This sentiment has always made me question when people say things are "unnatural", "artificial", or "synthetic": If we ourselves are of nature, and these things are a byproduct of us, then aren't they naturally occurring?
edit: added "synthetic" to reduce ambiguity.
The fact that a naturally occurring thing (human beings) can create artificial things is not surprising under this definition.
The definition can also be theoretically extended to other human-like agents, like hypothetical aliens. It hasn't been practically very necessary so far.
Edit: I should note that this is the sense of "artificial" or "unnatural" that is used in the context of the article. There is a secondary meaning, used in phrases such as "artificial sweetner" vs "natural pesticide" that I don't think stands up too well to serious scrutiny.
To be fair, "unnatural" is sometimes extended to refer to "life" instead of "humans", typically only when talking about the evolution of life or the search for extraterrestrial life. In that sense, then, yes - bird nests or termite mounds or coral reefs are unnatural. A more common wording for this same idea is something like "not created by geological processes".
What gives humans the special designation of their byproducts being unnatural?
You can argue that "unnatural" was a bad choice for this concept. But that's irrelevant to what words mean. There are other words like this - for example, "antisemitic" means "something that is against Jewish people", even though "semitic" means "of Jewish or Arabic or Phoenician etc. descent". So something discriminatory against semitic peoples is not necessarily anti-semitic.
Natural language doesn't follow strict logical rules. And of course, natural language is in fact itself an artificial, unnatural, construct.
It can both be true that everything humans do or create is natural because all of existence and everything in it is natural, and also that some things humans do or create are artificial or un-natural, without contradiction, because context may be taken into account, and the same words can mean different things depending on how and why they're employed.
Did life begin with the geological process of protein chains forming in geothermal vents? I don't know, but it begs whether it is natural or not.
Agreed.
> Nothing can be made or manufactured that is unnatural or artificial.
This doesn't follow in any way, not with the definition I gave, or with any definition I have ever heard. How do you define "artificial" such that an iMac is not artificial?
I've told you my definition (anything created by a human that is not an anatomical/physiological process of that human), and by my definition it is very clearly artificial (iMacs are created by humans, and they are not a bodily secretion of humans).
I don’t. iMacs are made of naturally-occurring materials. Those materials are mined or refined or formed in laboratories and factories, then assembled into something we call an iMac. All of those materials and processes are part of this universe and occur within the laws of then universe. They are all natural.
There really is nothing artificial in this regard. But that doesn’t mean some things aren’t detrimental to our health or well-being or the well-being of other life.
On the other side: we have a lot of taboos in the language/culture and not all of them are bad in terms of social well-being or happiness of individuals (the very simple example is that we sometimes lie to our kids). And I think that what we hide behind those taboos tends to emerge as "unnatural" or rather usually "supernatural". I also usually don't agree that we don't need a revolution in physics, but I understand it is so successful in creating all those working machines and we have to maintain them... ;)
> Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn’t know how to make it. Needed us.
Anyway, operationally speaking the difference is in how easily the matter in question can be digested by living things.
If it's easy to digest it's food, if it can't be digested at all then it's worse than artificial: it's anti-life.
Now, there is a secondary fuzzy notion of "artificial" typically used in relation to "chemicals". I don't think that definition stands up to most serious scrutiny, and is at any rate unrelated to this article.
Indeed, all words are "societal." The meaning(s) of a word is/are always a matter of convention (or tradition).