![[tmbchr]™](/journal/popocculture-blog-logo.jpg){kind=logo}
Is Humanity Unnatural?
In response to my latest bit on Ken Wilber, a really interesting debate began. To paraphrase Wilber’s original question: if Nature made humans, and humans caused the ozone hole and all the rest, then isn’t Nature ultimately responsible for all the problems we’re seeing today? In other words, is humanity just an extension of Nature? We’re so accustomed to hearing and thinking that we’re separate from Nature that it’s weird to think, what if we’re not? What if buildings and bombs and boob jobs and bio-engineering all fit right into Nature’s plan? Well, maybe we shouldn’t call it a “plan” per se, I don’t know.
Our choice seems to be either to believe that we and everything we do is a part of nature, or to believe that there’s something about humans that is inherently “unnatural”. The question arises here of how can anything really be non-natural? To know that we have to define natural. In an essay by Ran Prieur called 21 Stories About Civilization, Ran attempts to describe natural as:
By natural, I mean in symbiosis with nature. By nature, I mean the totality of symbiotic life on earth. By symbiotic, I mean: related in ways that are mutually beneficial and beneficial to the whole, where wider benefit takes precedence. And by beneficial, I mean: generating aliveness and diversity. (And if you don’t know what aliveness means, look harder.)
Is that how you would define Nature? What if the definition of Nature is somehow connected to the definition of reality I suggested recently? Basically, my tentative definition of (individual) reality is: anything you experience. Thus a dream is of equal reality to a stroll through the forest while you’re awake. What if the definition of Nature was something like: the ground from which experience is drawn or all possible experiences. This seems like kind of a nebulous definition at best. It doesn’t really pin down what Nature is, but maybe that’s exactly what it is: everything. We’re used to defining Nature according to events in the biosphere that support and sustain life-cycles of organisms. But what if it’s much much more than that? According to our expanded definition of Nature as all possible experiences, then there’s nothing unnatural about humans at all. In fact, we may be one of the most natural of all species, because we make use of such a broad-range of possible experiences.
But is redefining how we think of Nature a cheater’s way out of this dilemma? The expanded definition I offered above might be more in line with how people use the word “Cosmos” although that doesn’t typically account for non-material and experiential phenomena. Are there other ways out of this box? Christians seem to think that the non-natural part of humans has something to do with Original Sin and the Garden of Eden. Terence McKenna advanced an interesting but equally wild theory that (possibly extraterrestrial) psychedelic mushrooms gave humans the first spark of consciousness. In other contexts, this idea might be called panspermia - either that microorganisms or sentient beings from space came into the biosphere and influenced or engineered us into our non-natural state. Gnosticism has an elaborate cosmology involving Sophia’s error which created the material world, and it’s rule the Demiurge and his crazy cast of goons, the archons.
All of these are really interesting possibilities, and I put about equal faith (and lack of faith) in all of them. Mainly because they are all equally speculative, and none of them I can verify from my own experiential basis or personal knowledge. They do all seem to share at least a passing reference - at some point - to the consciousness of humanity as being that which sets us apart from the animals. The origins of consciousness are necessarily very hazy though. No one “remembers” it, although our creation myths seem to speak of it in symbolic language.
If I could go back to my own speculative redefinition of reality for a moment though, I think there’s something that could be further applied to this discussion. Above, I defined reality as anything that an individual experiences. The second the experiences of two or more individuals are compared though, we run into trouble. Either our definition is wrong (very possible, since it’s a conceptual description, rather than reality itself), or the experiences of individuals aren’t going to match up. Using language, we’re able to communicate our experiences to other people. But since they are descriptive facsimiles, they will never match the experience itself. In some way, it’s a lie, a distortion of individual reality. The more people who’s experiences are compared and described, the bigger the distortion gets. In a sense, you might even define consensus or social reality as: the experiences that noone has had or maybe “the descriptions of actual experience which lack an element of authenticity, because all experience has an element of indescribability.”
