Comment by simiones | Hacker News Reader

Comment by simiones | Hacker News Reader

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"unnatural" or "artificial" have a very clear meaning: made by the intervention of humans in ways outside our base anatomical functions (so excluding babys or spilled blood). This intervention can be mechanical (Stonehenge), or biological (breeding animals to become more useful to humans), or chemical (synthesizing oil from plastic), or a complex combination of all of them (whisky); it is also transitive: anything created by an artificial object is also artificial.

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.

Nothing can be made or manufactured that is unnatural or artificial. By definition, anything that can exist in this universe is naturally part of the universe.

> By definition, anything that can exist in this universe is naturally part of the universe.

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).

> How do you define "artificial" such that an iMac is not artificial?

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.

When birds make nests outside of their base anatomical functions, are they "unnatural"?

No, because birds are not humans.

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".

> We are, truly, Of Nature, not Above Nature.

What gives humans the special designation of their byproducts being unnatural?

You're asking the question backwards. We have a concept, "byproduct of human action". We needed a word for this concept. We more or less arbitrarily chose "unnatural" or "artificial" as the words for this concept.

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.

Naturally, I would prefer to agree to disagree if you’re willing.

What's special is we decided that having a different category for things humans do is useful.

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.

> "not created by geological processes"

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.

It's perfectly consistent that the origin of life itself can be a geological process but that the products of life itself are a separate category.

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