Creatio Ex Aliqua

Misconceptions of Environmental Malfeasance

In the following article there is an extensive utilization of Latin terms and phrases. I have supplied an English translation in parenthesis upon the introduction to each Latin term. But the preferable mode is if you are familiar with Latin and able to do so to accept the terms as they would have been understood by a Latin user of the phrases which is why I have included the phrases in Latin to begin with because I often find myself lacking in my ability to properly reinterpret with the precise meaning from one language to another. Basically the article is born out of the title phrase, creation out of something, and the often used religious counter idea that God created everything from nothing. My challenge in this article is to attempt to also counter the Lockean concept of the “blank slate” of the human mind. But I hope the reader will not be offput by the use of Latin.

The stories we learn.

John Locke was not the first behaviorist, or believer that humanity could be shaped or molded into a “better” humanity because the human mind enters the world as a blank slate upon which formulas of behavior and thoughts of man can be written upon a blank slate.  As a child I played with toys on occasions of sociability.  But it’s not that I was never given toys.  In the beginning years I had to innovate because we were too poor to have store-bought toys.  But as my family began to move up, I began being showered with gifts of toys.  Mostly from my father I believe.  When we moved to our first overseas posting my parents entered the DODDS teaching program as a consequence of their reunification, my father’s return to my life brought, I suppose, a bribery of toys to entice me to love him.  These were all the latest gadgets of technologically remote driving cars and battery operated moving toys.  Basically for eight years I had played by innovation, now I had all these wondrous gadgets with absolutely no comprehension of what I was supposed to do with.  The order was already built into them and there was absolutely nothing for me to arrange or present me with an opportunity to develop creatio ex nihilo (created out of nothing), to develop the tools (toys) to do what I wanted the toys to do.  They were already creatio ex aliqua (already created from something), shaped to control my interactions with them.

So while John Locke was not incorrect in his assumption that human experience can be shaped, I believe that the attitude that we are born with minds that can be formulated and behavior that can be developed in the manner that society dictates from being born voided of any personality of their own at birth, that the human at birth is aliqua og personality (with a personality) and not born inanis og personality (empty of a personality.)

One of the first imprints attempted to be input upon the young human is to develop the context that the child has in relation with all that exists outside of his personal aliqua (somethingness, essence).  Part of that is disciplining the child through behavioral modifications to conformitatis modus (conforming into acceptable forms) into within his society that the parents impose upon the child.  But that can only be developed in conjunction with cogitavi progressionem (developing thought patterns).

Unless the child’s cogitavi progressionem can be creatio ex nihilo, then it would be impossible to prevent the natural chao ex consilio (naturally undeveloped plan) and begin to develop the child into a human society of ordine disposito (arranged behavior).  

Because human society is developed through ordine disposito and all existence, including life forms and human life itself, forms through chao ex consilio, all humans begin to attempt to impose conformitatis modus  upon the cogitavi progressionem in the developing child,

And so it all begins with our stories—the first stories we are told that develop the relationship with the environment extra se (external to self).  This is initially presented to us through myths that help us relate the extra se that is necessary for every species that has any cognition to successfully navigate between self and the externalities of self.  It has nothing whatsoever to do with self-recognition or becoming cognizant in the ways of externalities in the way a human has interposed the concept of singularitas humana (human exceptionalism to the environment) that we develop as part of our comprehension of the extra se.  All species, at least beyond those that develop multi-cellular existence do have the ability to distinguish the extra se from the sui (self) and so they all have a degree of agnitio sui, whether humans determine their own agnitio sui in a similar manner, and so one of our earliest presentations to the child as he becomes cognizant of extra se is to impose the concept of singularitas humana upon the burgeoning self-awareness.

And so the first stories we learn are the mythic interpretations (sometimes called age-appropriate stories) presented to a child to explain the extra se to the child.  These mythic interpretations through several mythic impositional types of myth.  There is the myth of comprehending the extra se itself, the why of what is beyond the sui.  At one time this took what we now might call an unscientific interpretation and yet it can still be an essential ingredient through the first stories presented to the child on how he will cognitively relate to scientific interpretation as he progresses into what we determine maturated comprehension of the scientific method of developing thought.  These are the first “myths” that are presented and these are the myths that develop our relationship with the extra se.  The second stage goes into legends that are supposed to conform the child to the concepts of society and his relationship to power within the society.  The concepts of super heroes and gods are part of this cognitive attempt at presenting the child with deceptiones adumbret internos affectus rationalitatis  appellationes ad minus comprehendendo sensuum naturalium. 

