Through the past , Darkly

If you ask anybody when was the last time they did something which was morally dishonest, they would either say it was something very minor or that it happened many years back.
 
(Incidentally, this also works if you ask yourself the same question.)

Maybe they'll come up with a pencil stolen from someone in school or a cheat on the spouse early in the marriage.

Scientists who study human behaviour say the phenomenon is pretty much universal: people unconsciously paper over misdeeds and let time heal lapses of morality so that the self-image doesn't keep getting battered all through life.

We can't make up the past,says Anne E Wilson, a social psychologist at Wilfred Laurier University in Ontario,but the brain has difficulty placing events in time, and we're able to shift elements around.

The result, according to her, is that by doing this, we succeed in creating a personal history which may not be perfect from an ethical standpoint but at least makes us feel we're improving.

The trouble with this tendency, however, is that a lot us can conveniently slip into becoming sanctimonious in later life.

And why that happens is also interesting.

 Meaning, instead, if you ask somebody (or, again, yourself) when was the last time they did something that was morally honourable, something they're proud of, chances are they would now come up with an event from a more recent past even if it isn't actually so.

 That's the brain at work once more with its function of preserving the self-image at all costs.

 Other psychologists say it's the reason why older people grandparents, for example carry such an aura of virtue and sagacity about them and always seem to have an extremely fresh backlog of good just behind them.In fact, they've reached such a point that they themselves can attribute some of their gross iniquities like stealing and cheating to the sowing of wild oats in a nebulous youth left long behind.But psychologists also observe that the most ironic thing about it all is that remembering bad moral choices and regretting them later makes one feel good about oneself as having become better.

 And that's the real problem: you get the feeling that everybody makes mistakes and regrets not doing what was morally right.

 It makes you feel more attached to humanity,they say.

 What they don't say is that it's also an excellent excuse to continue living the un-examined life.

Some distances remain the same !

COSMIC UPLINK

Some distances remain the same !

Technology has a tendency to appear godlike sometimes. The obvious examples we can think of today are the Internet, unmanned planetary robots that map the surface of Mars, or machines which are capable of plugging into people’s brains and scanning their mental processes when they are supposedly in an otherwise vegetative state. It just shows how our idea of godhood has grown. If any of us were reading this some 10,000 to 15,000 years ago we would probably have thought that the recent discovery of the phenomenon of fire or a round rolling device called a wheel — both of which revolutionise people’s lives — were surely divine in origin.
   
Ten thousand years further down our worldline, things like the ability to move a person from one location to another at the speed of thought, discovery of extraterrestrial intelligences spread through the multiverse, or even the creation of life — complete with consciousness — here on Earth itself might seem to be divinity delivered at our doorstep. Beyond that the mind begins to boggle uncontrollably. Technophiles speak of an eventual and far out singularity event which is so much beyond our present capabilities to comprehend that it becomes impossible to understand it with present conceptions.
   
They say we will become a unified transhuman entity with no further need for any biological counterpart and our group mind will function as a self-improving superintelligence and transcend to a wholly new regime of intellect, society and technology. Contrarily, machines could also exponentially raise their own intelligence and achieve the same result leaving humanity out of the picture totally and forever. Or it could be a combination of both.
   
So is God in the details of technology? One which, perhaps, is ultimately guided towards a goal? Seductive as that thought may be, it’s also true that those who have had faith down the ages have not received it with the help of any mechanics; while those who may have received it thus, such as Einstein or Stephen Hawking for instance, have always alluded to its dimension being of a different domain altogether. This puts it eternally at the same distance from any technological progress. Mathematicians have a better way to put it. Infinity, they remind us, is exactly as far removed from the number one as it is from one trillion trillion trillion.