetic force. How can the fundamental forces be unified into a theory of a single underlying unified force? This is one of the most important unanswered questions in physics.
    Conserved Quantities
    Conservation is an invariance that holds over time in a system that is closed or isolated in some specified way. Noether's Theorem states that every conservation law is associated with some symmetry or homogeneity. Conservation of baryon-lepton number is predicted to be violated by black holes as they absorb baryons and leptons and evaporate into photons.
    Fundamental Constants
    Fundamental constants are those in any minimal set of constants each of whose value could not in principle be calculated from the others and the initial conditions of the universe. Fundamental constants include dimension-measuring constants and dimensionless constants.

    Dimension-measuring constants are those fundamental constants that help  define natural units of measure that are independent of any particular system of  measures.  These constants define natural units of duration, distance, mass, and electric charge.

    Dimensionless constants are ratios between quantities of the same dimension that thus have the same value in every system of measures. Humans know of 18 to 22 fundamental dimensionless constants.
    Mysteries
    Why did the Big Bang happen?  How can we explain the existence and values of the free variables? Why are there precisely three spatial dimensions?  Does the information destroyed in black holes constitute an arrow of time?  Is time travel physically possible, perhaps only if paradoxes are censored?

    How can Quantum Theory and Relativity be reconciled?  Is Quantum Theory correct in requiring either anti-relativistic faster-than-light influence or time-reversed causality? How do black holes destroy information (other than that of mass, charge, angular momentum, and temperature) that Quantum Theory says must be preserved?

    How does sound cause in liquids the generation of small but intense bursts of light and heat known as sonoluminescence?  What causes high-temperature superconductivity?

    3.1.1. Natural Science / Physics / Mechanics

    Mechanics: the study of the motion of matter.
    1. Rigid Mechanics: the study of the motion of rigid bodies.
    2. Non-Rigid Mechanics: the study of the motion of non-rigid (elastic and fluid) bodies.
    3. Relativity: the study of gravity and frames of reference.
    Fundamental Concepts
    Mechanics has three fundamental concepts: Each concept has an associated quantity: Each quantity has a standard unit of measure: Each quantity also has anatural unit of measure that can be expressed in terms of the fundamental constants c, G, and h:
    Derived Concepts
    Matter is that which has mass and occupies space. A body is any individual coherent material thing. Deformation is a change in the distances among the points of mass comprising a body. Rigidity is the tendency of a body not to deform. Elasticity is the tendency of a body to recover from deformation.

    The states of matter are:

    3.1.1.1. Natural Science / Physics / Mechanics / Rigid Mechanics

    Rigid Mechanics: the study of the motion of rigid bodies.
    Derived Concepts of Translational Motion
    Translational motion is motion from point to point in space. The following concepts of translational motion can be derived from the fundamental concepts of mechanics: Momentum is proportional to velocity, while energy is proportional to acceleration and thus to the square of velocity.
    Derived Concepts of Angular Motion
    Angular motion is motion about an axis. The derived concepts of translational motion all have analogs for angular motion, which is considered in polar coordinates with a fixed radius r. Work (W) in angular motion is Torque applied through an angular displacement, W = Lf, and is again equivalent to energy.

    Centripetal Force is any force on a body toward the axis of its angular motion.  Centrifugal Force is the inertia-induced apparent force on a body away from the axis of its angular motion.  A bucket spun around an axis by a rope connecting it to that axis experiences centripetal force from the rope.  Water in the bucket is held in place by an opposing centrifugal force which is actually just the inertia of the water trying to keep the water going in a straight (tangent) line.

    Principles
    The principle of least action: motion between two points takes the path of minimum action. From this principle can be derived Newton's laws of motion.

    Newton's Laws of motion.

    1. A body changes velocity only if a force acts on it.
    2. Force accelerates a body in proportion to the ratio of the force to the body's mass: F = ma.
    3. To every force there is an equal and opposite reaction force. This implies that momentum is conserved in isolated systems.
    Newton's Law of Gravity: the gravitational force between two masses is proportional to the product of their masses and to the inverse square of the distance between them.

    Machines. Because W = Fs (work = force × displacement) and work (energy) is conserved, the same work can be done by decreasing the force and increasing the displacement. A machine so magnifies the effect of a decreased force by applying it through an increased distance, resulting in a mechanical advantage. The simple machines:

    3.1.1.2. Natural Science / Physics / Mechanics / Non-Rigid Mechanics

    Non-Rigid Mechanics: the study of the motion of non-rigid (elastic and fluid) bodies.
    Concepts
    The basic concepts of non-rigid mechanics:
    Principles
    The basic principles of non-rigid mechanics:

    3.1.1.3. Natural Science/ Physics / Mechanics / Relativity

    Relativity: the study of gravity and frames of reference.

    Special Relativity is the physics of inertial frames.  An inertial frame is a frame of reference under uniform motion. Special Relativity postulates:

    The implications of Special Relativity include the following. General Relativity is the physics of frames of reference under acceleration. It has two postulates: The implications of General Relativity are:
    Mysteries
    Mach's Principle is that the there is no absolute space and that the structure of space-time depends only on the distribution of matter. Is Mach's Principle true?

    3.1.2. Natural Science / Physics / Wave Physics

    Wave Physics: the study of the motion of disturbances.

    3.1.3. Natural Science / Physics / Thermodynamics

    Thermodynamics: the study of heat and its relationship to energy.
    Heat
    Heat is the total kinetic energy of the random molecular motion of a body. Temperature (T) is the average kinetic energy of the random molecular motion of a body. Specific heat of a substance is the amount of heat per unit mass required to raise its temperature a fixed amount. Thermal Equilibrium is the relation shared by two bodies in contact when heat no longer flows between them.

    Latent heat is the heat a substance must lose, without changing temperature, in order to change phase from gas to liquid or liquid to solid. Vaporization is the change from liquid to gas due to addition of heat but without necessarily changing temperature. Freezing is the change from liquid to solid due to removal of heat but without necessarily changing temperature. Evaporation is the change from liquid to gas due to the escape of the liquid's more energetic molecules through its surface shared with an unsaturated gas.

    Heat Transfer. There are three mechanisms of heat transfer:

    Stefan's Law: the power (P) radiated by a body is proportional to its area (A) and to the fourth power of its temperature (T): P = AT4.
    Ideal Gases
    An ideal gas is assumed to consist of identical point masses undergoing perfectly elastic collisions with each other and with their container. Ideal Gas Law: the pressure and volume of an ideal gas are proportional to temperature and inversely proportional to each other: PV = RT. The pressure of an ideal gas is proportional to both the number of molecules per unit volume and the average kinetic energy per molecule.
    Laws of Thermodynamics
    The laws of thermodynamics are statistical laws that only apply to systems with many particles. The improbability of violations of these laws rises exponentially with the number of particles in the system.  For all but the most microscopic systems, these laws are effectively inviolate.
    Entropy
    Entropy is a measure of the disorder in a system, and the change in entropy (dS) is defined as the change in heat divided by the absolute temperature: dS = dQ / T. Isolated systems tend to increase in entropy, and thus the entropy of the universe increases in all natural processes.

    3.1.4. Natural Science / Physics / Electromagnetics

    Electromagnetics: the study of the behavior of electromagnetic charge.

