On Creation

Day 38

For you to make something, like an artificial person or a knight, is for it to be that something exists in the world, which would not exist except for some action of yours. To make something is to cause something to exist, and to create a gem in the world. We can say that the one responsible for the existence of a gem is you, the gem of you in the world. So, in the world before the moment of creation we have a gem – you – which then, at the moment of creation, extends in the world - acts – and acts in such a way that a new gem begins its existence at some part of the world. That new gem is somehow connected to the you-gem, in a way that we can call – responsibility. In other words, you are responsible for what you do. This a possible way of understanding the creation of anything, but not just the creation of something in particular. Because everything, including acts, feelings, and intentions, can be thought of as a gem and put together in complex ways to end up with just about anything, what you do is not just what you make, as in make a ship or a speech, but also in what you make, as in, make of the world. Because the gem you create effects the world, and all gems in the world are connected, by making a new gem or doing an action, you also effect the world and effect yourself. In short, you change everything – creation and responsibility are bound up with each other. Yet, there also seems to be a large gulf between them. Surely you are responsible for everything that you do – but are you responsible for everything that happens?

I am inclined to say no, to an extent. There is some share of responsibility in everything, and it is this link of responsibility that stands behind many calls to action, but that does not mean you are responsible for everything to the extent that you can be blamed for everything, or that everything which happens is entirely your fault. Rather, just as the world has two poles the inner free will and the outer reality, the creation of gems in the world is due to at least two things – the choices that you make, and the forces that you find yourself unable to deny. We can say that there are limits to the world which you make, and limits that you find. When you create something, you are involved with both of these sorts of limits.

What is it that we do when we create? We have followed along with Lewis the argument that the chivalrous man, the knight, is a sort of made or created person. He does not come about naturally. To come about naturally is to come to be, to be created, due to some natural force or tendency. Thus, to be created in the world due to the strength of an outside force, due to the limits of a world which you find you can't deny. Something which is entirely natural is not our responsibility, because we have nothing to do with its creation. However, these natural things are still only hypotheticals, because we rarely run into something which is not our fault at all. Since all that is is in the world, and the world is between two poles, we could rightly say that everything which is in the world is the gem that it is, partially due to us. In other words, this way of viewing the world takes seriously the claim that we could deny everything in the world. This is a sort of solipsistic world, but crucially a solipsistic world where we do in fact hold ultimate power. Thus, under this view it could appear to be the case that if I died, the entire universe and everything in it, the entire world, would cease to exist.. This might well be the case, but I entertain serious unsureties about it, the major one of which is in the power of we have in a solipsistic world. As I've stated earlier, one of the issues that I perceive in a solipsistic world is the issue that I do not entirely know myself. I have no wish to re-hatch the entire piece of writing her,e but suffice to say that I feel the belief in the unknown self puts paid to the idea of solipsistic power such that nothing could exist without us, at least the mind of us which is the world-gem of us. The importance of an unknown free-will core is perhaps more to the point, but the disappearance of free-will from the world would perhaps only lead to the destruction of my existence in the world, not necessarily the existence of everything in reality. All this added up together is a defense of the idea that we make things in the world from scratch, or entirely at our own discretion.

When we make or create things, one of the questions that we can have is – do we create something from nothing, or do we create things using other things? While the idea that we create things from nothing – that we cause gems to exist in the world which are not made up of others gems or shards – probably not the case, since it is just another way of arguing for solipsistic or godly power on our part, it would perhaps be illuminating to believe it. Remember , we believe everything – so, what if it is true that we create things from nothing?

Let us take this word by word, 'create', 'things', 'nothing'. To create is to make, to cause a gem to exist it the world, or to cause a logic-field point, or a possible-world area under a limit. That is, to be responsible for a 'thing', which is another way of saying any of the above three examples. Those two issues are not so mysterious now, after all, but what remains is 'nothing'. So, what is nothing? A thing is a gem in the world, so maybe nothing is a gem outside the world. However, if a gem exists, then that gem is a part of, or a structure of, the world. So, if nothing is a gem outside the world, then nothing is something. We seem to be getting nowhere – so lets break it down further. 'nothing' consists of two words, 'no' and 'thing'. A thing is a gem, and a gem is part of the world, so, well we can make things more complex by reference to the many-sided nature of all things, let us try to simplify. This means that we will not get the full picture – so be it. So, a thing is a gem. Nothing is thus a no-gem, a not-a-gem. We will clarify this difference by, instead of referring to a not-gem as nothing, referring to is as a 'no-thing'.

