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:
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:
> 15: of an off-white or beige color