    Light is electromagnetic radiation: the propagation of variations in the electromagnetic field. Light defines the speed at which everything moves through space-time.

    Atoms such as iron are permanent magnetic dipoles. A magnet is a macroscopic magnetic dipole composed of multitudes of magnetic dipoles (such as iron atoms) that are locked in alignment.

    3.1.5. Natural Science / Physics / Quantum Physics

    Quantum Physics: the study of the smallest amounts of matter and radiation.
    Motivating Phenomena
    The atomic theory of matter was inferred from the integral ratios of elements comprising chemical compounds, the successes of the kinetic theory of gases, and the Brownian motion of particles suspended in water. The nuclear theory of atoms was inferred from the existence of electrons, radioactivity, and especially the scattering of alpha particles directed at thin foils. Quantum theory was inferred from Several different phenomena exemplify the differences between classical and quantum physics.
    Principles
    Quantization. A quantum is a discrete unit of some physical property or phenomenon. A property or phenomenon is quantized if it can only occur in discrete units. In addition to the quantized fundamental properties, quantized phenomena include: Wave-particle duality. Every quantum has both wave-like and particle-like properties. As demonstrated in double-slit interference, quanta travel like waves but arrive like particles.

    Complementarity. Quanta have complementary properties that cannot be observed or measured simultaneously. Complementary properties include:

    Indeterminacy. Different quanta in the same state can nevertheless behave differently, for example by undergoing radioactive decay at different times. This is not due simply to observers lacking information about determinate underlying variables that could, if known, be used to predict the behavioral differences. Instead, as Heisenberg proposed in 1927, the indeterminacy is built in at the lowest level. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle states that complementary properties cannot be measured simultaneously and in fact have no precise definite value, measurable or not.
    Fields
    Afield is a region in which a force or effect exists. Changes in fields propagate at the speed of light. All the fields observed in nature are continuous over space and time, are (or are thought to be) quantized in their particle interactions, and exhibit gauge symmetry. Gauge symmetry is an invariance at each point in space and time. There are fields associated with each of the fundamental forces.

    The weak force is chiral: it includes phenomena whose mirror-reflected counterparts seem never to occur. This is strong evidence that there must be an odd number of space-like dimensions, since chirality cannot exist in an even number of space-like dimensions. (Reflection along an even number of axes is equivalent to rotation, and invariance under rotation is a fundamental symmetry in nature.)

    Field theories.

    Particles
    A particle is a quantum of matter or energy that has observable position. The most basic way to classify particles is according to their angular momentum. Another classification of particles is according to how they are composed of constituent particles.Hadrons are baryons and mesons: the subatomic particles composed of quarks and thus subject to the strong nuclear force. Atoms are particles that consist of electrons orbiting a nucleus composed of nucleons, that are the smallest units into which matter can be divided without releasing electrical charge, and that are the characteristic units of chemical elements. A nucleus is the tiny dense positively-charged central core of an atom, consisting of neutrons and mutually-repelling protons that are held together by the strong force and that attract electrons into orbiting quantum shells that give the atom its chemical properties.
    Interpretation
    A quantum system remains in an indeterminate but deterministically-evolving state until the next measurement or observation event. Such an event happens when the function has interacted with other wave functions to an effectively irreversible degree. Observation of an event is thus the irreversible widening of the scope of influence of the event. Observation "collapses" the wave function discontinuously and non-deterministically into a particular determinate state.

    Bohr's Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory is that reality should not be assumed to have properties that exist independently of their being measured. Einstein's hidden variables hypothesis is that future physical theories will reveal that the fundamental properties of reality have values that are independent of their being measured. Everett's many worlds hypothesis is that at each measurement or observation event the universe branches into a separate universe for each possible outcome of the event. The hidden variables hypothesis is not supported by available evidence. The many worlds hypothesis is unfalsifiable, unverifiable, and therefor meaningless.

    Quantum indeterminacy is on such a small scale that it is unlikely to affect macroscopic processes such as volition in the brain. However, quantum indeterminacy does in principle make strong free will possible. At the same time, too much indeterminacy would threaten to undermine the ethically more important property of weak free will.

    If quantum indeterminacy did not exist (i.e. if Planck's constant were zero), then it seems that an arbitrarily small volume of space-time could contain an arbitrarily large amount of information. The positions of the particles in any volume could in principle be measured to arbitrary precision, extracting arbitrary amounts of information. Similarly, the positions of the particles could in principle be adjusted to arbitrary precision, thus storing arbitrary amounts of information. Completely faithful and precise simulations of actual physical subsystems would be impossible, because infinite amounts of information would be required to accurately specify the positions of particles. Quantum indeterminacy thus seems consistent with the logical possibility that the universe is in fact a simulation running on some computational substrate (whose random number generator would constitute the ultimate hidden variable). Of course, since this possibility is probably unverifiable, parsimony requires that it be rejected pending other evidence.

    Mysteries
    What determines the particular mass values of quarks and leptons? Do protons ever decay, implying that quarks and leptons can be interconverted by means of some new gauge boson? Why are there precisely three generations of fundamental particles?

    3.2. Natural Science / Astronomy

    Astronomy: the study of extraplanetary space and its contents.
    1. Cosmology.
    2. Galactic Astronomy.
    3. Stellar Astronomy.
    4. Planetary Astronomy.

    3.2.1. Natural Science/ Astronomy / Cosmology

    The physical universe is everything that is, has been, or ever might be in causal contact with Earth. The observable universe is that part of the universe that is or has been in causal contact with Earth. Human knowledge of the universe outside the observable universe is limited by the rate at which Earth's sphere of causal contact is growing (namely, the speed of light).
    Origin of the Universe
    Spacetime; what was before the Big Bang? What caused the Big Bang?

    Big Bang. evidence: 2.73K blackbody radiation, Hubble's Law (good to 1 part per million)

    Inflation explains why the universe is isotropic, by allowing opposite ends of the observable universe to have once been in causal contact, even though today they are 20 Gly apart. Inflation also explains why the observable universe appears flat.

    History of the Universe
    Graph universe's size, temperature, density on log-log scale
    Nature of the Universe
    The universe is believed to have no boundary in the three familiar dimensions, in the same sense that a sphere has no boundary in the two dimensions of its surface. Thus the universe has no end or edge, and so nothing is outside the universe or "beyond its edge". For the size of the universe, humans only know a lower bound -- namely, the size of the observable universe -- and probably cannot know an upper bound, although it is often assumed to be finite.

    The observable universe is about 12-14 billion light-years in radius. At the limits of our observation are the Big Bang singularity (for the time-like dimension) and just-now-visible parts of the universe (for the space-like dimensions).

    cosmic background anisotropy.

    universe map (cf. Galaxies by Ferris p. 160)

    shape unknown: open, closed, or flat

    Fate of the Universe

    Misunderstandings

    Anthropic principle. Before big bang. Outside universe.
    Mysteries
    What is the fate of the universe: open, closed, or asymptotically flat? What is the dark and presumably non-baryonic matter that seems to be needed to account for the gravitational mass of galaxies? What happened in the first 10-43s? Why does there seem to be more matter than antimatter?  What causes gamma ray bursters?  Why are there fewer solar neutrinos than predicted?