Either way, maybe this is where humanity becomes unnatural. In other words, individual experience is natural, because it activates or fulfills potential experiences latent in Nature/Cosmos. Social experience merely describes potential experiences in Nature/Cosmos. But this makes me wonder if the “lies” told in consensus reality forge new potential experience in Nature-as-Cosmos which individual experiential reality may then encounter and fulfill. So even that seems again Natural according to the definition we described above. If there’s any merit to that definition, then “unnatural” might merely mean the process by which nature expands itself into new possibilities. And since humanity is again the agent of this expansion, it’s inherently Natural or even extraordinarily Natural because we push out the boundaries and fill in all the possibilities at an increasing rate.
Of course, all these expanded possibilities may or may not support Nature-as-Biosphere. There are many other aspects to that side of the debate though. Alec raised an especially good one in this comment:
are we saying that there’s something unnatural about humans because humans harm the environment? There are a lot of things that have been or could be a lot more destructive to our environment than fossil fuels and industrial waste. Supervolcanos, asteroids, supernovae.
I’ve never heard anyone try to call a volcano unnatural, and a volcano is most certainly destructive in the biosphere/life department. Although in a longer-range perspective, the environmental changes wrought by a volcano may have extremely positive effects for supporting life. The question of which is more valuable: life now or life later, seems to be a very valuable one which people rarely if ever ask. The only reason life now would be more valuable is because we are around to experience it. Reminds me of the post Max did on the “Long Game” in hoodoo where you’re supposed to outsmart your enemies by strategizing hundreds or thousands of years past them down the road. Nature is most certainly playing the Long Game, and no matter all our strivings to the contrary, we are merely a part of it.
- Aristotle on Nature
- No, you really don’t…
- Global Warming Is A Double Bind
- Airport Rituals
- This is totally fucked up
- Prev: Comments Problem
- Next: The Computer Conspiracy
July 22nd, 2005 at 2:16 am
Nice post! What I’m trying to get at, with my definition of “natural,” is a moral system, a way to use language to distinguish right and wrong action. Would a doctor define “health” so that everything is healthy? My morality is to serve the widest good that I can perceive, and right now, that’s the biosphere. We can speculate about the intelligence of the whole universe, or about human destruction of nature having some greater value, and those speculations are fun, and I hope they’re true. But I have to derive my actions from what I know for sure: that a lot of creatures have been having a good time for millions of years, and now they’re being rapidly killed off. It may turn out in the far future that I was wasting my time, but I have to do the best I can from where I’m standing.
July 22nd, 2005 at 2:27 am
Yeah, I understand. I commented on some of your points in that other post… One of the interesting aspects of what your saying I think is how do you derive that system of morality, if that’s what you’re after? Does it arise from the biosphere itself? If so, then how do you define which kind of life is better: now, then or later? If it’s focused around life-now, then where do you get that as being more valuable?
I’m off to sleep
July 22nd, 2005 at 10:19 am
that’s almost a whole separate issue: how you derive a subjective phenomenon (morality) from an objective one (nature).
it seems clear that nature can function just fine without our ideas of what is moral or not. conversely, it seems like our subjective experiences are best when they don’t depend on an external reality for their existance
what i mean by that is, well, attatchment to external experience is the basic (very basic ) source of suffering from the buddhadharma perspective.
the teaching is that objective truths are functional and have no moral component to them. our internal realities are based on feeling states which are heavily mediated by language and concepts, to the point where we can attatch ‘feeling good’ to some weird systems of rules and mental constructs, and/or block out our feeling sensitivity to the outer world in favor of our inner dialouge.
so from that perspective ‘good/bad’ as moral abstractions are either irrelevant, or misleading. once they are cleansed, feeling awareness and openness generates the correct relationship to the external world.
of course, most people are so out of touch with thier feelings and/or so addicted to the contents of their own heads, that they wouldn’t know the feelings of another being if they hit them with a sledgehammer.
July 22nd, 2005 at 10:53 am
McKenna also said that maybe weve been created by earth because she knows eventuall our sun will explode (life has already been on this planet for longer than many stars exist..)…. that we arent actually destroying earth, rather we are being born from it, to travel the stars & leave behind our cocoon… and thats its not wrong, its in fact what the earth intended…. or what the sun intended…..
or something…
personally, im the type to go down with the ship….
