I think I agree with the thrust of what you are saying, in that we do need to think about the negative externalities of different technologies before scaling them out as a species.
I am getting a little tripped up on your usage of 'the natural world' and 'environmental destruction' though. Aren't humans 'natural'? And if we are natural, shouldn't anything that springs from us also be 'natural'? We are subject to the 'laws of nature'. Is a beaver dam a natural thing? An ant hill? A bee hive? A bird's nest?
It's obviously nitpicking semantics and word usage, but I think people often use 'natural world' to refer to their own human preferences for how the world should look (often just as it looked as they were growing up), and by using the term 'nature', it carries a sense of absolute purity, and anything that goes against it must be wrong.
'Natural' arguments have been used throughout history, and still get frequently used today as a cudgel to dismiss any sort of social/technological change happening.
Now this is not to say that there can't be arguments against certain changes or that all change is the same, but the invocation of what's 'natural' always feels like a cheap rhetorical tactic in place of a stronger argument about why one state of the world is inferior to another state of the world.
An ant hill or a beaver dam are mere reorganizations of known matter types, and could be analogized to humans building things like walls. Stone, and even some types of mortar, participate in the great cosmic dance of Gaia [0], just like the works of the animals cited above. They decay, they are broken down by various processes over time, they are fashioned of things found in the environment.
PFAS, by comparison, does not, cannot, and is not, respectively. It doesn't break down, and was never present in any ecosystem nor any part of the water cycle until a few decades ago -- an fraction of an eyeblink in the sort of evolutionary time it'll take for PFAS' presence to be integrated into the cosmic dance of Gaia, and until then it's just gonna cause cancer.
I can agree that invoking the naturalistic fallacy isn't good argumentative practice, but some things are decidedly unnatural. Creating novel waterproofing chemicals that don't have naturally-occurring ways to break down and then dumping them into the water supply isn't something beavers, or ants, or birds, can do. Humans have transcended the natural world. I can tell because of all the new types of things we're adding to it.
[0] should be read less as some pseudoreligious thing and more a handwave about the ancient, stable systems that repurpose atoms from moribund things into newer, more vital things: microbes, fungus, rot, uptake of substances by plants, etc
Not sure that's accurate. Animals aren't trying to create things that break down easily; they're not trying to do anything but survive. The argument is circular: if animals make it, it's part of Gaia else it's 'unnatural'. Animals didn't make plastics, so they're 'unnatural'. By definition I guess, not by any real difference between them and bone or termite mounds or dinosaur bones or geodes...you know, things that can last for millennia.
Hell, even the Earth itself is made of crystals and granite and lead and arsenic and on and on. What's more natural than mother earth?
I don't applaud plastics entering the environment carelessly. But not sure we have a handle on why it's bad, when we say its not natural.
>The argument is circular: if animals make it, it's part of Gaia else it's 'unnatural'. Animals didn't make plastics, so they're 'unnatural'.
Er, this is your argument, not mine. Mine is: "if animals make it, and it is unmade (or remade, or recycled, or broken down [0]) by something else, then this is 'natural'." Plastics nor PFAS meet that standard. Those matter types stay static. The animals called 'humans' make plenty of other stuff that can't be adapted by microbes and fungus and rot that keep things from the natural world participating.
>By definition I guess, not by any real difference between them and bone or termite mounds or dinosaur bones or geodes...you know, things that can last for millennia
But this is the real pièce de stràwman: the objects under discussion have expanded from things that animals build, to natural features that don't chemically interact with the environment. Of course fucking bones and geodes aren't the same as nonbiodegradable plastics or PFAS -- not only are they contained physically by virtue of their properties, but they are also regularly destroyed by the various systems of Earth, like UV light or multicellular life, or the same geological processes that create them, respectively.
Every example provided in the parent is, and has been, a part of the world for so long that they're not disruptive to other systems, or at least are physically contained.
