I also believe torture has a huge role in this matter. I involved torture in my previous posts and I hardly kept myself from bring it up here as well. The interesting aspect here is that Coben always mentions that mind will eventually break and I think we could all agree that if someone induced us into a state where free will is simply turned off, than anyone would break. So for the sake of the argument let's presume that one has unlimited resistance to any trick that could put his free will to sleep; now let's take the Budhist monk and also give him eternal life. Now the question is: under unlimited torture, will the Budhist monk eventually freely break?

Good one! I personally think that many of our beliefs, including very strong ones, can be changed. I also believe that there are certain people who actually identify themselves with their beliefs.
1. I am not sure if "identifying" with something would shift the paradigm from "finite resistance to change" to "infinite resistance to change".
2. I am not sure what it takes to reach that level.

Interesting that you've mentioned torture, I actually wanted to bring that up into this discussion. Do you think unlimited torture can make absolutely anyone break his principles?

What if there is a matter in which the truth is not demonstrable? Eg religious vs atheist

Good point! That is a part of the mystery - can one identify with something to a point where that thing becomes part of himself forever or things that we are strongly attached to and believe are part of us are simply going to fade away at one point under the heaviness of eternal time?

I think your answer is absolutely fantastic - simple, clear, touching the main aspect of this apparently silly question. I believe in free will (thus in an immaterial mind), but I am still amazed at how easily you treated this heavy burden of eternity. Do you suggest that in some cases our mind becomes irreversible (immaterial mind)?

Maybe there are huge things like the wheel that we're missing right now, let alone far future civilisations. Some ancient civilisations were developed in many fields but had no wheel, a trivial thing at first sight. It wasn't because their lack of intelligence or technology to create it, the simple truth is that it wasn't in their mind.

Possibly. It has in the past, so it's reasonable to expect that it might in the future.

I totally agree with the fact that language and communication was a huge step, but no more than in the sense of giving us the capacity to express in a more clear manner thoughts that had been already present in our minds until we found words. I believe that notions like gods, universe, other universes, immortality have been here since humans were humans. On the other hand, animals don't think about gods and parallel universes.

We can't imagine the unimaginable, nor comprehend the incomprehensible, for the obvious reason that it has nothing to imagine nor to comprehend. We might, however, have the capacity at time t1 to understand what we will discover at t2, but obviously don't since it is yet to be discovered.

Humanity has the same basic set of wishes over time: to travel on ground, under ground, on water, on air, in space, other universes; to obtain and access information; to read other minds; to communicate instantaneously with other people from other corners of the world; etc.. So cell-phones, computers, satellites, robots are nothing more than direct accomplishments of these wishes. There can be indirect accomplishments, and here I'm referring to more detailed pieces of technology that doesn't serve as solutions for our ancient wishes, but as solutions for the technologies used to satisfy our ancient wishes (e.g. antennas). There is actually nothing that we're doing today and that its final purpose was not in our ancestors' minds in the form of desire, therefore nothing unimaginable or uncomprehensible for the ancient Romans.

We can imagine a zero, a big fat nothing. Yes, that imagining may be rather fuzzy on closer examination, but so is our conception of everything, or even something.

Maybe a more advanced civilisation would be able to understand things like nothing or infinite?

No, not really; it merely entails that we imagined, not the unimaginable, which would be a contradiction, but that there might be the unimaginable, despite our obvious inability to imagine what it could be.

Unimaginable by its nature or by our brains' capacity?

That implies that we imagined the unimaginable; comprehended the incomprehensible.

I wasn't talking about imagining the unimaginable, because if there is something unimaginable by its nature, than nobody would be able to imagine it, regardless of how evolved s/he is. I will give you the same example: if you would get back in time and would meet a barbarian you would be able to explain him about a smartphone and he would be able to understand: you could tell him that is a tool used to communicate with others instantly on large distances, to listen music or to access information. He would have all these concepts. But if you want to do the same thing with an animal, it would be simply impossible. Are we a barbarian or an animal compared with a much much more advanced civilisation?

I just received an answer to this question on Yahoo Answers and I consider it worthing: "Two aspects of understanding are familiarity and education (there are more than two, but I'm just focusing on those).
We can educate a chimpanzee to use a great many things in our world. They lack brain capacity to understand complexity, but they can be taught rudimentary skills and may even become quite proficient. Arguably it could be said that chimps are 100,000 - 1,000,000 years behind us in brain capacity (depending on which expert we listen to).

I should think humans are more adaptable than chimps, so if properly educated and familiarised with a functional piece of advanced alien technology, we could begin to comprehend the basics.

I do see your point though.
For example the chimp is unable to understand even intermediate level philosophical concepts and will likely never see the true purpose of poetry. They may develop a taste for the way words are spoken, but that is only due to an appreciation for sound or a connection with the person.