    3.2.2. Natural Science / Astronomy / Galactic Astronomy

    3.2.3. Natural Science / Astronomy / Stellar Astronomy

    3.2.4. Natural Science / Astronomy / Planetary Astronomy

    Where Earth is going
    Where Earth is
    Earth's Sky
    Brightest Objects.
    [Adapted from Norton's 2000.0 (c) 1989 and from Hipparcos ranging]
    Object Apparent
    Magnitude    		 Distance
    (ly)    		 Apparent
    Size    		 Ascen. Declin. Notes
    Sun -26.72 8 light-min 1800"      
    Moon -12.6 1 light-sec 1800"     Impacted 1000 CE?
    Venus -4.5   59"-9"      
    Jupiter -2.9   49"-32"     comet impact: 1994
    Mars -2.7   25"-3"      
    Mercury -2.2   12"-4"      
    Sirius -1.46 8.6   06 45 -16 43 SW of Orion; + w dwarf
    Canopus -0.72 313   06 23 -52 42  
    a Centauri -0.27 4.4   14 42 -60 59  
    Arcturus -0.04 37   14 15 19 11 pointed to by Big Dipper's handle
    Saturn +0.0   19"-15"      
    Vega +0.03 25   18 36 38 47 dust disk
    Capella +0.08 42   05 16 46 00 between Orion & Polaris
    Rigel +0.12 800   05 14 -08 12 Orion's SW foot
    Procyon +0.38 11.4   07 39 05 13 + w dwarf; 2 hr L of Betelgeuse
    Achernar +0.46 145   01 37 -57 14  
    Betelgeuse +0.50 430 0.04" 05 55 07 24 Orion's NE shoulder; 1st sized star: 1920
    b Centauri +0.61 525   14 04 -60 22  
    Acrux +0.76 320   12 27 -63 06 visual binary
    Altair +0.77 16.8   19 51 08 52  
    Aldebaran +0.85 65   04 36 16 30 between Orion & Pleiades; path of Pioneer 10

    Nearest Stars.
    [Compiled by C. Anderson, S. Clegg, and T. Studebaker from Hipparcos satellite data and the Yale Catalog of Trigonometric Parallaxes.]

    Object Apparent
    Magnitude    		 Distance (ly) Ascen. Declin. Notes
    Sun -26.72 0.000006      
    Proxima Centauri 11.05 4.22 14 32 -62 49 faint companion to..
    a Centauri A -0.01 4.39 14 42 -60 59 ..a Centauri
    a Centauri B +1.33 4.39 14 42 -60 59  
    Barnard's Star +9.54 5.94 17 58 +04 36 fastest star: 10 "/yr
    [2 dwarfs] [+7 - +13] [7 - 8]      
    Sirius A,B -1.46 8.60 06 46 -16 45 B: white dwarf
    [4 dwarfs] [+10 - +12] [8.7 - 10.3]      
    e Eridani + +3.73 10.49 03 33 -09 28 1st ranged star: 1838; has Jovian planet  w/ 7yr orbit
    [3 dwarfs] [+7 - +13] [10.7 - 11.2]      
    61 Cygni A,B +5.2 11.35 21 07 38 45 B: white dwarf
    Procyon A,B +0.38 11.4 07 39 05 13 B: white dwarf

    Distant Visible Objects.
    Object Apparent
    Magnitude    		 Distance
    (ly)    		 Size
    (ly)    		 Apparent
    Size    		 Ascen. Declin. Notes
    Andromeda Galaxy: M31 3.4 2.9M 200K 180' 0 43 +41 16 1st ranged galaxy: 1920; hosted 1885 supernova
    Small Magellanic Cloud 2.3 210K   180' 0 53 -73  
    Large Magellanic Cloud 0.1 179K 50K 600' 5 24 -70 1987 supernova was nearest since 1604
    Milky Way   30K 100K 360o     supernovae in 1604, 1572, 1054, 1006
    Hercules Globular Cluster: M13 5.8 23K 150 16' 16 42 +36 28 100K stars; target of Arecibo message
    W Centauri: NGC5139 3.7 16K     13 27 -47 29 biggest Milky Way cluster: 5M solar masses
    NGC104 4.0 13K 120 31' 00 24 -72 05 47 Tucanae; adjacent to Small Magellanic Cloud
    M22 5.1 10K 65 24' 18 36 -23 54 globular cluster
    Orion Nebula: M42 & M43 4.0 1.5K 30 60' 05 35 -05 27 middle "star" of Orion's sword
    Betelgeuse 0.5 1.4K 1012m 0.04"     biggest star: larger than Mars' orbit; 20 solar masses
    Pleiades: M45 1.6 380   110' 03 47 +24 07 Seven Sisters; Subaru; open cluster of 500 stars

    Earth Impacts
    "The four largest terrestrial-impact craters known: Chesapeake Bay on the East Coast of the United States and Popagai in Siberia (both dated at 35 million years), Chicxulub on the Yucatán peninsula (65 million years old and suspected of being produced by the impactor that may have killed the dinosaurs) and Manicouagan in Quebec (dated at 210 million years)."
    Space Exploration
    Voyager. In February 1991, from a vantage point 3.7 billion miles from Earth and about 32 (35?) degrees above the plane of the ecliptic, Voyager 1 returned an historic "family portrait" of nearly all the planets in our solar system. Voyager 1 is now farther from Earth than any other spacecraft, and is travelling at 63 Mm/h in the opposite direction as Pioneer 10. Voyager 1 is escaping the solar system at a speed of about 3.5 AU per year, 35 degrees out of the ecliptic plane to the north, in the general direction of the Solar Apex (the direction of the Sun's motion relative to nearby stars). Voyager 1 will leave the solar system aiming toward the constellation Ophiuchus. In the year 40,272 AD, Voyager 1 will come within 1.7 light years of an obscure star in the constellation Ursa Minor (the Little Bear or Little Dipper) called AC+79 3888.

    Voyager 2 is departing southward at 56 Mm/h, 48 degrees out of the ecliptic plane to the south toward the constellations of Sagitarrius and Pavo. In about 40,000 years, Voyager 2 will come within about 1.7 light years of a star called Ross 248, a small star in the constellation of Andromeda

    Pioneer. Pioneer 11is headed toward the constellation of Aquila (The Eagle), Northwest of the constellation of Sagittarius. Pioneer 11 may pass near one of the stars in the constellation in about 4 million years.

    3.3. Natural Science / Chemistry

    Chemistry: the study of substances and their properties.

    3.4. Natural Science / Geoscience

    Geoscience: the study of the physical composition and behavior of planets.
    1. Geology.
    2. Geography.
    3. Oceanography.
    4. Meteorology.

    3.4.1. Natural Science / Geoscience / Geology

    Radioactive decay keeps the earth's core molten, generating a magnetic field that protects the biosphere from ultraviolet(?) radiation. The magnetic field reverses polarity every ? million years. What causes the reversal? How does the reversal affect the biosphere?

    Plate tectonics

    3.4.2. Natural Science / Geoscience / Geography

    3.4.3. Natural Science/ Geoscience / Oceanography

    3.5. Natural Science / Biology

    Biology: the study of life.
    1. Molecular Biology: the study of biologically active substances and their properties.
    2. Cellular Biology: the study of cells.
    3. Physiology: the study of the functional subsystems of organisms.
    4. Ethology: the study of the behavior of organisms.
    5. Evolutionary Biology: the study of the generational development of organisms.
    6. Anthropology: the study of humans as animals.
    7. Ecology: the study of how organisms relate to their environment.
    8. Exobiology: the study of life beyond the Earth.
    Life is functional organization for sustaining self and kind involving active use of energy and information replication, respectively. Living is functioning organization for sustaining self as part of a system that constitutes life. Death is the irreversible cessation of living. A wide variety of systems undergo replication or are self-sustaining, but not all of those systems are alive.