Now that last phrase (and the reason for the Latin phrases is that they simply cannot be properly comprehended in English by a direct translation but the most suitable interpretation I can come up with would be literally, “Deceptions outline the inner feelings of rationality by appealing to less than understanding the natural senses.”  And of course this creates the conflict that each individual suffers throughout his life by the varying interpretations of those early mythic teachings that are also taught as essential untruths even though there is no way to de-eternalize those first stories no matter the degree we attempt to ridicule them as “childish.”  

Those stories seep into our consciousness and relate to the development later imposed that our mental growth is recognized by the degree we rationalize our emotions.  But can rationality, void of emotion actually achieve any consensual internality, or will it only tear our rationality away from our inner feelings and create unfulfilled longings that are expressed via irrational divides of ideologies based on the same internalized needs?

When legend is superimposed upon our need to comprehend,  to basic conflict between the sui and the extra se then an internal longing is developed for the powerful hero to set the sui free from the extra se that has been placed upon his cogitavi progressionem by attempting to  conformitatis modus  upon a person that was never born ex nihilo but was born ex aliqua.  Now as part of that aliqua that the human is born with is a species need, as in all communal species, for ego in conventu (part of the group), through conformitatis modus through methods that elevatio sui per civitatem (self-elevation over the community) or if we develop a hierarchicam dependentiam a communitate (dependence on the community's structured authorities.) If part of our birth as a human species is a strong recognition of both the sui and the communitatis, then the conformitatis modus requires a belief that our  cogitavi progressionem be shaped in a manner that  conflicts with the ex aliqua of the human child born with the need elevatio sui per civitatem to become subdued against the nature of his birth into a   conformitatis modus developed by  hierarchicam dependentiam a communitate.  

The result can be illustrated easily by the popular appeal of two  contemporaneously artistic presentations.  Both actually exhibit our internal rejection of what has been imposed by the culture that has attempted to alter the nature of the human species birthright inheritance. One is the “superhero” that our early stories of Paul Bunyans and Superman, and God-man somehow delivered us to a justice we don’t feel we are necessarily able to participate as strong individual selfs in a hierarchically structured framework.  So we look for the hero to relieve the self from the hierarchy.  

The other genre is of course illustrated in the genre of the controlled society by the overlords who place no meaning on the lives of the individuals.  This can be seen in such films as Elysium, Divergent, The Maze Runner, The Hunger Games, et al.In these films people need to learn to come together in order to overcome the hierarchy imposed upon them.  In the latter category we find the inward genetic birthright of our very somethingness at birth needing communities to survive in harmony against the elements (humanly imposed barriers and not  those imposed by nature.)  In these movies humans are united in a common need to each contribute individually in a united effort.

Humans evolutionally succeeded because the one who discovered the sources of food,the one who determined how to store food for later use, the one who determined how to develop more effective tools for both endeavors, advanced the species in a common manner where each was equally contributory, and the myths developed were centered on this recognition, no matter individual status.  People conformed to work in a harmony that respected the need for each individual, but de-emphasized the individual who attempted to favor himself over the other members.  And these myths entered into the earliest stories presented to its newborns and were the explanations given to explain the extra se to the sui.  

On the other hand the superhero, the Odysseus, the Sinbad, the Paul Bunyan stood out from humanity, or the combination of godly blood and human blood could create the superhero with petulant disregard for other humans that were inferiorly attuned and lacking in any godly proportions to succeed as well.  Thus we find the misfortunes in battle among the Greeks when Achilles withdrawals, and the need to insure success by propitiations to Achilles.  Achilles never cared if the Greeks as an entity were successful as  long as he, himself, was successful.

And then we entered into the Gods themselves whose power extended to control of the ex aliqua.  In the Jewish god, we notoriously have a god who creates all ex aliqua from ex nihilo.That the God himself was ex aliqua and everything else ex nihilo is somehow never well explained.  But this debate has not ended.  The most modern approach is to reject that the somethingness of our existence had to probably have developed in some way from a prior somethingness.  And while the argument of a choas forte ex creo (existence through chance) is somewhat lessening as we are developing more teleological understandings, it has certainly not gone away.  The problem we still do not comprehend is exactly how any stuff of existence came into existence as the stuff and if there are possibilities of other existences that form stuff into alternative existening stuffs.