July 22nd, 2005 at 10:55 am
Now that I think about it, the word “morality” is unnecessary here. What I’m after is a basis for choosing my actions. 1) Should I do what other people tell me, or figure it out on my own? I think everyone on this site would agree that I should do the latter. 2) Am I here to be selfish, or to help? Or a way to say this without the difficult issue of defining the “self,” is to say, Do I serve the narrower good, or the wider good? Again, I think people here will agree with serving the wider good. 3) What is the widest good that I can serve? Here there’s more wiggle room, but it seems clear to me that the most encompassing thing that I can be reasonably sure is real, and good, and that I can help, is the biosphere.
It’s reasonable to assume that they’re all equally valuable. But I can’t do anything about life in the past, and the farther I look in the future, the more difficult it is to know the effects of my actions. So tactically, the best move is to serve life in the present and in the future as far as I can clearly see it.
In general, yes, but not right now, when human hands are tightening around the throat of nature, and there are a lot of species out there whose survival depends on us developing a morality that includes nature and considers it valuable. It occurs to me that “everything is natural” is a manipulation of language to factor the interests of the biosphere out of the equation of our actions.
July 22nd, 2005 at 11:54 am
Somebody asked this in the other thread and I think it’s a great question as a sort of logical next step to some of the morality/nature issues:
Admittedly, it’s extreme, but I think it raises a good discussion point.
July 22nd, 2005 at 12:15 pm
one of my friends still maintains that plastic is a natural substance in the same way that beeswax is a natural substance. it’s a transformed product of the natural environment.
i think there’s a lot of misconception about whether the gnostics really thought that there’s something ‘non-natural’ in humans. i would say, instead, that they believed that something non-natural had been cast over humans, like a ‘cloak of darkness +3 vs. reality.’ heh. i talk about it on a more macrocosmic scale in gnosticism & nature. it’s not that we’re unnatural, it’s that we’re all too natural beings caught in a rather unnatural situation!
i also think there’s a real tendency for defeatism in ‘extensions of humanity = extensions of nature” argument. you end up with garbage like those asshole fundie theorists who claim that since the rapture’s comin’, we don’t need t take care of the environment.
i dunno; there’s something in me that really chafes at the idea, & maybe it’s one of the reasons i’ve never been fond of transhumanism. if human products are part of ‘nature,’ and evolution is heading towards cyborgs/ai/computer programs, then why not let the environment wreck itself? after all, some scientist somewhere will find a way to use nanotechnology to alter our lungs so we can breathe pollution-laden air, geneticists will toughen up our skin to make it less sensitive to uv, we can alter the way our cell walls process energy and maybe won’t have to eat- we can just all photosynthesize our energy. so why bother with environmentalism? bleh, no thanks. i’ll take my tree-lined mountains, thank you very much.
July 22nd, 2005 at 12:24 pm
Well, this seems to dodge the issue… if we’re natural and it’s something else that’s unnatural, then how did “unnature” first begin to exist? Maybe it’s got nothing to do with us, but still.
Absolutely, I’m sort of just trying to mess my mind of with this stuff and see if anything falls out of it. I agree with you and Ran that despite our definitions, we still require a system of figuring out what’s acceptable and appropriate. And I still think trees are better than parking lots, etc. I’m gonna put together a tangent of this about how do you derive morality, cause I think that’s very much one of the underlying issues here…
July 22nd, 2005 at 12:34 pm
there’s the ten thousand dollar question.
imho, all of the myths about ‘unnature’ refer to the battle between the subjective and the objective. iow, the ‘unnatural’ part of the human psyche is the result of a disconnect between the wholeness of the universal consciousness, and the individual experiencer. call it a symptom of being born in a limited form– as soon as one leaves the prenatal world, one is in the world of (as the taoists might say) the ten-thousand things. but, even those ten thousand are part and parcel with the tao. the ‘unnature’ arises when one assumes that the seperateness is more real than the whole, which fits along with ran’s ideas. but, this seperateness *had* to exist, because otherwise the universal consciousness wouldn’t be able to know itself for itself– as the gospel of truth says, how can one know something without first being ignorant of that something?
i guess the problem is that when it did split into the ten-thousand, it drove itself crazy on purpose, kinda like in the hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy when zaphod beeblebrox finds out that he’s the one who cut part of his brain out.