    3.5.1. Natural Science / Biology / Molecular Biology

    Molecular Biology: the study of biologically active substances and their properties.

    3.5.2. Natural Science / Biology / Cellular Biology

    Cellular Biology: the study of cells.

    3.5.3. Natural Science / Biology / Physiology

    Physiology: the study of the functional subsystems of organisms.
    1. Reproductive Systems.
    2. Respiratory Systems.
    3. Digestive Systems.
    4. Circulatory Systems.
    5. Supportive-Protective Systems.
    6. Actuating Systems.
    7. Immune Systems.
    8. Cybernetic Systems: systems that control and coordinate the operations of organisms.

    3.5.3.1. Natural Science / Biology / Physiology / Reproductive Systems

    3.5.3.2. Natural Science / Biology / Physiology / Respiratory Systems

    3.5.3.3. Natural Science / Biology / Physiology / Digestive Systems

    3.5.3.4. Natural Science / Biology / Physiology / Circulatory Systems

    3.5.3.5. Natural Science / Biology / Physiology / Supportive-Protective Systems

    3.5.3.6. Natural Science / Biology / Physiology / Actuating Systems

    3.5.3.7. Natural Science / Biology / Physiology / Immune Systems

    3.5.3.8. Natural Science / Biology / Physiology / Cybernetic Systems

    Cybernetic Systems: systems that control and coordinate the operations of organisms.

    In terran organisms, cybernetic systems consist primarily of endocrine and nervous systems.

    Endocrine Systems

    Nervous Systems

    A nervous system is in terran organisms a network of neurons organized to process sensations and produce behaviors. A neuron is a cell that processes electrochemical stimuli received from its branch-like dendrites and at some threshold emits a characteristic electrochemical response along its single outgoing axon. Signals travel in the nervous system at speeds of up to 100 m/s.

    The brain is the part of the vertebrate nervous system responsible for regulating and controlling bodily activities, including autonomic functions, sensation, movement, and cognition. The brain stem controls most autonomic functions and is involved in emotional and reproductive behavior. The cerebellum controls voluntary muscular activities. The cerebrum is responsible for sensation, volition, and cognition.

    Inputs to Nervous Systems
    Nervous systems are sensitive to a wide variety of stimuli.
    Functions of Nervous Systems
    Autonomic functions.

    Movement.

    Pain.

    Perception.

    Appetitive Behavior. Fighting, fleeing, mating, feeding, etc.

    Cognitive Behavior. All human cognitive functions seem to consist ultimately in the activation and modulation of synaptic connections in the cerebrum. The human cerebrum is divided into two hemispheres, one of which is dominant in each individual. The dominant hemisphere is responsible for language, mathematics, and handedness. The other hemisphere is responsible for face recognition and emotional, spatial, and musical processing.

    The frontal lobes of the cerebrum are responsible for attention, volition, planning, and conscience. The motor cortex of each frontal lobe controls the voluntary muscles of the body's opposite side. The somatosensory cortex of each parietal lobe receives and integrates input from mechanoreceptors and thermoreceptors on the body's opposite side. The visual cortex in each occipital lobe processes input from the opposing half of each eye's visual field, providing e.g. recognition of faces and perception of motion. The auditory cortex in each temporal lobe processes auditory input from both sides of the body, and has areas for the comprehension and production of language. The non-dominant temporal lobe analyzes the emotional content of faces.

    Immediate memory seems to be stored in the frontal lobes. Short-term memory is processed by the hippocampus. Episodic long-term memory seems to be stored in the temporal lobes, whereas the parietal lobes seem responsible for general long-term memory. Long-term memories seem not to be stored at particular points in the brain, but rather in diffuse associative networks.

    How are memories created, stored, recalled, and forgotten? How does the brain understand and generate language? How does the brain perform learning and reasoning? What happens in the brain as it makes a decision? How does the brain generate and process emotions? How does the brain control attention? What is the neurophysiological purpose, if any, of sleeping and dreaming?

    3.5.4. Natural Science / Biology / Ethology

    Ethology: the study of the behavior of organisms.

    3.5.5. Natural Science / Biology / Evolutionary Biology

    Evolutionary Biology: the study of the generational development of organisms.
    1. Genetics.
    2. Paleontology: the study of life in the past.
    3. Taxonomy: the study of the relationships of organisms.
    Evolution
    Evolution is accumulated change in a lineage of entities through inheritance of new variation.  All known terran organisms are related by their evolution from common origins. In particular, humans and all other primates evolved from a common ancestor.  The tens of millions of species living on Earth were all created by a process of evolution from common origins that also created hundreds of millions of species now extinct.

    Evolution is not simply any change in an entity. Individual organisms develop, not evolve.  Evolution does not inevitably cause "progress" toward "higher" forms.  Evolution can remove features (such as eyes and limbs) as well as add them.  Evolution is not constrained to creating increasing complexity.  However, as an ecosystem develops, extremes of complexity can become more likely due to accumulation of complicating changes in some lineages.

    Evidence for Evolution
    There are several different major kinds of evidence for evolution. Convergent evolution occurs when taxa under similar selective pressures come to share a trait that their common ancestors did not share. Convergent evolution is particularly interesting because it suggests the topology of the design space that evolution searches. For important evolutionary pathways like those resulting in sociality and intelligence, convergent evolution hints at how likely they were on Earth and how likely they might be elsewhere.
    Natural Selection
    Natural selection is differential reproductive success due to inherited variation. Natural selection is the most important factor in the evolution of terran life. Sexual selection is a form of natural selection in which competition for mates causes differences in reproductive success and a resulting exaggeration of traits that aid in mate competition.

    Natural selection acts on individual organisms, and not on groups or species of organisms. The inclusive fitness of an individual organism is the relative number of its alleles that are passed on to subsequent generations by the organism or its relatives.  Natural selection favors variations that increase a genotype's inclusive fitness. Natural selection for maximum inclusive fitness can lead some individuals to forego reproduction in order to help relatives reproduce. It can lead other individuals to compete with parents or siblings, cheat on mates, or commit infanticide against a mate's unrelated offspring.

    3.5.5.1. Natural Science/ Biology / Evolutionary Biology / Genetics

    3.5.5.2. Natural Science / Biology / Evolutionary Biology / Paleontology

    Paleontology: the study of life in the past.
    Genesis
    How precisely did life on Earth arise? Life on Earth is probably the result of a long series of increasingly complex auto-catalytic cycles of molecular synthesis that were subject to preferential replication through natural selection. Humans will require decades or even centuries to reconstruct through theory and experiment the details of how life arose. How probable or improbable was the beginning of life on Earth? Humans do not yet know, but the case for probability is being strengthened by both a) earlier estimates of how soon life arose after the Earth formed, and b) an increasing understanding of the steps genesis may have taken.