Without Any Theisms

Existendi sine creatura a deo vel deprehensio hominis (existence without the creation of God or the detection of man).  The essential problem I find with the concept of atheism is because of that.  Atheism is still a theism but it has changed a creation by a god to a creation detected by man remains a conundrum even when attempts are made to detect information and limit or adjust for the anthropic observations. Bertrand Russell notably once cryptically exhorted that what one believes before he observes will determine the outcome of the observation.

Brendan Carter noted that, “"Although our situation is not necessarily central, it is inevitably privileged to some extent”.  Of course, when stating this Carter was reacting against the Copernican Principle that had been stated to essentially remove mankind from his centrality in his observation that he was the focused center of the universe.  Now Carter believed that there was most likely an ensemble of universes and the human was limited in being able to observe only the one he was in a position to observe.  I don’t believe that Carter meant anything similar to Berkeley’s observation that a tree that falls still made a sound even if no human heard the sound, that that was proof that there must be a God to observe the sound absent a human detector.  Carter does not exclude existence(s) of any stuff unobserved but he does say all the stuff indicates that we are privileged to observe whatever we have the capacity to observe.  Personally, I take issue that stuff needs to be observed to exist and even though Carter later expressed regrets on how his own thesis was taken, he nevertheless recentralized the role of man in observation of that stuff.  Copernicus had attempted to present baby steps away from that position, albeit the Copernican Perfect Cosmological Principle that all large regions and times must be statistically similar.  By 1965 the discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation pretty much defied the principle itself even though there had begun a thesis against Copernicus Principle from the beginnings of the 20th century.  

In fact, the evolutionary biologist Alfred Russel Wallace anticipated the anthropic principle in evolutionary terms as long ago as 1904: "Such a vast and complex universe as that which we know exists around us, may have been absolutely required…in order to produce a world that should be precisely adapted in every detail for the orderly development of life culminating in man.”   When you add into the equation von Neumann’s Participatory Anthropic Principle in observation of quantum particles we realize the incapacity of anthropocentrism to be completely vacuumed from all human observation.  

Now recognizing the influence of these concepts on modern “scientific creationism”, there is nevertheless a conundrum to the development of non-theism that refocuses the creator-god to the observational-man that focuses the emphasis of human observation not as replacement for the creator-god but as an extension of god’s creation to man’s ability or desire to refashion both the environment of man as well as the society of man into a community still needing the superhero of goddish strength to lead the individual from the isolation of the self’s ex aliqua genetic allegiance, to becoming susceptible to being reformed as if his genetics offers upon his birth an ex nihilo slate to develop.

So if we look at man’s relationship with both his society and his environment we find a nature confused by the stories that have translated the myths that enabled a community to survive by recognizing the strength of the individuals acting in concert because they had no superiority to the environment but were mere participants within the environment and required each other to survive because they lacked superiority over the environment and ecocentrism that recognized that affecting the environment negatively made surviving within that environment more difficult for the sum.  Life of each individual was of an essential importance to that sum that survived as  mere non-essential participants in the eco-environment.  In this sense were there a creator, his role did not elevate man through stewardship but diminished him through commonality with all of the rest of the world of whatever did exist.  The anthropocentric individual was thus unwelcome and seen as disruptive to the necessity of survival within the ecoexistence.  

Whether one believes in a theism, whether a theism of gods, or a theism of man acting as his own creating entity does not distinguish themselves to me from being part and parcel of the anthroeco submission that intuitively conflicts with but have been impressed upon us from our first stories, the legends of gods and men that are exceptional  that lead us to submit to both the inner need to be released from our despairs by the superhero and our continued obedience to the projections of human extraordinariness.

The human whose own ability to survive is dependent on anthroecocentrism that disputes only a particular policy of ecological harmony still dependent on the anthroecocentric approach to making corrections will still not be led to respect their own peculiar role within the environment.  The method of antrhoecocentrintisic approaches are one and the same and will make no substantial differences in any future ability to survive if we remain sublimated to the idea of human superiority to the something of existence.

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