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> Redefining words like this harms clarity of communication. I've yet to read TFA, but, I disagree with this. Natural vs artificial is a false dichotomy, and t
by pygy_ 11y ago
> Redefining words like this harms clarity of communication.
I've yet to read TFA, but, I disagree with this. Natural vs artificial is a false dichotomy, and the existing definition of nature (a biblical remnant) is hampering our ability to envision our world properly, form IT to GMO to medically assisted procreation to climate change to general AI.
Humans are primates, we're part of nature as is everything we create. Artificial just is a subset of natural.
What is evolving is the information vector.
It's been DNA for billions of years, then culture (brain to brain), which actually predates humanity. Big cats learn hunting by imitation. Birds of the same species but of different locations sing different, learned songs, non human primates communicate symbolically and have regional accents.
We refined language, oral communication and developed mnemonic techniques like story telling, singing and poetry, which all must have been technological revolutions when they were invented (technology is a subset of culture).
We then started to externalize it with engraved, then manuscript then printed writing.
Then off course came telecommunication and computers, which are able to manipulate information independently.
This has been a continuum, and trying to set humans aside just because you happen to be one is a mistake.
On one side, you have green nuts who reject en masse nuclear energy (which would help mitigate the ongoing greenhouse cataclysm) and GMO (Monsanto's practices and products are horrible, but one shouldn't throw the baby with the bathwater). On the other one you have conservatives who reject social and reproductive progress because it goes against imaginary "laws of nature".
Now general AI is around the corner, and brains will likely go the way of the dodo.
We're going to get squeezed between global warming/ocean acidification and the robotic revolution. That's not a bad thing in the grand scheme of things, but it won't be pleasant when it occurs.
If we want a chance to make the right decisions to make it at least less painful, we should be armed with the best available mental tools, and putting ourselves out of nature is a basic mistake that we should avoid. We're not magic.
- mrob 11y agoNatural vs artificial is not purely a false dichotomy, because it conveys information. A wolf is nature. A dog is not nature. I don't think either of those categorizations are controversial, even though humans have altered wolf personalities by killing all the bold ones, and even though humans only actively selected a small part of the dog genome, and even though wolves and dogs are genetically very similar. Wolves and dogs are widely accepted as different categories. The existence of marginal cases, eg. dog-wolf hybrids, does not change this any more than the fact that cabbage and kale are the same species makes the words "cabbage" and "kale" meaningless. You can argue that "nature" is not a useful categorization, and that it's mostly used for political arguments, but the proposed redefinition only makes that problem worse. And it still doesn't solve the problem of marginal cases. All it accomplishes is making the word "nature" more confusing.
- pygy_ 11y agoI use "wild" or "raw", vs artificial to describe such phenomena, even though it is of little practical use. How does the redefinition make anything worse? My take is that, since nature is everything there is, it becomes useless as a concept and can be safely eliminated from the discourse. Its current definition is poisonous.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoI agree. > I disagree with this. Natural vs artificial is a false dichotomy (...) Humans are primates, we're part of nature as is everything we create. Artificial just is a subset of natural. There's a good illustration of that point that surprisingly is not XKCD: http://abstrusegoose.com/215 http://abstrusegoose.com/215