3 ms·

"How did that lump of plutonium become a lump? That part wasn’t natural." Allow me to become a little philosophical but since human beings which are product of

"How did that lump of plutonium become a lump? That part wasn’t natural." Allow me to become a little philosophical but since human beings which are product of nature made plutonium, isn't the making of plutonium natural too? I mean everything that is happening in this universe is natural! I know the general usage of the words "artificial" for human-made and "natural" for everything else. But when we are talking at the grand scale of life and universe I think a human-made plutonium is as natural as bee-made honey.

achierius 3y ago
Perhaps a better phrase to have used would have been "not prior to a complex system" -- as the lump of plutonium exists only because of a complex system doing its thing, it should be considered a consequence of the complex system rather than an alternative.
- InitialLastName 3y ago
  To attempt to pedantically clarify, is "exists only because of a complex system doing its thing" not true of basically any pure lump of material that exists? To me, the actions of stars fusing heavy atoms and then those atoms ending up in lumps of material somewhere sounds like a pretty complex system doing its thing.
namaria 3y ago
I love debating this with people but ultimately it's just playing games with semantics. The notion of artificial x natural is very recent and very localized. Some cultures would differentiate raw from cooked in a similar sense. But it's like talking about what is really green vs what is really blue. Completely circular since it depends on the definitions of the terms.
- jonhohle 3y ago
  It's easily extendable to the animal world as well. Is a nest created by a bird or a den created by one of various mammals natural or artificial? Is a nest made by mice in my garage from synthetic fabrics, flexible plastics, and whatever plant matter it can find natural or synthetic? My wife was recently asked to make a meal for someone who didn't eat "processed" foods. What level of manipulation needs to happen before a food is "processed"? Can beans or rice be dried and put in a bag? Can chicken broth be used if it's homemade, but the chicken came from a commercial farm? Or is extracting broth from a chicken processing it? I've increasingly noticed many sub-cultures adopting odd definitions and interpretations of commonly used language with the expectation that everyone who interacts with their group understand their dialects. It's not really jargon or vernacular since the words are common to the language, just used to mean something different than the general population would understand. Similarly, artificial is now assumed to mean bad and natural good, when neither ascribe value by definition or in practice.
  - namaria 3y ago
    You could approach the language problem like that as well. Before imperial efforts in recent centuries to normalize languages in certain territories, there was no Standard French or German or Italian. Vocabulary and accents changed slowly across the landscape, following geography - places isolated diverged and places integrated converged. Migration, trade and conquest added layers of complexity to this variation. But your idea that people are failing to use Standard English and creating language subcultures around peculiar meanings of artificial/processed/chemical vs natural/homemade/organic is itself based on a very artificial distribution of language.

achierius 3y ago

Perhaps a better phrase to have used would have been "not prior to a complex system" -- as the lump of plutonium exists only because of a complex system doing its thing, it should be considered a consequence of the complex system rather than an alternative.

InitialLastName 3y ago
To attempt to pedantically clarify, is "exists only because of a complex system doing its thing" not true of basically any pure lump of material that exists? To me, the actions of stars fusing heavy atoms and then those atoms ending up in lumps of material somewhere sounds like a pretty complex system doing its thing.

namaria 3y ago

I love debating this with people but ultimately it's just playing games with semantics. The notion of artificial x natural is very recent and very localized. Some cultures would differentiate raw from cooked in a similar sense. But it's like talking about what is really green vs what is really blue. Completely circular since it depends on the definitions of the terms.

jonhohle 3y ago
It's easily extendable to the animal world as well. Is a nest created by a bird or a den created by one of various mammals natural or artificial? Is a nest made by mice in my garage from synthetic fabrics, flexible plastics, and whatever plant matter it can find natural or synthetic? My wife was recently asked to make a meal for someone who didn't eat "processed" foods. What level of manipulation needs to happen before a food is "processed"? Can beans or rice be dried and put in a bag? Can chicken broth be used if it's homemade, but the chicken came from a commercial farm? Or is extracting broth from a chicken processing it? I've increasingly noticed many sub-cultures adopting odd definitions and interpretations of commonly used language with the expectation that everyone who interacts with their group understand their dialects. It's not really jargon or vernacular since the words are common to the language, just used to mean something different than the general population would understand. Similarly, artificial is now assumed to mean bad and natural good, when neither ascribe value by definition or in practice.
- namaria 3y ago
  You could approach the language problem like that as well. Before imperial efforts in recent centuries to normalize languages in certain territories, there was no Standard French or German or Italian. Vocabulary and accents changed slowly across the landscape, following geography - places isolated diverged and places integrated converged. Migration, trade and conquest added layers of complexity to this variation. But your idea that people are failing to use Standard English and creating language subcultures around peculiar meanings of artificial/processed/chemical vs natural/homemade/organic is itself based on a very artificial distribution of language.