39 upvotes, 2 direct replies (showing 2)
View submission: There Is Nothing Natural
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 Aromatic_Top_7967 at 15/02/2025 at 03:12 UTC
4 upvotes, 2 direct replies
Cannot be expressed? Aren't you talking about linguistics here? A person may have a limited understanding about say a concept in science- for instance 'black holes' but lacks the scientific jargon and knowledge to discuss it with another person.
Comment by TevenzaDenshels at 16/02/2025 at 12:00 UTC
2 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Manmade as a subset of nature made makes sense.
But even then nature itself that hasnt been e.g. deforested is still manmade since its still a decision of not killing the environment. Amazing isnt it