    The methane, ammonia, water, and hydrogen sulfide on the early Earth would have been readily combined by lightning, heat, or ultraviolet radiation into organic molecules like amino acids, sugars, and nucleic acids. Clays or other mineral surfaces may have served as catalysts or concentrators for polymerization of these organic molecules. Nucleotide phosphates could have spontaneously assembled into polynucleotides, which then would be templates for further such assembly. Errors in copying could have led to a population of various replicating polynucleotides. Some polynucleotides could have weakly but selectively bonded with particular amino acids to construct various proteins. Any polynucleotide whose associated protein helped catalyze that polynucleotide's assembly would have preferentially reproduced. Mutually catalyzing cycles of protein synthesis could have caused the evolution of enzymes.

    Cells may have arisen as proteinoid microspheres forming spontaneously and helping maintain concentrations of proteins or enzymes which themselves made microsphere formation more likely. Cell division and reproduction may have developed from the tendency of some microspheres to rupture (perhaps after some form of growth) into two or more spheres. Natural selection would favor those resulting spheres that retained a complement of nucleic acids, proteins, and enzymes sufficient to continue the sphere's cyclical catalysis, which would at some point be considered the metabolism of a spherical cell.

    The earliest bacteria were chemotrophs deriving energy from inorganic chemicals in their environment, but around 3.5 Gya some bacteria evolved into phototrophs that could capture and store the energy from sunlight. The earliest first form of photosynthesis split hydrogen sulfide to produce ATP and waste sulfure.

    Biogeological History
    Name Began Characterized By
    Archaeozoic Eon 4.7 Gya Before life
    Proterozoic 3.6 Gya Simple life
    Phanerozoic 590 Mya Visible life
       Paleozoic Era   Arthropods, amphibians
       Mesozoic 248 Mya Reptiles, ferns, conifers
       Cenozoic 65 Mya Mammals, flowers
          Tertiary Period    
          Quaternary 1.64 Mya  
             Pleistocene Epoch   Ice Ages, hominids
             Holocene 13 Kya Warmth, Homo sapiens
    Revolutionary Advances
    The most important contingent non-parochial revolutionary advances.
    Advance When Notes
    Life >3.85 Gya glycolysis, replication, genes, cells
    Photosynthesis 3.5 Gya  
    Endosymbiosis >2.7 Gya Eukaryotes
    Oxygenic Photosynthesis 2.5 Gya  
    Aerobic Respiration 2.2 Gya  
    Nitrogen fixing? ?  
    Sex >1.5 Gya  
    Multicellularity >1.2 Gya multiple times
    Vision? >500 Ma once? [cf. Walter Gehring]
    Land colonization 400 Mya Amphibians: 345 Mya
    Flight 350 Mya Insects; Pteradactyls; Birds; Bats
    Endothermy 250 Mya Dinosaurs? Birds; Mammals
    Flowers, Seeds 150 Mya  
    Sociality   insects; mammals
    Grasses? 40 Mya  
    Evolution of Intelligence
    While certain birds and cephalopods are somewhat intelligent, the most intelligent terran organisms are all mammals: Hominoidea, Cetacea, Carnivora, Pinnipedia, and Proboscidea. There are several interrelated factors that correlate with terran intelligence and have probably been mutually reinforcing with it. What are the precise evolutionary pressures and paths that led to increased intelligence in many mammals and certain birds and cephalopods? There no doubt are limits to how fully humans will ever be able to answer this essentially historical question.

    3.5.5.3. Natural Science / Biology / Evolutionary Biology / Taxonomy

    Taxonomy: the study of the relationships of organisms.
     

    Taxon Began Notes
    Prokaryotae (Monera) 3.7G No nucleus: bacteria.
       Archaebacteria   Methanogens; salt, hot acid lovers
       Eubacteria   Fermenting; N-fixing; Photo; Chemoauto; Respiring
    Protoctista (Protist) 1.2G Protozoa, amoeba, algae, slime molds. Aquatic.
       Chlorophyta   Green algae. Ancestor to Plantae.
       ...    
    Fungi 470M Spores; no cilia; terran aerobic autotrophs.
    Plantae 470M Embryos, multicellular; usu. photosynthetic, terrestrial.
       Bryophyta   Non-vascular; spores. Mosses,
       Filicinophyta   Ferns.
       Cycadophyta   Palms. Gymnosperm: non-ovarian seeds.
       Coniferophyta   Cone-bearing gymnosperm. Pine, fir, spruce, larch,
       ...    
       Angiospermophyta 150M Flowers, seeds. Fruit. See Insecta, Chordata.
    Animalia 700M Blastula. Multicelled diploid anisogamous heterotrophs.
       Parazoa   Indefinite shape, no organs. Sponges,
       Eumetazoa   Radial or bilateral symmetry; organs.
          Coelenterates   Radial, marine. Hydras, jellyfish, coral, anemone,
          ...   aquatic worms,
          Brachiopoda   Clam-like bivalve shells.
          Mollusca   Snails, slugs, oysters, clams, mussels, cephalopods
          Arthropoda   Segmented bodies & legs. Crustacea, Insecta,
          Echinodermata   Tube feet; radial 5-symmetry. Starfish, urchins,
          Chordata   Dorsal nerve, gills. Bilateral.
             ...   acranial, lacking brain and skull.
             Agnatha   No jaws or scales. Lampreys, hagfish, slime eels.
             Gnathostomata   Jaws, usually paired appendages.
                Pisces   Fishes.
                   Chondrichthye   Cartilaginous. Sharks, skates, rays.
                   Osteichthyes   Bony fishes.
                Tetrapoda   Four-limbed.
                   Amphibia   Eggs in water; breathe via skin, gills, lungs.
                   Reptilia   Dry scaly skin; eggs on land; now cold-blooded.
                   Aves   Feathers, wings, toothless, warm-blooded.
                   Mammalia   Warm blood, hair, mammaries.
                     Prototheria   Egg-laying. Platypus, spiny anteater.
                     Theria   Non-egg-laying.
                        Metatheria   Marsupials.
                        Eutheria   Placental.
                           Insectivora   Hedgehogs, shrews, moles.
                           Edentata   Armadillos, anteaters, sloths
                          Tubulidentata   Aardvark.
                           Pholidota   Pangolin (scaly anteater)
                           Rodentia   Squirrels, mice, porcupines,
                           Lagomorpha   Rabbits, hares.
                           Hyracoidea   Rabbit-like, hooved: Hyrax
                           Artiodactylia   Even-toed ungulates: pig deer hippo camel giraffe
                           Perissodactylia   Odd-toed ungulates: horse zebra rhino
                           Proboscidea   Elephants.
                           Carnivora   Dogs, cats, bears,
                           Cetacea   Whales, dolphins.
                           Pinnipedia   Seals, sea lions
                           Sirenia   Sea cow, dugong, manatee
                           Chiroptera   Bats.
                           Dermoptera   Colugo (flying lemur)
                           Primates   Lemurs, tarsiers, monkeys, apes, hominids.

    Genetic evidence indicates that many taxa originated earlier than the fossil record suggests. For example, the chordate-arthropod divergence is estimated at 993 ± 46 Mya, and the divergance of plants, animals and fungi is estimated at 1576 ± 88 Mya [Wang, 1999].

    3.5.6. Natural Science / Biology / Anthropology

    Anthropology: the study of humans as animals.
    Primate Taxonomy
    Primates are mammals that have grasping appendages with nails not claws, and that use sight more than smell.
     