As for whether there really are concepts, technologies or natural phenomena that we are unable to understand, I cannot provide a definitive answer, purely because the specifics wouldn't be ready to avail themselves to our brain.
I think it's reasonable to extrapolate that this scenario is possible, perhaps even likely." - Salubrious proclivity

I'm still waiting for your opinion regarding my lizard analogy >:)

And if our technology would evolve to an ,,unbelievle level" as you say, what would that technology be capable of that we can't even imagine now? I mean, let's presume they'll travel to multiverses and they'll live eternally. What more can they do that we can't imagine?
I'm not talking about duration and continuity. For the sake of the argument, let's presume we will keep our cultural and technological advance. I'll use the same analogy: a barbaric tribe doesn't have the notion of smartphone, but if someone would explain Konan that is ,,something that makes instant communication possible" he would understand. A lizard has no concept of music for example or that of humor. It is simply out of its limits and it could not understand these concepts. So, again, if everything will be fine and technology will evolve forever, we, the ones in the present times will be to the future civilisation like the lizards to us or like Konan would be to us?

Of course the cultural and technological differences will make them so wierd for us, but as a tribe from Guinea can eventually understand us if taught, we would be able to understand them if we were to observe them for a sufficient period of time IF our current level of intelligence and capability of understanding is developed enough. If you put a lizard to understand religion or music, it would never be able to. So, in comparision with million of years civilisation in front of us, we would be the Guinean tribe or the lizard?
Off topic: I see that you ask yourself if evolution is linear of humanity's history will be repetitive. Well, regarding evolution I have a big feeling that is limited, meaning that we'll not get farther than a certain point not because we will not have the capacity, but because after a certain point the notion of evolution dissapeares. E.g: learning how to conserve food for 1 billion years would not be considered evolution compaerd with consereving food for just a million years. If you're really into this (or anyone else here for that matter) you can send me a private message and we can talk about it. :)

"Super advanced intelligences might inhabit virtual worlds with more than three dimensions where the virtual structures of time and space are very different ..."
By saying this you prove that you actually imagine it, or better say you associate something with notions that we already have in present : time, space, telepathy. That is actually not hard to imagine, you just did it. I'm talking about totally new concepts (like we have now time and space they will have ,,bimb" and ,,bamb") but we now can't simply understand concepts like ,,bimb" and ,,bamb" right now, not because we didn't discovered them yet, but because we need to evolve more in the terms of intelligence (natural or technological) to have those notions. PS: I exclude supernatural from my question.
"I do not think we will ever know why there is something rather than nothing, for even if we prove God exists, we are still left wondering why he created what he did."
You're close, I'm not talking necesarry about finding out if there's a God, but I'm talking about more if such an advanced civilisation will be able for example to totally understand ,,infinite" because they will be much more intelligent than us, or that we don't currently understand ,,infinite" because it is simply not understandable no matter how intelligent we'll become. If they will be able to fully understand notions like ,,infinite", or they'll invent another social model totallly different than our current minds can invent, they'll sure be on another level. If not, they will be just much more advanced, but at the core level, there's no ,,next level".
"3) Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." It may be, but the pure fact is that at the level of concept, we already have these magical purposes in our minds and we have been having them since the beginning. Of course they didn't had the means or the names for the technologies like ,,transistor" or ,,computer", but there's nothing that today's technology does and that our ancients didn't thought of it - flying; communicate instantly across large distances; build high; travel into the universe or even other universes etc.. So at the core conceptual level, there's nothing new under the sun in the last 2 million years.

I can agree with what you said but my question was about something else. I was asking if human evolution will transform us in something that we have no capacity to understand it, not because the lack of information or because we cannot ,,feel" a million years, but because our mind are currently too undeveloped to imagine. Eg.: they will be able to see colours that we don't see and we are not able to imagine a colour that we never sawed.

We can't ,,feel" what 1.000.000 years is because we don't live that much. But that doesn't mean we can't mentally grasp 1.000.000 years. We can imagine, we can think, we can associate with many things and we also can imagine for that matter.
We actually grasp reality at those scales when we're watching into the deep Universe :)

