4 ms·

>Cancer is natural. Losing a leg to cancer would be "natural" too I don't think that's natural at all. "Natural" would be simply dying from cancer in your leg

>Cancer is natural. Losing a leg to cancer would be "natural" too I don't think that's natural at all. "Natural" would be simply dying from cancer in your leg, after it metastasizes to the rest of your body. Amputation isn't natural, nor is any other human medicine. All medicine is unnatural, and working against what would happen in nature. Just putting a bandage on a small cut to avoid infection is unnatural: to be natural, you should let it get infected and then die from it.

zogrodea 3y ago
What do natural and unnatural mean? Are human activities not part of nature, the same way the activitiy of other creatures like spiders and elephants are? Why or why not, and if a distinction between human and non-human activities is drawn, what justifies it?
- shiroiuma 3y ago
  I'm pretty sure that human activities ("artificial") are unnatural by definition. What justifies this is that we're humans, we have language, and we make words in those language to mean certain things (or make certain distinctions) that are important to us. So we can make the words mean whatever we want. We want "natural" to mean "unaltered/unaffected by humans", and "artificial" to mean "made by humans", so that's what they mean. Are you looking for some kind of deity to define English words for you?
- smsm42 3y ago
  For me, it means nothing, it's just stupid confused term that some people use to try to appeal to some vague authority. That's why said it's not good or useful term and I wouldn't use it.
smsm42 3y ago
Not all medicine. A lot of medicines are derived from plants or other organisms. Many animals use their saliva to avoid infection. Not sure if any use other materials.
- shiroiuma 3y ago
  >A lot of medicines are derived from plants or other organisms. That's irrelevant. There's nothing natural about extracting some chemical compounds from a plant on the other side of the world and using it to improve a medical problem you have. >Many animals use their saliva to avoid infection. Sure, that's fine. That's not the same as extracting chemical compounds from some plant somewhere else. Animals aren't doing anything like that. Even ancient medicines, where they dug up some root somewhere and boiled it into a tea, is unnatural. Animals don't know how to do that, and even ancient humans had to figure it out with a long trial-and-error process that probably took thousands of years. They certainly didn't know about this stuff instinctively. Saying "plant-based medicine is natural!" is like saying that concrete-and-steel buildings are "natural" because they're made with materials found in Earth's crust. It makes no sense at all.
  - smsm42 3y ago
    > There's nothing natural about extracting some chemical compounds from a plant on the other side of the world and using it to improve a medical problem you have. Excepting "other side of the world", the rest is very natural. It is one of the methods of getting poisons for some organisms - eating plants that already contain them. For example, monarch caterpillars accumulate certain toxic glycosides acquired from plants, and use them to make themselves poisonous to predators. So do other insect species - feeding on plants toxic to their potential predators and then keeping the toxins is a common defense mechanism. One that humans borrowed too - e.g. poisonous dart frogs (people don't feed on them, usually, just take their poison, but the principle is similar). Animals also been observed consuming certain plants when sick, though I am not sure about the efficiency of those methods. Chimps certainly are known to use some plants as anti-parasitic, etc. agents, and other simians too. There's evidence of elephants doing the same. I'm not sure where would we make a boundary between purposeful behavior of "smart" animals like chimps and pretty much the same behavior of humans, only at larger scale, but if we declare chimps being "natural", using plant medicines, at least a primitive ones, should be included.

zogrodea 3y ago

What do natural and unnatural mean? Are human activities not part of nature, the same way the activitiy of other creatures like spiders and elephants are? Why or why not, and if a distinction between human and non-human activities is drawn, what justifies it?

shiroiuma 3y ago
I'm pretty sure that human activities ("artificial") are unnatural by definition. What justifies this is that we're humans, we have language, and we make words in those language to mean certain things (or make certain distinctions) that are important to us. So we can make the words mean whatever we want. We want "natural" to mean "unaltered/unaffected by humans", and "artificial" to mean "made by humans", so that's what they mean. Are you looking for some kind of deity to define English words for you?
smsm42 3y ago
For me, it means nothing, it's just stupid confused term that some people use to try to appeal to some vague authority. That's why said it's not good or useful term and I wouldn't use it.

smsm42 3y ago

Not all medicine. A lot of medicines are derived from plants or other organisms. Many animals use their saliva to avoid infection. Not sure if any use other materials.

shiroiuma 3y ago
>A lot of medicines are derived from plants or other organisms. That's irrelevant. There's nothing natural about extracting some chemical compounds from a plant on the other side of the world and using it to improve a medical problem you have. >Many animals use their saliva to avoid infection. Sure, that's fine. That's not the same as extracting chemical compounds from some plant somewhere else. Animals aren't doing anything like that. Even ancient medicines, where they dug up some root somewhere and boiled it into a tea, is unnatural. Animals don't know how to do that, and even ancient humans had to figure it out with a long trial-and-error process that probably took thousands of years. They certainly didn't know about this stuff instinctively. Saying "plant-based medicine is natural!" is like saying that concrete-and-steel buildings are "natural" because they're made with materials found in Earth's crust. It makes no sense at all.
- smsm42 3y ago
  > There's nothing natural about extracting some chemical compounds from a plant on the other side of the world and using it to improve a medical problem you have. Excepting "other side of the world", the rest is very natural. It is one of the methods of getting poisons for some organisms - eating plants that already contain them. For example, monarch caterpillars accumulate certain toxic glycosides acquired from plants, and use them to make themselves poisonous to predators. So do other insect species - feeding on plants toxic to their potential predators and then keeping the toxins is a common defense mechanism. One that humans borrowed too - e.g. poisonous dart frogs (people don't feed on them, usually, just take their poison, but the principle is similar). Animals also been observed consuming certain plants when sick, though I am not sure about the efficiency of those methods. Chimps certainly are known to use some plants as anti-parasitic, etc. agents, and other simians too. There's evidence of elephants doing the same. I'm not sure where would we make a boundary between purposeful behavior of "smart" animals like chimps and pretty much the same behavior of humans, only at larger scale, but if we declare chimps being "natural", using plant medicines, at least a primitive ones, should be included.