    Prosimians Lower primates: lemurs, lorises, tarsiers
    Anthropoidea Infraorder of higher primates
      Platyrrhini New World. separated nostrils; long prehensile tails
        Callitrichidae Marmosets, tamarins
        Cebidae South American monkeys other than marmosets
      Catarrhini Old World. close-set nostrils; nonprehensile or absent tail
        Cercopithecidae African and Asian monkeys: baboons, ..
        Hylobatidae lesser apes: siamangs, gibbons
        Hominoidea Tailless, large, flat-faced, tree-climbing superfamily
          Pongidae great apes: orangutan, gorilla, chimpanzee, bonobo
          Hominidae Small canines, large brains. Bipedal, E. of African Rift Valley.
            Australopithecus Southern ape-man. Africa 5 Mya - 1.5 Mya
            Homo Tools, culture, meat scavenging
              habilis Handy man. Africa 2 Mya
              erectus Africa 2 Mya - 300 Kya. Fire. Into Eurasia. Became sapiens?
              sapiens Vertical forehead, 1350 cc cranium, projecting chin
                neanderthalensis Europe 500 Kya - 30 Kya, when sapiens sapiens arrived. Burial.
                sapiens orig. African pop split 140 Kya, left Africa 50 Kya

    Chimps are more closely related to humans than to gorillas. Similarly, chimps and gorillas are more closely related to humans than to orangutans. Thus the clade Pongidae is paraphyletic.

    Human Taxonomy
    Negroid Sub-Saharan Africa
       Pygmy Congo R. Pop. 200K. Now speak Bantu.
       Black Nilo-Saharan & Niger-Congo, incl. Bantu expansion
       Khoisan Namibia
          Khoi "Bushmen"
          San "Hottentot"
    Caucasoid N. Africa, SW Asia, India, into Europe 8 Kya
       Indian  
       European  
          Mediterranean  
          Basque Related to pre-Caucasoid Paleo-europeans?
          Slavic  
          Alpine  
          Nordic  
    American Reached America by 13 Kya
       Amerind No type B blood.
       Na-Dene  
       Eskimo Reached America 5 Kya. Pop. 130K.
    N. Mongoloid NE. Asia
       Han Chinese  
       Tibetan  
       Mongolian  
       Korean  
       Japanese  
       Ainu  
    S. Mongoloid SE. Asia
       SE Asian  
       Austronesian Expanded from Taiwan 3 Kya
    Australoid Reached New Guinea, Australia 40 Kya.
       Melanesian New Guinea, etc.
    Evolution of Hominid Intelligence
    How did hominid intelligence evolve? This question may never have a fully satisfying answer. It is unlikely that tool use led to bipedality, since the fossil record shows bipedality preceded larger brains and the earliest tools. Bipedaliy was more likely a response to the change of East Africa's climate from forest to savanna, where brachiating is less important than seeing over high grasses. Decreasing sexual dimorphism suggests more-monogamous pair-bonding, and supplemental male provisioning of nuclear families may have co-developed with bipedality. Concealed female ovulation and continual female sexual receptivity both probably contributed to increased male-male cooperation and tighter pair bonding. Such changing social patterns probably increased the selective pressure for intelligence, as did the availability of the hands for tool use following bipedality. The parallel increase in tool use and the size of the metabolically expensive brain was associated with a more omnivorous diet that included scavenging and hunting of meat.

    How did Homo sapiens acquire language? This question, too, will likely never have a fully satisfying answer, as the fossil record tells even less about the development of language than it does about the development of intelligence. Just as sociality was crucial to the evolution of intelligence in animals, it probably also created selective pressure for the development of language skills. A variety of particular factors and stages have been proposed.

    The result has been neural systems in the human brain that are highly specialized for language.

    3.5.7. Natural Science / Biology / Ecology

    Ecology: the study of how organisms relate to their environment.

    3.5.8. Natural Science / Biology / Exobiology

    Exobiology: the study of life beyond the Earth.

    4. Technology

    Technology: the application of science and mathematics.
    1. Engineering: the application of physical science.
    2. Biotechnology: the use of biological and bioactive methods and instruments.
    3. Management: the direction of persons and related processes.
    4. Industrial Technology.

    4.1. Technology / Engineering

    Engineering: the application of physical science.
    1. Materials Engineering.
    2. Mechanical Engineering.
    3. Optical Engineering.
    4. Industrial Engineering.
    5. Electrical Engineering.
    6. Electronic Engineering.
    7. Nuclear Engineering.
    8. Software Engineering.

    4.2. Technology / Biotechnology

    Biotechnology: the use of biological and bioactive methods and instruments.
    1. Agriculture.
    2. Genetic Engineering.
    3. Pharmaceuticals.

    4.3. Technology / Management

    Management: the direction of persons and related processes.
    1. Administration.
    2. Finance.
    3. Marketing.

    4.4. Technology / Industrial Technology

    1. Food Production.
    2. Sheltering.
    3. Communication.
    4. Entertainment.
    5. Transportation.
    6. Energy.
    7. Government.
    8. Military.
    9. Education.
    10. Health Care.
    11. Manufacturing.
    12. Merchandising.
    13. Brokering.
    14. Services.

    5. Social Science

    Social Science: the study of the regular behavior of persons.
    1. Economics: the study of production, exchange, and consumption of goods by persons.
    2. Political Science: the study of the government of persons.
    3. Sociology: the study of human group behavior.
    4. Psychology: the study of mind.
    5. Linguistics: the study of language.
    6. History: the study of humanity's past.
    7. Futurology: the study of humanity's future.

    5.1. Social Science / Economics

    Economics: the study of production, exchange, and consumption of goods by persons.
    1. Macroeconomics.
    2. Microeconomics.
    Fundamental Concepts
    Economic value is utility or desirability to persons, especially as determined by free markets. Goods are anything which has economic value. The economic cost of a good is the economic value of the goods and resources expended to produce it. Economic efficiency is economic value divided by economic cost.

    Production is the transformation of economic resources into goods. Economic resources are any natural resources, human resources, or capital resources that are useful for production. Capital is any product that is has utility for production. Human resources are the labor, skills, and knowledge of persons.

    Exchange is the trading of goods for money or for other goods. A market is any mechanism for buyers and sellers to exchange goods. A free market is a market in which buyers and sellers are generally free to decide what to exchange and under what terms. Money is anything generally accepted as a medium of exchange and thus useful for storing or measuring economic value. The price of a good is the amount of economic value that must be exchanged to acquire it. Demand is willingness and ability to buy. Supply is availability and proffer for sale.  The scarcity of a good is the excess of its demand over its supply, and in a free market is measured by price.

    Consumption is any use of goods that subtracts from wealth without adding to production. Wealth is the economic value of what one owns minus what one owes. Income is change in net wealth plus the value of goods consumed.

    Assumptions and Idealizations
    Assumptions. Goods and resources tend to be scarce. Economic actors tend to choose rationally to maximize wealth. In particular, producers choose to maximize profits, and consumers choose to maximize utility.

