natural vs unnatural

(inspired by that troon thread about skynet)

just always makes me smirk a bit when people use the phrase 'it's unnatural' to justify their point of view about something not being right.

my pov is that everything, even your 19" flatscreen and your wee plastic lighter are natural.

mankind has it in its nature to produce tools of this sort, it's no less natural than a dog wiping its arse crack on some rough grass.

all are products of the evolution and nature of the universe, thus natural. 'unnatural' as a state is impossible.

i have not, as yet, had anyone give me an adequate explanation of the term 'unnatural'

discuss.

Don't think there's anything to discuss 'cause I more or less agree with what you're saying.

jordan

What you're saying is true, but the expression can be used and makes sense within a frame of reference.

  On 9/28/2011 at 11:24 AM, impakt said:

What you're saying is true, but the expression can be used and makes sense within a frame of reference.

the semantics point clearly stands (as it does with many of the common misuses of language), but i have an issue with where people draw the line between. especially if they are using the term 'unnatural' to rail aginst a point of view they disagree with.

I think "unnatural" always ends up being connected with evolution of life as we know it. Everything that contradicts with our perception of this gets labeled unnatural.

I have never appreciated the term unnatural and it broke up my marriage.

rofl

  On 9/28/2011 at 9:45 AM, loganfive said:

everything is a dog wiping its arse crack on some rough grass.

fixd

IDM fans must have a weird view on what's unnatural. They like listening to instrumental electronic music & watching sci-fi movies, but dislike mp3s, vsts, & cgi. So they go on the internet & talk about how it's not the real deal if computers were used.

I'm glad I'm not an IDM fan then. I like mp3's and vst's.

i always come back to that thought when natural/unatural is brought up. I do think the idea has its uses but 90% of the time it is completely misused.

i think more along the lines of "natural vs shaven"

you could call a thing natural when you know it's a truth but lack the scientific ground to prove it.. like gravity didn't need any proof as a natural phenomenon before it became a scientific fact, it was just naturaly so by observation. I think that nature and science complement each other nicely in this way.

when we call things unnatural we're observing a similar kind of thing like gravity, a deep rooted fear we can't quite put our finger on. only it has nothing to do with anything we produce, but with how we got to the point where we could produce them. is it a natural state we are in as a species, or will we come crashing down to the ground eventually?

It's the kind of phrase where you tend to know what is meant by it but you know it doesn't really explain it properly. Every use dissolves into grey areas, which is fine in some ways. If you try and use it in an explicit way like 'I only eat natural foods' it doesn't work because you need to explain more what you mean by that. I suppose you could think of it as a gradient going from being as if humans were never here to being altered by humans as much as possible.

but being altered by humans is perfectly natural.

yeah i've made that argument before. there really shouldn't be any dichotomy between human beans and the rest of the world. just because we are conscious of relatively sophisticated devices aka tech doesn't mean it is any different from any other product an animal creates towards survival. still I agree with the frame of reference, the words have alterior meaning even if the actual definitions don't allign in a literal way. natural is what has not been altered by humans and would have existed in our absence, unnatural is what we assume is only brought into existance through our own modification of ordinary resources

When humans say unnatural they usually mean dangerous to their idea of humanity's and nature's well-being in the short or long term. You might as well say it's natural to wage war, and I guess it is. doesn't mean it's good for us. The thing about being human is that we have the capability of judgment and the choice whether to fulfill our wants (not needs) against that judgment. bic lighters really are a bad example. We have that lazy gene and it's done great things for us in the past, it's just gone out of control in proportion to its necessity.

Many modern things & systems are great, others offset the equilibrium between rich and poor, man and nature etc. I believe it's unnatural to approve of that. Otherwise we're nothing but a plague, and mankind's reign will be extremely short-lived. You might as well say it's natural to be stupid, but does that make the availability of choosing not to be stupid meaningless?

  On 9/28/2011 at 2:23 PM, keltoi said:

i think more along the lines of "natural vs shaven"

If it's a good shave, there shouldn't be any lines :)

  On 9/28/2011 at 6:26 PM, chenGOD said:

  On 9/28/2011 at 2:23 PM, keltoi said:

i think more along the lines of "natural vs shaven"

 

If it's a good shave, there shouldn't be any lines :)

'cept the one vertically up the middle.

  On 9/28/2011 at 2:12 PM, impakt said:

I'm glad I'm not an IDM fan then. I like mp3's and vst's.

yeah, so do i, wtf are you on about cryptowen?

  On 9/28/2011 at 7:15 PM, BCM said:

yeah, so do i, wtf are you on about cryptowen?

Strawman argument about those who are too into analog things

yes you are right, human beings are very involved in the movement of geological material. as a species, we move rocks around on a very large scale, and of course it's very interesting that some of the earliest human structures are the most physically massive and weighty, like the great pyramids. our relationship with the geological stratigraphy of the earth is constantly evolving, and even cities are a kind geological extension of the process of crystallization carried on through the intermediation of a biological unit i.e. intelligent primates who are building these structures. virtual reality is the same, it's nothing new; Err was a virtual reality and Chatal Huyuk, but done in stucco and fired ceramic, and stone. it's just when the medium is so intractable as stone, that the epistemic assumptions which get formed about what reality is become very different than if your able to build all of Versailles with the click of a mouse button, but nevertheless it's the same.

terence mckenna once said; "while the naive are scanning the stars our appliances have become telepathic..." meaning, there is a very strange kind of intelligence being called into existence by ourselves, this artificial intelligence which is being called into being by human activity is made of the same materials as Err and Chatal Huyuk, it's made of ceramic, glasses, and metals.

it's as if the earth is like some kind of embryonic or fetal thing and at the end of its gestation what happening is it's ramifying its nervous system, it's appearing in its development and the unfolding of its morphogenesis. we are partners in this process, actors in a cosmic drama that involves the Earth at one polarity and machine at the other polarity as the expression of the will of the Earth towards a kind of self-reflective transcendence that is achieved through machine-human-biotic symbiosis.

it's not a story about processes out of control, its not a story about human guilt, it's not a story full of "we musts" and "we shoulds", it's a story which gives honor to every part of the unfolding experience-field, in other words, biology, technology, human culture, human traditional values, transcendent human extopian values... its a story of things on course, on time, and under budget, and i assume that is how nature really operates, and that we just live inside some kind of anxiety producing culture that is a necessary response to such conditions of stress.

don't be mistaken, there are some processes; nuclear waste buildup, urbanization, and other land disturbances, which if allowed to run on indefinitely would wreck the whole system and pitch it into chaos, but as Confucius once said, "no tree grows to heaven" meaning it's fruitless to project any process to infinity because any process projected to infinity will result in some kind of catastrophic scenario.

yeah there's no argument, humans are part of nature too. hippies should come up with better words, but by natural what they are really saying is something that doesn't exceed certain vague and personal threshold of purity. they don't say purity cus it sounds religious.