Vanity of the Anthropocene: Anthills and skyscrapers are equally "natural"
Thèque Thursday
Thèque Thursday
Hi! Welcome to Engineering Our Social Vehicles. I’m your host, Paul Logan. Today is Thèque Thursday. If you’re new around these parts, that means that on Thursdays we like to go to the club and then write about technology. Today we’re going to be asking the question: is technology unnatural?
The soundtrack this Thèque Thursday is Walter Murphy’s A Fifth of Beethoven. Please turn on your disco ball and laser lights now and play it on repeat while you enjoy the article.
Is technology unnatural?
The thesis of this post could be stated as “if it occurs, it is natural.” I’m going to start with my definition of technology, just so we’re on the same ground for terms.
In the framework of EoSV, technology does not have physical form. It is solely informational. A sandwich is not technology. The recipe to make a sandwich is technology.
All the rocks we tricked into thinking aren’t technology. They are the physical byproducts of informational life that reproduces by being useful to humanity. Since information lives in human brains, if it isn’t useful to them then it’s unlikely to be reproduced.1 If you can destroy the physical thing without destroying the knowledge to reproduce it, then it is informational life.
I think of technological advancement much the same way I think of culinary advancement: No one wrote a recipe for a grilled cheese sandwich before someone had written a recipe for cheese, and a recipe for bread. It’s both hierarchical and evolving— so it follows the same patterns as social vehicles.
Technology is the additive process by which we as humans develop attendant species of symbiotic informational life; put simply, knowledge. This is analogous to artificial selection and animal husbandry, just in the much faster medium of abstraction. Technology encompasses everything from mathematics to theater (can’t have Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead without first having Hamlet). Technological advancement relies on cross-pollination of discoveries and methods among fields of human endeavor.
For example, virtually all human weaponry outside of explosives has been variations on thin pointy rocks or big dull rocks. Now that ancient technology has reared its head again as the US army’s favorite new assasination toy, the R9X Hellfire Missile (colloquially known as the “knife missile,” or “Flying ginsu2”).
In 2022, human knowledge- and thus human technology- is more centralized than ever. With the level of open discussion in research and the free availability of information online to the majority of the world, one might start to think of technology as a collective repository, rather than a distributed mass of knowledge. This is not the case — if the central repository goes down, or is corrupted3, then we are back to fragmented knowledge.
I would argue that technology is specific to social vehicle. With Rome we lost concrete, with Tesla wireless current. What can be added to can also be taken from and lost. The things we think of as modern day “technology” are trappings of knowledge specific to this incarnation of civilization, and are not guaranteed to persist beyond it.
All of these things qualify technology as informational life, just like social vehicles, and just like the meta-aware information inhabiting our meatsuits that we like to call “self.” The fact that technology has repeatedly experienced convergent evolution via multiple discovery counts towards the fact that it’s as natural as homo-sapiens. And we are 100% natural.
What is “natural?” (a reddit conversation)
A while back there was a post on /r/philosophy entitled Nature doesn’t care if we drive ourselves to extinction. Solving the ecological and climate crises we face rests on reconsidering our relationship to nature, and understanding we are part of it.
There was a comment chain I couldn’t resist hopping in on that went like this:
There are millions of people (indigenous to every continent) living in harmony with nature and who want to continue to do so. Certain groups are killing the world and our species as we know it.
Someone replied with a comment stupid enough to get me going:
This is factually wrong. the only reasons indigenous people seem to live in harmony with nature is because they lack the technology to cause real damage. The native Americans burned down huge forests so the could farm buffalo for example. Humans have always exploited nature.
And this is how I replied to the reply:
This is factually wrong. The only reasons ants seem to live in harmony with nature is because they lack the technology to cause real damage. Ants destroyed huge earthworm environments so they could farm aphids for example. Ants have always exploited nature.
Imagine what they could do with turbo laser jet packs. 🤯
Your distinction is meaningless. If our standard of unnatural is manipulation of the population of other species, ants meet the requirements. But nearly EVERY species manipulates and is manipulated by its environment and its neighbors.
Humans are nature, nature doesn’t care. If humanity eventually sublimates all matter in existence into grey goop, that will have been a natural process arriving from natural means to natural ends.
The commenter I replied to fired back:
That is an anthropogenic process you described and not how a scientist views natural processes. You are right that nature doesn’t care as it is a mass of varying processes that are constantly evolving. However, changing variables in that equation results in changing the solution that might not have occurred in a “natural” or unaltered state. Your example is like saying a GMO is organic when it is made of organic compounds but was engineered.
Not to be outdone, I pushed back:
Yeah, “anthropogenic” processes are only anthropogenic because we’re anthropocentric.
I also described some “ant”thropogenic4 processes that scientists shouldn’t view as natural under the same standards.
You’re acting like humans are sitting above nature fiddling with the dials. We die to disease and disaster just like deer and fish. We aren’t the masters of the grand equation you describe- we are just variables affecting other variables, as we’ve always been, as all life always has.
The conception of a natural or unaltered state is flawed at a base because it imagines a timeline without humanity that doesn’t exist. We do exist, nature produced us, we are natural, so are the things we produce in turn. Anthills and skyscrapers are equally natural.
I love the GMO example because it displays such a blatant disregard for existing biological knowledge. Did you know that in response to stressors plants greatly increase their rate of mutation (via creative transposon usage)? They diverge from a “natural” state intentionally as a mechanism to survive environmental stress. Plants have been genetically modifying themselves since long before humanity was a twinkle in the missing link’s eye.
We just showed up, and decided that since we were so awesome we must be ruining everything. If we were around to commentate on the rise of dinosaurs and mammals and other bottleneck environmental evolution events, I’m sure we would have found a way to anthropocentrize them as well.