    Idealizations. Producers and consumers have complete information about the prices and quality of all goods available or demanded in the market. Markets for particular kinds of goods are not dominated by a relatively few sellers or buyers. Sellers are able to exclude potential buyers from consuming the sellers' goods without buying them. Under perfect competition, markets tend toward equilibrium. Mathematical proof has been given of the theoretical existence of at least one set of prices that will clear all markets simultaneously.

    Principles
    The law of demand states that the price of a good is inversely proportional to the quantity demanded. The law of supply states that the price of a good is proportional to the quantity demanded. The law of diminishing marginal utility states that the amount of marginal utility derived from a good diminishes with the amount consumed of that good. The principle of comparative advantage states that overall efficiency is maximized if market participants import the products they make least efficiently and export the products they make most efficiently, even if those products are made more efficiently by other participants.

    Free Markets. Free trade benefits all parties, even those absolutely more efficient than others. Routine consensual transactions are positive sum, because if either party suffered a loss then she would decline to make the transaction routine. Free markets are the most efficient way to determine the allocation of economic resources and the distribution of goods. The decentralized mechanism of free market pricing is able to ration goods and resources more efficiently than could any central planning agency. This is because the pricing system transmits information about supply and demand more efficiently than could any planning agency. The pricing system forces economic actors to reveal their demand, and forces firms to supply only what is demanded.

    Natural resources over time become less costly and thus less scarce. Population growth leads to increased specialization, increased productivity, increased living standards, and a cleaner environment.

    Misunderstandings
    Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) wrote in his 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population that geometric population growth would overwhelm arithmetic growth in agricultural output and thus doom humanity to subsistence living. Malthus was wrong for two reasons. 1) Technological advances have slowed population growth by turning children into net consumers for their family instead of net producers. 2) Technological advances have increased agricultural output faster than population has increased.

    Marxism is the belief in the labor theory of value and its consequent conclusion that any profits by private owners of capital are unjustified and exploitive. The labor theory of value states that the value of a good is precisely the amount of labor required for producing it. The labor theory of value ignores the fact that capital contributes to value by making labor more productive.

    5.1.1. Social Science / Economics / Macroeconomics

    Inflation is any increase in overall prices. Deflation is any decrease in overall prices. The real interest rate is the difference between the nominal interest rate and inflation. Inflation over the long term is not caused by excess demand, or production being close to capacity, or inflationary expectations. Inflation over the long term cannot be "wrung out" of the economy through higher unemployment. Inflation (and deflation) over the long term can only be caused by the money supply growing (or shrinking) relative to aggregate output. Inflation is a tax on dollar-denominated assets, and also transfers wealth from creditors to debtors.

    Gross domestic product is the market value of the total production in a year of all the factors of production located in a nation. Gross national product is the total production in a year of all the factors of production owned by a nation. The Gross World Product in 1999 was estimated to be $40.7 trillion. Total human wealth has been estimated at $500 trillion. Recession is any decrease in gross domestic product that lasts at least six months. Depression is any recession so severe that GDP drops at least 10%. Growth is any increase in gross domestic product. Growth is caused by increases in any or all of: capital stock, capital efficiency, labor supply, or labor productivity.

    How can real (as opposed to nominal) production and productivity be accurately measured over the long term? Knowledge and technology can create qualitative improvements in goods and services that confound historical comparisons of real production.

    Unemployment is the state of unsuccessfully seeking to sell labor. Frictional unemployment is the amount of short-term unemployment caused by the process of matching jobs with job-seekers. Structural unemployment is the amount of long-term unemployment caused by long-term changes in the mix of job skills demanded by employers. The natural rate of unemployment is the sum of the frictional and structural unemployment rates.

    Why is unemployment in industrialized economies often closer to 10% than to what many economists believe should be its natural rate of 1% to 3%? The most likely explanation is some kind of ratchet effect that keeps wages from falling when demand for labor decreases, so that unemployment substitutes for wage cuts. There are perhaps sociological reasons why employers and employees are reluctant to see wages cut. Also, minimum wage laws probably cause some of the unemployment of low-productivity workers.

    The three major markets in the economy are those for goods, labor, and money.

    Equilibrium in the goods market is when AE = Y and S + T = I + G.

    A multiplier is the ratio of the increase in the equilibrium level of aggregate output to the independent increase in some input. The multipliers for planned investment I and for government spending Gare both 1/(1 - MPC + MPM), which is 1.4 [Case & Fair 1999]. The multiplier for taxation is -MPC/MPS. The multiplier for an increase or decrease in a balanced government budget is 1.

    The money supply is the amount of money in circulation, usually measured as M1 or M2. M1 is all currency held outside banks plus all deposits against which a check may be written. M2 is M1 plus all accounts which are easily convertible into currency, such as savings and money market accounts. The velocity of money is the ratio of nominal GDP to the money supply.

    A central bank is the institution in a nation that creates currency, regulates the money supply, and stabilizes the banking system. The required reserve ratio is the fraction of any bank's deposits that must be held at the nation's central bank. Banks are able to create money by making loans, but only if they have reserves in excess of the required reserve ratio. The money multiplier is the ratio of increase in money supply to increase in reserves.

    5.1.2. Social Science/ Economics / Microeconomics

    1. Market Theory.
    2. Market Imperfections.
    3. Public Policy.

    5.1.2.1. Social Science / Economics / Microeconomics / Market Theory

    An industry is the market for a particular kind of good. A firm is an organization of persons under unified management trying to maximize profit by producing goods to meet perceived demand. Profit is total revenue minus total cost. Pure rent is the return to any production factor that is of fixed supply. Sunk costs are costs already incurred. Fixed costs are costs that are constant for a given level of production. Variable costs are costs that are a function of the level of production. Marginal cost is the cost of producing one more unit of output.

    The law of diminishing returns states that applying additional units of a production factor out of proportion to other production factors will eventually yield smaller increases in production. Additional capital increases the productivity of labor, which increases the demand for labor, which increases the price of labor (wages). The equilibrium price of (and return to) each production factor is equal to its productivity as measured by marginal revenue product. Thus the standard of living for laborers is ultimately determined by the productivity of labor.

    The short run is the time scale on which there is a fixed scale of production and no entry or exit of firms from the market. The long run is the time scale on which firms can enter or exit markets and scale production as they choose. The productivity of a production factor is the amount of its output per unit input. The marginal revenue product of a variable production factor is the additional revenue earned by employing an additional unit of that factor. Investment is the creation of new capital. Depreciation is the decline in an asset's value over time, due usually to accumulated use or obsolescence. The present discounted value of receiving return R after time t at interest rate r is R / (1+r)t.

    Speculation is the buying and selling of goods, and especially factors of production, with the intent of profiting from their changing market value over time. Speculation performs the socially useful function of targeting investment to the production factors that are most productive.  Even short-term speculation performs this role, because short-term speculators must determine the net present value as it will be perceived in the near future, which recursively depends on the long-term net present value.

    Pareto optimality is the condition that obtains when no person can be made more happy without making some person less happy.

    5.1.2.2. Social Science / Economics / Microeconomics / Market Imperfections

    Violations of the various assumptions about markets can lead to misallocation of resources. Excludability is the ability of producers to detect and prevent uncompensated consumption of their products. Rivalry is the inability of multiple consumers to consume the same good. The Coase theorem states that markets will allocate resources and production efficiently even in the case of externalities if a) all the relevant rights are clearly (even if unfairly) assigned, and b) transaction costs of negotiation are minimal. The Tiebout hypothesis is that public goods can be produced efficiently if produced locally, so that their price (in the form of local taxes and land values) reflects the preferences of consumers free to choose where they live.