July 22nd, 2005 at 12:57 pm
I started on this path a couple days ago, wondering if the account of the original split is actually recorded in Genesis. The first acts God does is in dividing the light from the darkness, the seas from the firmament… God commits the first “unnatural” act
July 22nd, 2005 at 11:59 pm
“Although in a longer-range perspective, the environmental changes wrought by a volcano may have extremely positive effects for supporting life.” ~ Tim Boucher
This points in the direction of a speculative thought I’ve heard before–that the apparent destructiveness of human civilization serves some greater purpose to the planet that gave rise to our kind. But, it is hard to imagine such a scenario, as life on Earth as slowly evolved to take advantage of the long term changes brought by a volcano. This is not true of human civilization.
The changes we bring to the table have not occurred before in the history of this rock. Now, it is certainly possible that human civilization could result in long term benefits, but wouldn’t it be necessary for some guidance to arise for that to happen? I mean, as a whole, our choices are too volitile, too unpredictable. Wouldn’t some agent, such superintelligence, be in need of deployment to coax mankind into effecting the beneficial change?
July 23rd, 2005 at 1:34 am
Ok, now ya got me thinking and typing again, so I’m going to interject that the best working definition I have found for this sort of discussion is to label that which something was meant to do as Nature, and that which deviates from it’s actual purpose as un-Natural.
Applying that to God, well… I’ve always been fascinated by the part where it says “God created man in His image, male and female He created them”.
??? But taking it down the road for a walk, I always find myself coming back to the question “What does God do?” Already answered in the above statement about God: He Creates. If that is his purpose, how would dividing this from that be unnatural? It’s kind of like cellular division, isn’t it? Or is it? Ack. Must return to my cave. These questions erupt into more questions…. like, if we are made in his own image, does that mean it is our purpose too to create? This ties very heavily into my current BS/paradigm/reality theory.
And this also makes me think, what if the stoner from Animal House was right? I’ve always suspected he might be on some level, somehow. Again I say, ACK! As above, so below….
July 23rd, 2005 at 2:23 am
I see this as being about creativity - at the cosmological/metaphysical levels, the universe that we see seems to be the product of a great creative spirit. Variety, diversity, fecundity, evolution, things blending and merging, combining and recombining to create new and more complex things, this is the Way on this material plane. Looking at humanity from within this framework, we can easily reconceive “free will” as “freedom to create”, because when you think about it, you realize that when we’re not doing something that is in some sense creative, we’re pretty much operating on automatic pilot, prisoners of habit and history. From this perspective, it is easy to see humanity as something entirely natural, an extension of everything else that already is - the universe creates, and it creates beings who themselves can create (not just humans, but all life, in my opinion, manifests creativity, if you know how and where to look for it).
But the freedom to participate in the creative symphony does not guarantee a harmonious tune will be played. Because freedom and creativity are inseparable, and our levels of both are great, we have the ability to create technologies, ideas, institutions, works of art and propaganda that reduce variety, diversity, fecundity, and complexity in their practical effects. They promote monocultures in both Nature and man, they row upstream against the ontological currents that seem to flow through all of time and space. Instead of creating that which can inhance and supplement that which already is, we have unfortunately chosen an historical path of disrespect and destruction…mostly, we’ve only succeeded in replacing the Beautiful with the Profitable, the sublime with the ridiculous. Man the actor may be natural, but his collective actions have been in contradiction to the deeper truths he represents.
July 23rd, 2005 at 1:01 pm
That’s exactly what I want! And I’ve never seen Animal House. What does the stoner say?
July 29th, 2005 at 12:34 am
[…] Aristotle on Nature
A while ago we had an interesting discussion here on the “nature” of Nature. I just found a nice thought to add into that […]
July 20th, 2006 at 2:18 pm
[…] Think about it like this for a moment: air travel is essentially a very unnatural thing for humans to be participating in. Our bodies are not designed to fly, and when we fly long distances, our natural sense of time and place gets thrown out of whack (jet lag, etc). So flying really does require that we enter into a sort of “sacred space” in order for us to be able to cope with it mentally and emotionally (even if it’s on a subconscious level). Like any sacred space, we enter and interact with it according to certain rituals and must observe certain taboos. […]