>I don't applaud plastics entering the environment carelessly
Should they be introduced more thoughtfully? The point is that the system is unfamiliar with it. It can't be broken down and reused by something new.
[0] Plastics 'break down' into smaller plastics. I don't think that quite counts.
Granite breaks down about as fast as plastic. No, plastic is not very different from, well, almost the entirety of the planet earth. But for a thin skin of muck.
Geodes and dissolved heavy metals and salts and on and on -all entirely 'natural' and been there forever - don't chemically interact, much.
Natural poisons exist nearly everywhere. Nature is not some wonderful synchrony of cooperative organisms. Everything is doing its best to kill something else through poison, acid, lye, violence etc. That apricot pit wants to kill you with cyanide so it's pit can thrive in your decaying body.
Heck, an imbalance in ordinary creatures (think invasive species) can do untold harm.
Examples abound. It's not about kind, just concentration and rate.
It's a complex system, and the dichotomy 'natural' doesn't contribute much to the discussion. That's my thinking anyway.
You aren't reading, or possibly understanding, what I'm writing.
Granite seems fine to me, and even if it isn't, it is localized in ways plastic and PFAS aren't. Plastic is very different from almost the entirety of the planet earth. It doesn't occur naturally, and doesn't break down naturally; just like PFAS. You can obscure this fact all you like, but it's trivially true.
>Natural poisons exist nearly everywhere. Nature is not some wonderful synchrony of cooperative organisms. Everything is doing its best to kill something else through poison, acid, lye, violence etc. That apricot pit wants to kill you with cyanide so it's pit can thrive in your decaying body.
Natural poisons (wait, now you're fine with invoking "natural"?!) are broken down over time -- they're natural. That apricot pit doesn't "want" anything, unlike the humans that make plastics or PFAS, and its cyanide "pollution" is contained physically by virtue of its properties, unlike the plastics and PFAS made by humans. Plus, the pit is easily metabolized by the various systems of microbes and fungus and rot that keep things from the natural world participating in the great cycle, like cyanide and apricot pits and apricot flesh and absolutely everything related to or created by apricots ever. I repeat, "every example provided in the parent is, and has been, a part of the world for so long that they're not disruptive to other systems, or at least are physically contained".
The system is complex, yes, so let's not go polluting almost the entire environment with things that haven't existed long enough for the various naturally-occurring garbagemen to notice, let alone adapt to them. Are unnaturally occurring materials vital to modern human life? Yes! Do we absolutely need to blanket the ecosystem in them, to our cancerous detriment? No!
Your definition involves setting humanity apart from
nature and then inverting the implicit superiority in doing that. Once you’ve taken those steps you can say anything people make that isn’t made by other animals is worse because it is unnatural.
To me the essential idea is we have the scale and capacity to move global homeostasis in ways that few animals (at least since dinosaurs) have.
Plastics are not unnatural. They are produced by animals. Humans are animals. Just more dangerous than others on a global scale.
Wax moths and bacteria both have already naturally mutated and evolved to consume plastics. Evolution and life are perhaps less fragile than you think.
None of this is to say we shouldn’t behave responsibly, only to say we also shouldn’t panic every time someone creates something that kills some stuff. That too is natural, and drives evolution.
Exactly as parent stated, there already are organisms evolving to consume plastic. The same is probable to happen for PFAS. It has carbon therefore it contains useful energy that some creature will eventually evolve to digest and outcompete other organisms.
That of course is to the detriment of the very properties we desire in these materials. Just as flooding the environment with antibiotics made them less effective, so will flooding the world with plastic will make plastic lose it's advantages. Just more slowly. This is another reason to not contaminate the environment with our externalities.
It's useful to distinguish things that are made with human influence and things that aren't, and it can be done without value judgments (one is superior or inferior). It's useful because of the disproportionate effect of synthetic things vs. natural things. No species prior to humans had the ability to obliterate all life on earth.