Someone once told me that she doesn't need more than 6 senses. She made me ask myself how many senses there are, is there a finite possible number of them or there's no limit? Besides our 5 classic senses I simply was not able to find other ones, maybe except ,,reading minds"; ,,knowing the future" and other 2-3 silly ones. To give you another example, I personally see 3 main universal economical policies: Socialism; Liberalism and Anarchy. I believe that as long as resources matter for life beings, no matter how evolved they are of what type of universe they live in these are the main 3 categories and every system is either an extreme form of one of these three or it is situated somewere between them. It's just a matter of parametrization. Same as in the case of senses, I believe that these 3 types include every possible outcome of economic policies and there's nothing outside this triangle. But what if I'm wrong and there are more than three, maybe 100.000? I simply cannot find more than 3, I'm not capable of doing it and for that matter nobody was until now.
I don't believe that life is just about shapes and surviving and I believe that we're fundamentally different from a worm in many aspects and evolution plays a major role here. So my answer to your question "What would you be able to know that you can't already know?" is that maybe evolution will enlarge our potential and same as a worm cannot think at philosophy, they will have things that we're not capable thinking of, maybe they will invent other economic policies, other sciences, maybe they will have more personality traits than we have now, or like animals have no sense of humor, maybe they will possess things that we don't have, etc..
Do you think it is possible that we're the worm in this moment or we already reached all paradigms in the terms of senses, personality traits, political systems, the potential of understanding etc. and from now on we will just evolve technologically?

Some life beings don't have the notion of ,,seeing" because they don't possess this sense. Intelligent animals like dogs or dolphins cannot understand what philosophy is no matter what. It's a matter of evolution and no matter how ugly may sounds, the reality is that in many aspects we're superior to animals. In the same time, we can think that evolution has no limits and life beings can take superior forms that possess traits that we can't understand - not just 5 senses, but billions; beings that can easily understand notions like ,,infinite"; etc.. So my question would be: is it possible that life beings evolve so much that the current human would be inferior to them as a worm is inferior to us in the sense of the capacity of understanding?
Your final quote is in contradiction with what you said. Actually the ancient Greeks (and the firsts homo sapiens for that matter) had the capacity to understand everything we do today if they would had had sufficient information like you said. Furthermore, they had concepts like flying, going to space, exploring the Universe, instant communication and even virtual reality. My question goes farther than ,,we can't understand because the lack of information". My question is about ,,we can't understand because we don't have the capacity to" and this capacity is given by the biological or even scientific/technological evolution.

I have to admit that your answer was intriguing and the fact that I reply so late is that I wanted to lay on sheet an outlined idea. So I’m going to begin with point 2 of your reply. It is not about my gut feelings. I can accept the idea of a billion tails in a row because nothing limits this possibility, but when it comes to other things, like the example I’ve mentioned, it’s different – if a big motivated player who scores in big competitions and wins titles can’t hit the ball in the back of his yard for ten years in a row simply because probabilities rules sounds nuts and I simply don’t believe it. Not in a bllinfinite! After all it is a paradigm shift and a contradiction; he could be one of the best players in the world, but he cannot touch a ball (contradiction). So it’s not about the talent and hard-working, it is about probabilities (paradigm shift).
Now, you might say (and you did at the point 1) that it might not be a stochastic system at all. Well, that was the intriguing part for me but I’ll talk about it a bit later.
Meanwhile, I’ve been thinking to some systems. E.G.:
1. Tossing a coin – it’s all about probabilities
2. Poker game. Well, you can have the best poker player in the world losing a billion times in a row against a rookie, simple because his adversary had a first hand of full aces a billion times in a row (100% winning hand).
3. Let’s go back to coins. Let’s presume that someone’s tossing a coin infinite, but this time his purpose is to have tails all the time.
In order to achieve this aim he has to develop a throwing technique - e.g. coin spins twice in air and obtain tails -(presuming this is possible like in sports), so he starts training and eventually he becomes a professional at tossing coins. Now, my first query is which of the following statements is right?
a) We say that he’ll improve his chances of being successful by training, meaning he’s getting the chances of hitting tails are getting higher. The player is never going to be perfect, so he’ll eventually reach a limit in his potential. In this case he will evolve from 50% chances at every try to 99,9%. in an infinite throwings, he has no limit in missing.
b) But my opinion is that this is not about the chances anymore and by improving the technique actually translates in having a success rate. Let’s say, in his worst day he can’t miss more than 3/10. Not being perfect though, he’ll miss 1/10. So, if his value oscillates between A (worst shape), B (best shape), implies results between C (7/10 success) and D (9/10 success) - limits in infinite.
My second question would be why a) or why b)?
Back to the intriguing part. After all, if we have just 99% knowledge about the state of the elements of a system, isn’t fair to say 1% is in the hand of chance and that system is stochastic one as in the poker game for example?
I’ll repeat the questions:
1. Improving chances (probabilities) or reach a success rate?
2. What are the arguments for you choice?
3. Aren’t all the systems where we don't have 100% information about the present elements in it a stochastic one?
4. If you choose ,,success rate” and your questions 3’s answer is yes, than how can limits survive in a stochastic system?

NB: I exclude quantum mechanics and probabilities dictated by subatomic randomness.