-Discordian Proverb
I will wake up and go about my meaningless life. there will still be war and hate and injustice. We will still be ruled by a complete idiot. Naked men will still get me horny, and my car will continue to suck gas.
Look at your own life and see if there is imminent change in your future. There isn't any, is there? Even if something seems to change, once you pierce the illusion you see that it is as it always was.
The world could've been created last Thursday and all this stuff put here just to confuse us.
I could have started daydreaming five minutes ago, and I'm not really writing this.
You could've started daydreaming five minutes ago, and you're not really reading this.
I might not even exist. Cogito ergo sum, et al. Even if I exist, I don't know that you do, or that this computer does. I could be in an asylum somewhere, hallucinating all of this writing. It may even be in 18th Century England or some such place, where the Internet is an impossiblity, just the deranged dream of a madman. I'm going to assume that everything is as it seems, though, and thus avoid the existential delimna.
We cannot know the true impact of an event until we achieve Complete Empathic Awareness. When we understand the emotions behind each human action, then we can completely know history. Until that time we only know a few more popular views on what went on. We read some half-truths, a smattering of downright lies, and occasionally find a pearl of knowledge that give a bigger view (or smaller, depending on how you look at it: what really happened in World War II, or what Hitler really was trying to do- macrocosm or microcosm) of the whole picture.
Perhaps artificial intelligence will one day help us to understand. Cybernetics could record every individual human experience and we could thus benefit and learn to manipulate emotions along with the understanding of history this would provide.
Archived human experience would prevent history being written by the victors and give us a more concise picture of what has gone before. If it could resist manipulation, it would be an invaluable asset to preventing the loss of History to counter the ever-increasing realm of Science.