On the contrary, some species have already obliterated most other life on earth namely cyanobacteria during the great oxigenation event. Possibly others have done the same. They certainly did not care at all about the destruction they caused. All of this was perfectly "natural".
That of course does not mean we should follow their example. It just means that "natural" is not a useful term.
This is still a far cry from a global nuclear winter or a deliberately redirected asteroid, or any other number of things that only humans are capable of.
The Great Oxigenation Event is a terraforming level event. We are not yet capable of such a large scale manipulation. Nuclear winter is at most comparable to a supervolcano or an asteroid impact.
Also, if you consider asteroids to be natural and their orbits to be natural then "nature" is already plenty capable of playing cosmic billiards. Or do you want to restrict nature to just biology?
Everything you’re saying is anthropocentric. Give it 1, 10, or 100 million years and the natural order you idolize will have upended itself a thousand times over. All the familiar species will be extinct except for a few. The surface of the earth will have been buried or ground to dust under glaciers. Rivers, lakes and coastlines will warp and vanish and new ones will be created. The changes we have made will be wiped away but even if they remained they would pale in comparison to the violence that nature will have wrought on itself. Hopefully we will be among the stars then having outgrown this tiny pebble.
I mean, sure. Do you have any instrumental goals that aren't anthropocentric? I'm serious. Do you want anything, anything, that isn't explicable by your embodiment as a human on the planet on which you evolved? I can barely think of anything at all that fits that criteria, let alone something in that category that I personally might want.
Having evolved under the conditions that have largely prevailed for 100,000 years or more, I'm anxious to not rock the Great Boat too sharply. The rate of change is ultimately unstoppable, but we don't have to introduce disruption into otherwise stable systems, and thereby increase it. Why? Because I, too, if I manage to think that far ahead, agree that humanity should ought to get out among the stars because nature's inexorable march will change those conditions no matter what we do. Consider, however, the nature of the blood system in vertebrates: it evolved in the way that it did to emulate the properties of the ocean that once surrounded our simplistic, barely-multicellular ancestors. Diffusing foodstuff in and waste out is a passive existence; putting those services under the control of an internal ocean that the organism can influence means much more complex options. Like leaving the ocean entirely, and becoming something new.
The environment around us is intertwined with our health and well-being, in ways that we don't yet understand. If the natural environment, the "ocean", changes under our feet too quickly, we won't be able to package enough of it up to take with us to the stars. Put another way, are there any external dependencies for, say, vaginal pH? How about nutritive crops? Gut flora? How much greenery should a human see to remain psychologically healthy? What does the greenery require? We're in the very early stages of "evolving a blood system" so we can leave; we need to ensure the environment can sustain us until we do.
You keep saying fuzzy things like "made by humans", and "easily metabolized by other microbes", and "great cycle". I'd suggest pinning down a more formal definition of natural. Here's one (well, many): https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/natural.
By definition 4
> 4: having an essential relation with someone or something
your rhetorical question and answer:
> Are unnaturally occurring materials vital to modern human life? Yes!
pretty much prove that plastic is natural, by definition 4, of course.
The closest definition of the 15 to the way you are using the word is 8
> 8: occurring in conformity with the ordinary course of nature
But that's more related to a process by which something occurs. And the key word there is ordinary. The closest I think we have to your argued use of natural would be saying something like the process of extraordinarily changing the environment in a way that disrupts existing ordinary processes, is unnatural. The example used for this definition is death, so something like murdering somebody with a gun might be colloquially closest to this definition, for the death was unnatural.
But regardless, semantically we run up against a pretty unarguable definition when looking at the noun nature:
> 1: the external world in its entirety
By definition whatever the world includes is part of nature.
It's pretty clear you can't exclude humans from nature and then argue anything they do is not natural.
