A while ago we had an interesting discussion here on the “nature” of Nature. I just found a nice thought to add into that [...]

these questions erupt into more questions

That’s exactly what I want! And I’ve never seen Animal House. What does the stoner say?

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.

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….

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?

if we’re natural and it’s something else that’s unnatural, then how did “unnature” first begin to exist?

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.

we’re all too natural beings caught in a rather unnatural situation!

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.

i also think there’s a real tendency for defeatism in ‘extensions of humanity = extensions of nature” argument. you end up with garbage

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…

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.

Since humans are unnatural by virtue of not being in symbiosis with the biosphere, would it be moral to kill a person if doing so would prevent harm coming to Nature?

Admittedly, it’s extreme, but I think it raises a good discussion point.

how do you define which kind of life is better: now, then or later?

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.

it seems clear that nature can function just fine without our ideas of what is moral or not.

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.

or something…

personally, im the type to go down with the ship….

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.

I’m off to sleep