    5.1.2.3. Social Science / Economics / Microeconomics / Public Policy

    Taxes can be levied on either static holdings or dynamic transactions. Static taxes are of two major kinds. Transaction taxes include several kinds. An income tax is a double tax on saving. The benefit that flows from income consumed is taxed once, while the benefit that flows from income saved is taxed again as future income. After a given amount of income has been earned, consuming it incurs no further tax, while saving it does.

    The labor supply in an economy like America's is inelastic, in that the labor supply does not change much when wages change. Thus payroll taxes levied on employers are actually paid by employees, because they will generally still work for wages lowered by the tax. If the labor supply were elastic, then employers would have to raise wages by the amount of the tax in order to keep their labor supply.

    Minimum wage laws tend to increase unemployment among low-wage earners by over-pricing their labor and thus decreasing the demand for it. The social benefit of a minimum wage is financed through a hidden and production-distorting tax that falls on only certain goods and services rather than on the general tax base. Unions with monopolistic control over the labor supply in a particular industry enforce artificially high wages that lead to suboptimal levels of production and employment. Rent control prevents the supply of housing from expanding to meet the demand, and transfers income from those unlucky enough to be landlords to those lucky enough to have a(n increasingly scarce) lease.

    5.2. Social Science / Political Science

    Political Science: the study of the government of persons.
    1. Roles of Government.
    2. Political Forces.
    3. Political Processes.
    4. Forms of Government.
    5. Branches of Government.
    6. Levels of Government.
    7. Jurisprudence: the study of laws governing persons.
    8. International Relations.
    9. World Politics.

    5.2.1. Social Science / Political Science / Roles of Government

    5.2.2. Social Science / Political Science / Political Forces

    Dimensions of Political Opinion
    Economic and Personal Liberty. The two major dimensions of modern human political advocacy are 1) economic liberty vs. security and 2) personal liberty vs. security.  Economic liberty is freedom from coercion against one's property or resources. Economic security is safety from not having enough property or resources. Personal liberty is freedom from coercion against one's body, expressions, or non-coercive actions. Personal security is safety from expression or action that one considers improper.

    Enfranchisement. A third important dimension is personal enfranchisement and the general enfranchisement of beings by e.g. sentience or taxonomic endangeredness. Enfranchisement is the recognition of rights by virtue of properties such as sentience, fetal development, age, intelligence, sex, ethnicity, sexuality, religion, property ownership, and citizenship.Discrimination is the unfair treatment of persons based on their possession of the properties involved in personal enfranchisement.

    In theory this third dimension is independent of the first two, but in practice it correlates (imperfectly) with the personal liberty vs. security axis. The two sorts of enfranchisement for which the correlation is weakest are fetal status (see Pro-Choice) and citizenship. Favoring enfranchisement of non-citizens implies support for free trade, liberal immigration, foreign aid, human rights abroad, and humanitarian interventionism (as opposed to isolationism or imperialism). Foreign intervention has historically been imperialist rather than humanitarian, and so doves have usually been progressives, and hawks have usually been reactionaries.

    Misunderstandings
    "Pro-Choice". Many otherwise progressive thinkers subordinate any consideration of a fetuses' franchise to the liberty of women to control what happens inside their skin. These self-styled progressives would never subordinate a slave's (or trespasser's) franchise to the liberty of plantation owners to control what happens inside their fence lines. The inconsistency seems more of an emotional over-reaction to the recent non-enfranchisement of women at the hands of men, and less of a clear-eyed decision to draw the line of franchise at e.g. birth or fetal viability. Such a naked assertion of women's entrenched interest over that of fetuses, without due consideration and explicit rejection of fetal franchise, is hardly progressive but rather plainly reactionary.

    Thus being "pro-choice" on abortion is as disingenuous as being "pro-choice" on slave-owning. The position actually being advocated is the non-personhood of fetuses and slaves, respectively. But "No personhood for fetuses" is not a very fun bumper sticker, and so opponents of fetal personhood choose to obscure the real issue.

    5.2.3. Social Science / Political Science / Political Processes

    5.2.4. Social Science / Political Science / Forms of Government

    Governments vary by who wields power: Governments vary by how much power is wielded: Governments vary by how their power is justified: Civilians Killed by Governments in the Twentieth Century [R.J. Rummel Death By Government, 1994]

    Location Regime Deaths Era
    Soviet Union Communists 61,900,000  1917-1990
    China Communists 35,200,000  1949-1994
    Germany Nazi Third Reich 20,900,000  1933-1945
    China Kuomintang 10,400,000  1928-1949
    Japan Imperial-Fascist 6,000,000  1936-1945
    China Communist Guerrillas 3,500,000  1923-1948
    Cambodia Communists 2,000,000  1975-1979
    Turkey "Young Turks" 1,900,000  1909-1917
    Vietnam Communists 1,700,000  1945-1994
    North Korea Communists 1,700,000  1948-1994
    Poland Communists 1,600,000  1945-1948
    Pakistan Yahya Khan 1,500,000  1971
    Mexico Porfiriato 1,400,000  1900-1920
    Yugoslavia Communists 1,100,000 1944-1990
    Russia Czarist 1,100,000  1900-1917
    Turkey Mustafa Kemal "Ataturk" 900,000  1918-1923
    United Kingdom Constitutional 800,000  1900-1994
    Portugal Fascist 700,000  1926-1975
    Croatia Fascists 700,000  1941-1945
    Indonesia Suharto 600,000  1965-1994

    5.2.5. Social Science / Political Science / Branches of Government

    5.2.6. Social Science / Political Science / Levels of Government

    5.2.7. Social Science/ Political Science / Jurisprudence

    Jurisprudence: the study of laws governing persons.

    5.2.8. Social Science / Political Science / International Relations

    5.2.9. Social Science / Political Science / World Politics

    American Political Parties
    The Democratic Party is the populist American political party which was founded in 1792 by Thomas Jefferson, which supported state's slavery rights before the Civil War, and which was refocused by Franklin Roosevelt toward leftist policies of welfare statism, civil rights and economic equality. As leftists, Democrats are more likely to favor economic security over economic liberty, but personal liberty over personal security. Democrats are more likely to prefer centralized federal solutions over local,  private or market solutions. Democrats are less likely to trust free markets to be efficient and fair, and thus are less likely to trust individuals with economic freedom. Late 20th-century Democrat constituencies include blacks, Jews, organized labor, hispanics, the poor, gays, urbanites, and women. Late 20th-century Democrat policies are as follows. The Republican Party is the American political party which was founded in 1854 to oppose slavery and preserve the federal union, and which advocates rightist policies of economic freedom and personal security. Republicans are less likely to prefer centralized federal solutions over local,  private or market solutions. Republicans are more likely to trust free markets to be efficient and fair, and thus are more likely to trust individuals with economic freedom. Late 20th-century Republican constituencies include fundamentalist Christians, the wealthy, asians, suburbanites, and men. Late 20th-century Republican policies are as follows. The Libertarian Party is the American political party founded in 1971 to promote personal freedom and  responsibility by limiting the state to only prevent force and fraud. Late 20th-century Libertarian policies are as follows.