Getting off of semantics, the reason this is even an argument at all is because nature in a transhumanist world might look very different than nature in our predominately "organic", or human, world. And an argument in the piece we're discussing is that transhumanism isn't interesting anymore because we're living it. Then, if we're living it, it's our nature. We introduced plastics, who's to say microbes or fungi or nanobots won't develop to decompose plastic too? Certainly that exhibits the characteristics you describe as participating in the great cosmic dance of Gaia, no? Even so, it still boils down to a time scale thing. If we made obsidian in a lab, would it be unnatural just because it didn't come from a volcano? Yes, and no!
Finally, a reassuring reminder that HN is, in fact, quite natural:
> Mine is: "if animals make it, and it is unmade (or remade, or recycled, or broken down [0]) by something else, then this is 'natural'."
Does this mean that at some point in time lignin was artificial by your definition, as it couldn't be broken down by anything for a few million years as far as we can tell?
PFAS, like nearly everything, has a half-life. As a category so large the half-lives can range from days to thousands of years in a vacuum, but even those with thousand year half-lives can be broken down with catalysis in seconds.
It is new tech on the scale of humanity and we will figure it out.
> Creating novel waterproofing chemicals that don't have naturally-occurring ways to break down and then dumping them into the water supply isn't something beavers, or ants, or birds, can do.
Genes encode proteins, proteins are chemicals, so evolution creates new proteins, and organisms often dump them to environment. The difference is that other organisms produce new chemicals through genetic evolution and not memetic evolution, like humans. Some of these chemicals are initially non-breakable, for example after lignin was introduced, it took millions of years to evolve organisms able to break it.
I invite you to learn more about termites, their physical mounds and their rearing of young.
Specifically, how a co-evolved gut parasite allows termites to do the things they do and requires a fecal transplant, at birth, for every new termite.
In the continuum between beaver dams and human highways this kind of physical and biological organization should figure prominently… and I hope you find it interesting.
You're just playing with semantics. If everything humans do is natural than everything is natural: computers, plastics, concrete, etc. The purpose of using the word natural is to distinguish from what is unnatural, and without grabbing a dictionary, for me that generally means something that does not "naturally" occur (i.e. without human intervention specifically) in the natural world.
Chemical engineers create unnatural things, things that don't exist in the natural world.
That's the whole point. Word "natural" is not good in any serious argument because it simply doesn't have well-recognized unambiguous semantics most people can agree on. Ask a bunch of folks if some things are natural and while they'll most likely agree on the basics (wild forest flower is most likely would be called "natural", while a mobile phone is most likely not) the opinions will start to diverge on less obvious stuff (e.g. penicillin).
It's like a concept of "god" - everyone has their own idea what it might mean. (full disclosure: I'm ignostic).
With such words it's best to either start with a definition, or pick some different, less ambiguous term.
I disagree. It's easy to choose this as a position if you intend to argue disingenuously, and therefore you always ensure that your argument positions are logically sound, and complex and abstract enough so as to exclude most others from being able to argue back. On the other hand, if you are steel manning the other person's argument, instead of playing a complex word definition game that invalidates what they've said on account that they haven't explicitly defined for you all of the axioms of their position, (and if they did you can attack their argument with a different set of nit picking fallacies such as "too long didn't read"), you would probably find their argument compelling, or at the very least you would be forced to reveal the true reason you disagree with them. It's much easier to attack somebody else's argument for using the wrong language than it is to present your own position.
I guess when I say “natural,” what I truly mean is “that which is not made by man.” Any substance which is found in the natural environment and mechanically altered does not count in my definition of man-made; this is essentially the same notion of natural that revolvingocelot points out.
I think the crusade against “natural bias” is unfounded. Of course there are plenty of natural things that are not good for us—such as viruses— but the painful and uncomfortable truth about natural maladies like viruses is that they represent nature working as intended (protecting us from the ills of overpopulation, for example).
The bottom line is that changing everything we dislike about nature can lead to our demise. She’s already thought a million steps ahead of whatever we hope to accomplish.
