What isn't natural?

rob wrote in Message 3: What isn't natural? Even artificial things like nukes, pop-tarts, and robots are natural. "God" is natural, too”no less natural than soap suds or Shakespearean sonnets. Another expression for God is ”Fear Of Death.’ That’s natural enough. The fact that humans have made an extra-big fuss over God doesn’t mean that such fearful fussing is unnatural.Rob, you believe in the supernatural, I suppose. Well, you're not alone. But the God meme is natural enough. Look at the vast studies of historical cultures across the world, primitive or otherwise; they all have supernatural beliefs and God memes. They all fear death. So they are natural, aren't they? What isn’t natural? Can your attitude against nature be justified by invoking the God-Is-Above-Nature principle?The God meme has proven to be ubiquitous across cultures and geographies. The human is like any other animal, we’re all hard-wired to fear death. Some animals take up arms races to counter what they fear, such as the porcupine. Humans do something like that, too, and they also take up religions. That’s natural enough: when humans are so fearful of natural death they naturally invent belief systems to comfort them and lower your stress levels. That’s natural.But you, rob, want to see humans as a special creation. And how do you measure the difference? You invoke the scientific meme of complexity: I suppose you assume godliness is part of human complexity. If anything, why wouldn't that make us a lesser beast in forest? If complexity is the measure you desire, you ought to check out the cuttlefish.”HM

Larni wrote: I use "fear" in metaphorical context, as meaning any animated avoidance of "danger," which also carries meaning as an emotional metaphor. It is natural for life to "fear" death, isn't it? And it is natural to bicker over metaphors. No "affective drive to evolution" to it”no evolutionary cowboys that herd us along to the higher complexity. Careful with your "pains," which amount to a sensory-emotional metaphor. By what measure do you claim a human brain is more complex than, say, the brain of a cuttlefish? My point here is that we speak of natural "complexity" as if it has anthropocentric meaning, and we use the term carelessly without having any relevant measure of its importance.”HM

Percy wrote: I would agree. However, the first definition, albeit valid, is a just bit too anthropocentric for me. It carries a sense of human arrogance. (This may be more my problem than anything else.)”HM

TD wrote: No fun at all. Animals with complicated life cycles, like gastrointestinal parasites and rotifers, seem a lot more complex to me than humans or penguins. It all depends on the parameters.”HM

TD wrote: By your reasoning, then, the stone house of the caddisfly larva is not natural. Nor is the honeycomb, nor the cultured fungus farms of leafcutter ants...”HM

Ikabod wrote: Nah...Have you even watch an ant lion use the physical features of sand grains, slope geometry, and gravity to catch its lunch? None that I've ever watched took mechanical engineering classes at any university I know of. Same thing is true of cone snails”where did they learn about fractals well enough to decorate their shells with them?Crows invent tools. Chimps invent tools, Spiders invent tools. Insect larvae invent tools. Even plaque-forming bacteria invent tools. They all use the same selective, adaptive, exaptive, and trial-and error methods humans use to do their so-called "arificial" things. Even if biologists eventually do make artificial life, it will be natural. And even if artificial life is confinded to virtual reality inside copmputers, it will still be natural.The only things that are not truly natural are those things that people invent to make excuses for their bad behaviors...like God, original sin, saviorism, virginal mothers, and holy ghosts.Once upon a time, the prokaryotes called the eukaryotes "unnatural." Once upon a time the protozoans called the mesazoans "unnatural"...”HM

Freedom, love, hate, economics, and social orders are all natural. And even protein molecules know difference between left and right of center. But nature is neither fair nor kind nor just nor polite. Nature rules and God obeys, or otherwise He is in serious ontological trouble (along with morality).Fundamental, my dear Ikabod.”HMEdited by Hoot Mon, : No reason given.

