created by SilasTheSavage on 14/02/2025 at 23:59 UTC
13 upvotes, 13 top-level comments (showing 13)
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1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
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Comment by QuoteAccomplished845 at 15/02/2025 at 01:04 UTC
41 upvotes, 2 direct replies
It was an interesting read.
My stance on the matter, which the article gets close to but eludes, is that everything and anything man created or can create is natural. Artificial food or intelligence is natural. The potential of wood becoming a mighty ship pre-exists in the natural characteristics of wood. Even the potential of art or fantasy pre-exists in the natural characteristics of the human mind. The potential of coding an extremely fun video game not yet released, pre-exists in the code used to create said video game. The potential of creating a code which in place can be used to create, pre-exists in the human mind.
Even if you, arbitrarily, look at animals to set what "natural" is, you will see them manipulating matter for their benefit, like birds creating houses way before man did or beavers creating dams way before man did. You will even see them creating imaginary scenarios for pure entertainment, like when dogs pretend to fight each other or when monkeys literally troll each other and laugh about it.
The scale of matter manipulation or imagination, seems like an arbitrary and purely anthropocentric standard of what "natural" is. Me stepping on an ant colony and destroying it, is completely irrelevant to the human experience. Someone nuking my country and destroying it, is completely irrelevant to the Milky Way galaxy. Both those actions are destructive. Man or man creations cannot be unnatural, whatever the scale, because anything a man can do or think is part of nature. Something being unnatural cannot even be expressed.
Comment by yyzjertl at 15/02/2025 at 01:43 UTC
11 upvotes, 0 direct replies
This was a good article, but I feel like it doesn't really engage with what Mill is claiming.
So what might we think “natural” means? Mill has a pretty influential proposal here (from his three essays on religion): “what takes place without the agency, or without the voluntary and intentional agency, of man.” Basically, unnatural things are those that are influenced by human agency, and natural things are the rest.
Here, Mill claims that the natural is what *takes place* without the agency of man. He is concerned about a category of "phenomena *produced by* human agency." But when the author here rewords it to "influenced by," the meaning is changed. Being influenced is a much weaker condition than being produced. Birds are certainly influenced by human agency, for example, but they were not *produced* by human agency. And it seems more broadly that if we actually take Mill seriously and go back to "takes place without" rather than "influenced by," most of the (real) problems mentioned in this blog post disappear.
Comment by el-pez at 15/02/2025 at 06:51 UTC
7 upvotes, 2 direct replies
Everything is natural
Comment by SgCloud at 15/02/2025 at 10:54 UTC
3 upvotes, 0 direct replies
You could actually come to the complete opposite position that everything that's "out there", including ourselves and the things that we create are a part of nature, insofar as nature is opposed to that is beyond and above nature, i.e. god. I think part of why we usually think of culture not as a part of nature but as logically opposed to it is that we implicitly cling to the theological notion that we as human beings are of divine origin and hence that everything about us except the bare biological realities, e.g. thinking, agency, creativity, etc., is part of a non- and supernatural reality.
Comment by Im_Talking at 15/02/2025 at 10:28 UTC
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
"There is Nothing Natural" - He types as part of his subjective experience.
Comment by mdavey74 at 16/02/2025 at 21:22 UTC
2 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Everything is natural, nothing is unnatural. There is only the natural world.
Aside from the teleological argument you made, which I agree with, what people mean when they say something is unnatural is that it is abnormal to their experience, unfamiliar, nontraditional, uncomfortable.
Comment by Darnocpdx at 15/02/2025 at 06:45 UTC*
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Humans only invent in the abstract, non physical - money/value, god, time/measurments. As for physical things, it's all natural, we don't really invent things, we just move stuff around.
Comment by West_Economist6673 at 15/02/2025 at 07:25 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
I’m not sure I understand the argument being made in this essay. I assumed it was basically what the title says: that we cannot “meaningfully say that there are actually some things that are natural and some that are not” — but if that’s the case, why introduce a meaningful “natural/not natural” distinction in the last paragraph? And if a different point is being made — what is it?
Comment by wstdsgn at 15/02/2025 at 12:08 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Firstly, this would mean that everything is unnatural—or at least everything on the surface of earth. What parts of the earth are wholly unaffected by the actions of humans? The answer: none. An easy way to see this is just to consider greenhouse gas emissions. Plausibly there’s nothing on earth that has not been affected even slightly by changes in climate.
Since we don't emit greenhouse gases with the intention to bring about climate change, I don't see why the suggested definition fails here.
Comment by but_a_smoky_mirror at 16/02/2025 at 04:10 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Disagree, that everything is natural. Even human made materials are made by, naturally occurring humans.
Comment by belizeanheat at 17/02/2025 at 23:33 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Eesh that's bad writing
Comment by Im_Talking at 15/02/2025 at 10:52 UTC
-1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
"We can escape this problem by making naturalness a spectrum: things are more or less natural as a function of how much (and perhaps how distantly in the past) they have been influenced by human agency. "
No you can't. Then any distinction becomes meaningless. Say our wheat we eat is 99% genetically modified by man, yet it lives and grows. Is it any less natural?