You are still anthropomorphousising nature. Nature does not intend to protect us from anything, much less from overpopulation. Nature does not intend anything as a whole. Each living creature simply intends to survive and multiply. Not changing anything about nature will also lead to our demise. Most non-human organisms (maybe all other than domesticated dogs and lifestock) are either ambivalent or opportunistically trying to kill us. Because we are made of carbon and therefore contain useful energy.
Anthropomorphousising I believe is the greatest and most wide spread cognitive limitation of humanity.
Absolutely. Anthropomorphizing is just a metaphorical way to simplify the highly complex system that is formally known as natural selection. It also alludes to the notion of Earth as one big organism, popularly known as the Gaia hypothesis.
I don’t think there’s any harm in this. Ships that humans build are also addressed as feminine. It’s just a thing that we do.
I would argue there is great cognitive harm in anthropomorphizing. And it very much does not simplify anything, quite the opposite.
I do believe the notion of metaorganisms is useful. A human can be considered an emerging metaorganism formed from millions of cells of various origin including human, bacteria, viruses, giruses, parasites, etc.
We are also possibly part of larger metaorganisms, probably in the form of cities. And the entire planet can be considered a metaorganism. Terraforming another planet can be interpreted as a planet having offspring.
Arguing for the existence of metaorganisms is not the same as arguing that the mataorganism is aware and influences its own internal processes affecting its lower level member organisms. You (your conscious self) do not tell your kidney what to do.
Natural selection is very much not self aware and it is not trying to achieve an end goal, much less so a goal with regards to humanity. Nature has not "thought" neither ahead nor behind nor to the side of us.
From Wikipedia:
"The Gaia hypothesis proposes that living organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings on Earth to form a synergistic and self-regulating, complex system that helps to maintain and perpetuate the conditions for life on the planet."
Do not confuse the Gaia hypothesis with a Gaia god. By anthropomorphizing that is what you do. Gaia does not answer your prayers, nor hear them, nor care for them.
I consider, anthropomorphizing to be the root mechanism at the formation of all religions. Humans were exposed to uncontrollable phenomena. In their attempt to influence them they anthropomorphizied the phenomena. As a result they could attemp to bargain with it, plead with it, threaten it, beg it, blame it, thank it, etc. . We have just repurposed the neural pathways used to communicate with other humans in order to communicate with the environment. Probably for the same reason a nerural net will missrecognise a leopard print sofa as a leopard. The unknown, unpredictability, is more terrifying than anything else, and definitely more terrifying than being wrong. Anthropomorphizing is also one of the things that will stand in our way towards developing AI. We will continue to redefine intelligence in order to maintain human exceptionality.
I believe anthropomorphizing is fundamentally wrong.
A lot of, probably even majority of viruses are a good thing - they add horizontal gene transfer to improve the evolution[1] and survival chances of species, sometimes even multiple ones at once, also making our own human virome[2].
I would define "natural" as meaning something that has evolved on this planet, and through that process has reached a sustainable, though arbitrarily complex balance in the ecosystem.
I am getting a little tripped up on your usage of 'the natural world' and 'environmental destruction' though. Aren't humans 'natural'? And if we are natural, shouldn't anything that springs from us also be 'natural'? We are subject to the 'laws of nature'. Is a beaver dam a natural thing? An ant hill? A bee hive? A bird's nest?
It's obviously nitpicking semantics and word usage, but I think people often use 'natural world' to refer to their own human preferences for how the world should look (often just as it looked as they were growing up), and by using the term 'nature', it carries a sense of absolute purity, and anything that goes against it must be wrong.
'Natural' arguments have been used throughout history, and still get frequently used today as a cudgel to dismiss any sort of social/technological change happening.
Now this is not to say that there can't be arguments against certain changes or that all change is the same, but the invocation of what's 'natural' always feels like a cheap rhetorical tactic in place of a stronger argument about why one state of the world is inferior to another state of the world.