I don’t think we really have the ability to destroy all life. We just have the ability to end human habitability, which is again just anthropocentrism and hand wringing over a road bump that an intelligent observer evolved in a post-humanity future wouldn’t mark as distinct or significant from any other mass-extinction event.5
/u/ Congenita1_Optimist jumped in with a great elaboration on the GMO point:
Many forms of GMO are things that 100% could feasibly happen in nature, they're just done in a targeted way instead of waiting for a random process to do it.
Sure you would never see a gene for am anti-freeze protein in flounders just get shuttled over to a tomato. But you could (and already have) seen a single gene mutate to become non-functional in corn, leading to it growing much taller and having more cobs. And in nature there are plenty of bacteria and viruses that just infect plants and shove their own genes (and others they've picked up) into said plants. This is actually the origin of the most commonly used form of genetically modifying plants (it's based off a bacteria). Hell, a great many of the tools used in molecular biology are physical processes or derived from (or are) living things.
Things like up- or down- regulating extant genes or knock-outs (breaking previously functional genes) happen all the time in nature, just as a random process.
If an agrobacterium modifies a plants genes so that it produces a new form of sugar (that only the agrobacterium can digest), it doesn't strike me as particularly more natural than a human using that agrobacterium to do the same. Do we not call ants that farm their own fungus "natural"? It reeks of anthropocentrism.
Anthrop-obscene
To sum up the arguments from the reddit discussion:
Everything that exists, exists naturally.
Humans die to nature just like any other animal. We get killed by disease and disaster and even occasionally we are predated. We aren’t above nature, we’re in it and of it.
All sufficiently complex life develops technology like plaque on teeth. As we saw in the introduction, this is because knowledge itself is just an living informational symbiont.
If our standards for “unnatural” are manipulation of the environment or manipulation of another species’ population, then the majority of life on this planet is unnatural.
If our standards for “unnatural” are intentional genetic manipulation; then many plants and bacteria are unnatural, and in fact, are GMO’s.
We only think of ourselves as unnatural because we are vain, and believe the world revolves around us. Hence the word: anthropocentric.
Let’s say humans do cause the end of all life on the planet.
Is it sad? Yes.
Is it bad? Yes.
Without humanity, will there be anyone left around to care? No.
This is Anthropocentrism in a nutshell. We only matter to ourselves. to the rest of nature, we’re just more nature.
It’s been proposed that we refer to the period of time since humanity evolved as “The Anthropocene” due to the massive effects we’ve had on the environment. I think this is a great idea, considering that we’re far from the first, or even the deadliest, organism to have caused a mass extinction event.
The Great Oxidation Event occurred ~2 billion years ago and is inferred to have driven most of the biosphere on the planet to extinction. The Earth had barely any freely available oxygen before the GOE. So most life around that time would have been anaerobic. Oxygen is toxic to anaerobes, so it’s good that there wasn’t any; until cyanobacteria started terraforming the atmosphere by pumping out enough oxygen to kill everything else. What a chad move.
We may think we’re all that, but humanity is likely going to just be another sedimentary band to any future intelligent observer that decides to look. We’ll probably be responsible for some valuable natural resource similar to oil, but instead made of compressed plastic and Shen Yun fliers. I hope it has a cool name like “anthropotanium” or “people juice.”
Counterarguments
Nature only includes organic life.
So Mars isn’t natural?
Shen Yun was actually pretty good.
I haven’t seen show, just the fliers.
Anthropogenic processes are a valuable distinction for scientific study.
I’m not arguing that we shouldn’t distinguish human activity from nonhuman activity, just that using the term “unnatural” to describe human activity is disingenuous. I’d hope we can agree that uses of “unnatural” to describe homosexuality and areligiosity have been globally damaging to culture and that allowing a false dichotomy that can be bent to political aims is a dangerous thing. The point is that the distinction has never been useful and always been political.
Show me the replicator for informational life that lets it evolve. If you can’t then it isn’t alive.
Ah, the argument that killed memetics. We don’t need a replicator to see that information obviously affects the physical world and biology, and that it can be both adapted maladapted. See Dual Inheritance Theory for arguments for those more cogent than I that information/culture/cultural selection is real. In terms of whether information can be alive, I address this question in You are parasitizing your body, The Cultural Microbiome, and What are social vehicles anyways? Suffice to say, the most convincing argument I can give is that if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck…. then we might just need to expand our definition of
ducklife.
Physical embodiment of knowledge are technology.
Sure, that’s fine. Though an interesting philosophical question, to me this is a semantic distinction that doesn’t have a lot of relevance outside of the EoSV framework.
Just because you say that something existing makes it natural doesn’t mean it is.
If we take the term natural to mean “anything arising from nature,” I don’t see how you can argue that humankind hasn’t arisen from nature. Transitively, I don’t see how you can argue that anything that naturally-begot humanity produces isn’t also natural. Humans are natural organisms that take natural materials and forge them into artificial form. If human innovation isn’t natural, than neither are anthills, or spiderwebs, or beehives.
Conclusion
Technology is alive, just like us. It is natural, just like us. To consider anything that exists unnatural is to deny the fact that the universe has arrived at this point without any external muddling or tomfoolery, and all things that exist have arisen through natural processes.
If it occurs, it is natural. Follow me on twitter.
There are some pretty big implications for this in terms of digitally stored and reproduced information, but that’s something for another post- this post is about humans, not computers.
See also: Scots Wikipedia Scandal.
😛 Proud of myself for this one
Paragraph ninja’d in from another comment.
"Transitively, I don’t see how you can argue that anything that naturally-begot humanity produces isn’t also natural. Humans are natural organisms that take natural materials and forge them into artificial form."
You just did? But 10/10 would read about an opinion on the problem of universals again that involved hellfire missiles and ants with turbo laser jet packs.