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When birds make nests outside of their base anatomical functions, are they "unnatural"?
by asow92 3y ago
When birds make nests outside of their base anatomical functions, are they "unnatural"?
- simiones 3y agoNo, 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".
- asow92 3y ago> We are, truly, Of Nature, not Above Nature. What gives humans the special designation of their byproducts being unnatural?
- simiones 3y agoYou'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.
- asow92 3y agoNaturally, I would prefer to agree to disagree if you’re willing.
- wharvle 3y agoWhat'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.
- asow92 3y ago> "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.
- simiones 3y agoIt'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.