Yes, because the shallow end is full pompous nincompoops.”HM

Catholic Scientist wrote: Why do you need to draw a line? Why are human activities unnatural? Why is a digital computer's software more unnatural than the digital genetic code? Could it be that your opinion on this derives from your belief that humans are specially made by God? Could it be that your church values trump your intellect?Since I don't belief in anything "super-natural" I don't see why humans are so unnaturally special. And it is not a good idea to take the anthropic principle too seriously; it's worse than bothering over the cosmological constant.”HM

CS,If a wolf gets caught in a snow storm it will find shelter under a tree, curl up in the leaves, and stay as warm as possible...naturally. But if a man does the same thing is he doing artifically? He made a choice, so did the wolf. Oh, yes there is, buster. It even has a digital alphabet. Well, OK. But why isn't "man-made" natural? If beaver-made, fish-made, insect-made, bird-made, and monkey-made are all natural then why can't man-made be natural, too? I think some humans like to assign unnatural characteristics to our species ('cuz we're special in the eyes of The Lord, maybe?) The only characteristic humans have that is truly unnatural is religion. I even regard a written symbolic language as natural, because it occurred in the course of biological evolution under entirely natural conditions. Can you say the same thing about religion?If all you mean by "artificial" is "man-made" then you have not yet explained why either one can't be natural. I think this topic could naturally morph into a discussion on emergent properties. Nature shows us marvelous tricks in that category. I don't see how any emergent property could be artificial unless governed by un-natural laws that don't exist. I don't agree with either statement. How do you define conscious-ness? Control? Does a religious belief pass for conscious-ness? (Well, yes, it certain does have control!) Would you say "scientific conscious-ness" is different from "religious conscious-ness"?I think human consciousness is an extended phenotype of the Dawkinsian variety. At least the tool-making part of it is. If you want to call human tool-making "artificial" then go ahead. But would you agree, per chance, that it is naturally artifical?”HM

CS,I think I understand most of your points. Percy has us summed us up pretty well. But I can't let one aspect of this discussion go completely; it's the part that says humans are unnatural”i.e., 'we are unnatural because we are conscious.' I think you are defining "conscious-ness" from a limited perspective. The only definition of consciousness that I can accept right now is the one posited by Julian Jaynes: consciousness and the bicameral mind are two different things. The bicameral mind is commanded by hallucinations, or godly voices, instinct on steroids, take your pick. Consciousness, on the other hand, recognizes its historical bicamerality and surmounts this primitive human condition by making choices independent of the 'voice of God.' (Thor lost his voice when thunder was intellectually understood.) That was necessary to discover the laws of nature.And, obviously, it was natural to discover the laws of nature. They have ontological meaning!So, if you want to attach artificiality to consciouisness, I guess I'll go along. But I still don't see why artificiality is unnatural. That's all. Religions are unnatural, gods are unnatural, saviors are unnatural, angels are unnatural, all simply because they don't exist, they have no ontology, except for those landscapes of heavenly dreams, which are too subjective to be of any use to this discussion.”HM

CS,OK, I’ll agree that religions exist. But what they stand for does not exist, at least not ontologically.Right now I’m reading a good book on this very discussion topic: “Out of Control/The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World” (1994) by Kevin Kelly, Executive Editor of WIRED. He argues a point I find convincing”that the evolutionary domain he calls “Bios” is seamless and continuous with its corollary “Technos,” both of which are characterized by a kind of emergent property he calls “hive mind.” He sees Technos and just as natural as Bios, while I suppose you might see Bios and natural and Technos as unnatural.”HM

Rob, risking the wrath of an Admin who needs to blow his/her whistle for off-topicism, I would suggest looking at Gdel's "undecidable propositions" this way, as Douglas Hofstadter does (in "Gdel, Escher, Bach." p. p.17): "All consistent axiomatic formuations of number theory include undecidable propositions." Hofstadter uses the Epimenides paradox as an approximate literary example: "I am from Crete, and all Cretans are liars." (John Lennon said it another way: "This is not here.") Therefore, nonsense can attend an otherwise correctly formulated proposition.What Gdel did was to prove his point mathematically, which means that any notion of "absolute-ness" in mathematics can be now dismissed as "undecidable." King Dave may have had a clue, but those bicamerally hallucinated commands got the best of him”they placed boundaries on his pre-emergent consciousness.”HM

My dear mr. crashfrog has violated ever decent principle of these EvC forums. Won't that hurt like a barbed-wire colonoscopy?Furthermore, are we all ready now for the amphibian version of Gdel?”HMEdited by Hoot Mon, : No reason given.

CS wrote: Santa Claus, Tinker Bell, and the Easter Bunny do exist ontologically”they have no empirical being-ness. God fits in there, too. But genes, populations, species, and biospheres are all naturally ontological, like rocks, stars, and gravity. And I suppose "transubstantiation of the Eucharist" is worthwhile mumbo-jumbo?”HM