What is a nothing? We know that all things which exist do exist – that: is, is. Those things which we know exist, do exist within the world. Everything which we know is, is in the world, and is a gem in the world, and all that exists it the world are gems – well, gems and the unknown cores of gems. The unknown cores of gems are also the limits of the world – the area which exists and that is not in the world. Thus, we have the difference between what we know exists, the world, and that which does exist but we don't know it exists – reality. Is is, but we do not know all that is. We know the world exits in reality because it does, but we don't know that the world is 'correct', or that it actually reflects our models reality, or in any way how it is connected to reality, except by the mere fact that what is possible in the world – what ever that is, which may or may not be what we think it is – is definitely possible in reality, because it is. Reality may be the world, but as long as we have a questions to which we do not know the answer, we at least suspect very strongly that what we understand the world to be is not necessarily what actually is, what reality is. Which all goes to say, that if we can create something from no-thing, then we create things from what is not in the world – from what is in reality.

To say that we create something is to say that we are responsible for it, and to be responsible for something to exist is to make it exist in the world. Because what is in the world is what is possible, another way of saying this is to say that we cause a thing which we did not know existed, a thing which was not in the world, to be in the world. When we create things, we turn them from being possible to being actual. We move the thing – the gem – from the possibility-space of reality to the possibility-space of the world.

We create things, but it is also possible for the thing to create itself, in a way. Imagine an asteroid that is hurling towards the earth at this moment. We don't see it, don't feel it, don't even know that it is there. Then one day the asteroid slams into the earth, and this results in a lerge explosion. If you are standing nearby when this explosion happens, then it first appears to you that the explosion came from nowhere. This explosion is a gem in the world, an existent-event. At first it appears to be magic, but as you study the explosion, you begin to imagine reasons for the explosion to happen. You begin to imagine that the explosion was created. Through various works, you learn that the explosion happened because of an asteroid hitting the earth. You also learn that you did not see the asteroid before it hit the earth. You could not have created the explosion, been responsible for the existence of the explosion, because as far as you were concerned the asteroid did not exist. However, the asteroid did exist in reality, just not in the world as you know it, until all of a sudden it did.

In order – The world existed, and everything is in the world was known to exist. The asteroid existed in reality, but the asteroid was not known to exist. Eventually, the asteroid caused an explosion which was known to exist in the world. The explosion first appeared to come from nowhere, but it was eventually realized that the explosion was caused by an asteroid. Thus, the existence of the asteroid is now known in the world. So, the world has expanded into reality, or reality has intruded into the world – the asteroid now exists in the world, when before it did not. The world was thus revealed to have been incomplete before the explosion, because we could not have known if there was going to be an explosion due to an asteroid or not, because we did not know about the asteroid. Put another way, the gem of the explosion and an asteroid have been added to the world, and the world has grown to be a more correct version of reality. This is an explanation of the the cracking and growth of a world.

Thus, we have an explanation for how something can come to be created from no-thing, by force majeur intrusion of reality into the world, which we earlier said was possible. This is something which we are not, effectively, responsible for – a gem created by, as it were, outside forces. What was possible in the world, the limits of the world, have now expanded. It remains to talk about creations which we are responsible for.

A creation which we are responsible for is a gem which enters the world due to choices that we have made. To create something, and to expand the world, is the same action. So, if something is created in the world, then the world is expanded because of something that we did. We turned a gem which we did not know was possible – a gem in reality – into a gem which we knew was possible, a gem in the world. A gem in the world can also be understood as a point in a logic field, or an entire logic field. These points can come about either through forced creation, or through expansion. Forced creation is creation by force-majeur from outside, such as an explosion. It is something happening which we did now know about before, and which we are not effectively responsible for. Creation of a new point through expansion is an outgrowth of a logic field, a point in a logic field which is related to previous points in the logic field. This is the same sort of activity as the first gem that we created in this piece – the gem which came about in the world because of an action that we, the gem, took in the world, and which is connected to us by the relation of responsibility. In other words, a gem which is an outgrowth of us in the world, the result of us acting in the world, and something we created which was not forced on us by an outside force. Rather, it is something which we at least partially created out of stuff that was already in the world. It is a gem that we created out of things – the world – and also out of no-thing – the thing in reality. We took something/s from the world, put them together, and made something which did not exist in the world before, even though it could have existed. It appears to us that we made something form and expanded the world, but by expanding the world we also turned what was a no-thing, a gem which was not in the world, into a thing – a gem in the world. In short, we have expanded the limits of the world and made the impossible possible, but the gem we made was not impossible, we only =thought it was so, even though we couldn't have known it was possible until we did so. Therefore, it appears to us that we did something impossible, even though we didn't.

Remember that limits are vague, and so is the world itself. Thus, we are not entirely sure what is impossible and what is not. This accords with experience of all sorts, where we think we can do it, but we aren't totally sure. It is only after you have done something that you know for sure it was possible, no matter how strong your belief was beforehand. Things and actions that you think you can do but are't sure about have a somewhat ghostly existence compared to things that you have actually done. This is why we get butterflies in the stomach when doing something difficult, because we aren't entirely sure. Of course, we aren't entirely sure about anything and any part of the world could fall apart at any time.

We can also say that this is the process whereby the possible become the actual.