Monday 28 April 2014

Education: key to self-discipline and good citizenship

In our society the task of training up children to be good citizens and good to themselves has to be that of parents and teachers. While some discreet legal protection is to be extended by governments and their agencies, their task is mainly to ease the difficulties that crop up in the work of parents and teachers. In the Syai society I (fictionally) write about, the task is given to the guardian (usually the dedicated parent) and to elders who have the time for it, and - very importantly - to the children themselves!

As children's understanding of the world develops, they need proper general knowledge, not myth parading as knowledge. Their critical faculties (in Syai) are developed so that they understand the limitations of knowledge and the dangers in power-relationships; also, the proper place of myth-and-story in their emotional development. 

Neither the old-fashioned bullying teacher-pupil relationship nor the struggle of the teacher against some children's bad parenting - the teacher in a straight-jacket of powerlessness and governmental pressures - achieve anything but a society of "winners and losers", of  predominant dissatisfaction, stress and misery.

Saturday 26 April 2014

Physics, Time-travel and Free Will: Do we want to risk a dead planet?


According to Einstein (and no-one' yet proved him wrong) the Theory of Relativity does not preclude the possibility of time travel. But to avoid "the Grandfather Paradox"  one is obliged to postulate alternative worlds or universes. 
I go back and kill my grandfather. From the time I do that, or even before - if the world before that time is "leading up" to that event - that world is not strictly existing any more as the world I am existing in on my return to the present. It may be very similar to it, of course, because my time-travel act is insignificant in the big picture. Nevertheless, killing my grandfather would be something I do by "crossing over" into a parallel world.

Apply the same reasoning to free will. If parallel worlds physically explain away the paradox of time travel, it can also explain away the paradox of free will or choice. I make a choice that slightly alters the course of events as would have unfolded without that choice being made. But the world as it would have been is still real. It is the alternative world that gives my thought and act of choosing reality. If it were not, then it is the one world that dictates what I think and act as it "dictates" to the wind to break off a branch of a tree. Freedom of choice would have no meaning whatsoever. We would be robots cursed with a completely useless, meaningless "extra" (like an appendix) called "the illusion of freedom".

If there is plausibility to the general idea of parallel universes, then our real individual freedom to choose must extend to a collective freedom. Surely, we are "criminally" responsible if our choices fail to create a genuinely sustainable world (civilization) similar to the one I picture in my imagination and writings, the Syai world. Do we collectively want to fail - which will very likely mean a dead world, similar to the many as exemplified in the picture above?  No; and leaving aside all moral consideration, to keep doing what we don't want is an act of madness. 




Thursday 24 April 2014

'Picturing' the gods.

In Victorian times and earlier it was commonplace for artists to picture God and associated celestial beings, not to mention the old gods of Greek mythology. It's interesting that in these times we are more shy and more reluctant to represent gods and even human figures who were mouthpieces for a 'god'  in art, especially when it is being  done for the benefit of believers in a still-living religious faith. The modern 'believer in the One God'' seems to think material representation is best left to nothing more that old-time pictorial symbols not taken seriously. In Islamic religion is completely forbidden to picture Allah and His human mouthpiece in any way whatsoever. In my Syai world religion is pretty well identical with myth and the power of myth to awaken the inner mind. Accordingly, there is no trouble over picturing the gods as one might suggest they should look in an artist's imagination, in the imagination of a child or of anyone whether a skilled illustrator or not.   

Friday 18 April 2014

The Syai world, possibly in another gakaxy.


The universe contains around 100 billion galaxies, each with between 100 to 500 billion stars. Most scientists are convinced that by dint of sheer numbers there must be aliens out there. This would include some races of beings similar to us. Biologists tend to me more sceptical about this than are mathematicians. One biologist put the chances at only one or two planets with 'intelligent' life in every 5-to-7 galaxies. But that was before up-to-date astronomers revealed that planets are far more common around stars that had been thought likely.

The Syai planet ('Feishoafeis') is one such planet as imagined. Who knows? At least some likeness to it may be out there. How would we contact the Syai aliens? I don't know. For my purposes in writing about them and creating this blog, I just assume the contact has been made. Someone records discussions and writes about the memories of a visitor who has been to the Syai world. The "Someone" I call Lakka (L.) and the "visitor" I call Terres, the name he/she called him/her self when with the Syai people.  L.

Monday 14 April 2014

I have used Google to investigate how things are with constructed languages. Apart from the one(s) developed by Tolkien for the Lord of the Rings and old attempts at international languages like Esperanto, there doesn't seem to be much going on in recent times. 'WiseGeek' is a website which has a good summary of what constructed languages are about. I haven't yet registered to be able to contribute on this site, but am still trying. 'Syai' is a language linked to a fictional world and culture, quite well developed in itself. The Syai world has a  sustainable, small-growth stable civilization with a culture of individualized well-being. To me it suggests the direction in which this planet's human civilization might progress to avoid disaster. "Utopia is a beacon on a hill that can never be climbed", but its light can nevertheless show up more clearly the alternative ways. The picture contains an example of hand-written Syia script. The printed script is available but so far only on my personal computer.