Is industrialisation a part of nature?

[DoomUK]

I'd prepared an extraordinarily long ass post about this subject, but since I'm the worst philosopher in the world and not very good at creating engaging lengthy verbiage, I'll say it this way:-


Human brains are a part of nature, right?

What we do with said brains is therefore a part of nature, right?


So why don't we treat industrialisation - with all of its less-favourable qualities such as pollution and global warming - as a part of nature? Why treat "man-made" things and "natural" things separately and speak of them dichotomously, as most of us do?

[Technician]

DoomUK said:

as a part of nature's great masterplan

Aaaaand here's where I stopped taking you seriously.

Into the trash it goes.

[Maes]

Well, if we didn't start using tools and learning to use them more efficiently (thus leading, sooner or later, to industrialization), then someone else certainly would.

[Joshy]

I'm in no condition to be writing an essay here, but I think Habermas and Marx are good philosophers to look to for this sort of thing, particularly Habermas with his lifeworld and system distinctions. IIRC, basically industrialisation goes against the lifeworld (the essential aspects of our lives- trees, relationships, wisdom, what we need to survive and flourish as individuals, etc) and has colonised the healthy aspect of nature. So you can't really claim that industrialisation is part of nature, it has become its own autonomous system, its own entity that strives to consume, rationalise (the Max Weber kind), commodify everything in its wake, even though it did initially come from the lifeworld to start with. This is something I remember so I'm not exactly sure of the actual terms.

The human brain = nature, therefore anything that is a result of our minds = nature is not exactly a good generalisation. I can see the temptation of making a teleological argument out of this (i.e., animals use claws to survive, we use our minds and the consequent creation of tools to survive, etc), but I don't see how it can work. We do not know what mind is entirely composed of, nor do we know what is absolutely ethical or unethical (although we do have ideas of what we should do, and this is -always- a continuous work in progress). And the idea of 'nature' is a funny thing, it can easily be man-made values you cognitively project onto something. Habermas did say that what leads to progress is communicative reasoning in a reasonable discursive environment. Anything that hinders this dialectic progress is considered unhealthy. So, as a rule of thumb, you could say that industrialisation, as an autonomous system, tend to suppress this 'healthy essential dialectic between people' (interactions and reciprocation are one-sided, exploitations, pollution causing health problems, shitty fundings for schools/health system, censorship of informations, etc, etc). These are simple examples (there are obviously going to be a lot of counter-examples if you want to split hairs).

[Gez]

The capacity for an ecosystem to be entirely and irreversibly altered by one component of it is definitely a part of nature. For example. Another example is when "you" introduce a new species in a small ecosystem where it didn't exist before, competing with local species to the point of extinguishing them and overrunning the place until they run out of food and all die off. This is something that has happened with rabbits on some small islands, the bunnies proliferating in the absence of predators and devouring all plant matter on the island until there was nothing else and they all died.

By these token, then, industrialization is certainly a part of nature. It's natural for fragile and delicate equilibriums to be disrupted. These things happen on their own (flooding, climate changes, supervolcano eruptions, meteor impacts, etc.) or through a species becoming out of control. Eventually, a new equilibrium appears, until the next disruption.

It's just that it completely sucks to be in the middle of such a disruption. I mean, sure, it's great that life will go on and that no matter how badly we fuck the planet up, there will still be thriving populations of mosquitoes, roaches and rats to spread out and occupy all the emptied ecological niches. But well, some of us might have wished that other animals (like ourselves, natch) would have survived too.

As for nature having a masterplan -- this isn't the Intelligent Design World forums, so don't bring such nonsense here. Nature doesn't think. Nature doesn't plan. Nature is.

[kristus]

I'm sick so I'll settle with saying, what Gez said.

[GreyGhost]

DoomUK said:

nature's great masterplan

If allowing destructive parasites like ourselves to trash the ecosystem is part of some master plan - Nature must have a deathwish.

[schwerpunk]

To the OP's title I'd answer 'yes,' but clearly that's only the beginning of the conversation. Because if you just leave it at that, factory farms, strip-mines, moon landings, and thermobaric weapons, etc, all become 'natural.' Which isn't a problem in my mind, because I don't associate much with the term (I'm a materialist, so 'part of nature' could easily be substituted for 'part of the universe'), but many people do. Please note that this says nothing about whether the above things are 'good' or not - just definitions. Anyway, it's clear some new definitions are needed.

Joshy's cited lifeworlds seem to be a pretty good stand-in. Correct me if I'm wrong, but under this definition would one classify each 'stable' stage in a ecology as a kind of, err, species? Using the term species extremely loosely here. Not going to go gaia on this one just yet. :p

P.S. Also, yeah, there is no 'master plan.' You put a parenthetical statement after that phrase, so I'll give you chance to restate yourself before linking you to some really boring papers. :P
P.P.S. Unless by 'master plan' you meant 'does a bunch of shit for no particular reason until the heat death of the universe.'
P.P.P.S. I love the succinct title by the way. Great question to mull over morning coffee with.

[Maes]

GreyGhost said:

If allowing destructive parasites like ourselves to trash the ecosystem is part of some master plan - Nature must have a deathwish.

No deathwish, it just means that something that's just a bit tougher, hardier and meaner than us will eventually wipe us all out. It may be something subtle and creeping, like a disease, or something tangible like a particularly destructive pest. Or simply overpopulation and disruption of the civilized world by uncontrollable masses of Islamic third-world outcasts, acting as the "cockroaches" of humankind.

It's really like a prison's courtyard or a ghetto: certainly it appears full of bad muthafuckahs, but there's ALWAYS one that's a bit tougher than everyone else, and even his "success" will be shortlived as soon as he softens up a bit or someone just a bit tougher than him makes an appearance. And usually the "fittest" guy or entity are usually that way primarily because they doen't give a fuck, have less sensitivities and less scruples.

[DoomUK]

schwerpunk said:

P.P.S. Unless by 'master plan' you meant 'does a bunch of shit for no particular reason until the heat death of the universe.'

Something like that, yes. Bad choice of words, I'll admit. Probably too late to edit it so no one notices...

[schwerpunk]

Maes said:

No deathwish, it just means that something that's just a bit tougher, hardier and meaner than us will eventually wipe us all out. It may be something subtle and creeping, like a disease, or something tangible like a particularly destructive pest. Or simply overpopulation and disruption of the civilized world by uncontrollable masses of Islamic third-world outcasts, acting as the "cockroaches" of humankind.

It's really like a prison's courtyard or a ghetto: certainly it appears full of bad muthafuckahs, but there's ALWAYS one that's a bit tougher than everyone else, and even his "success" will be shortlived as soon as he softens up a bit or someone just a bit tougher than him makes an appearance. And usually the "fittest" guy or entity are usually that way primarily because they doen't give a fuck, have less sensitivities and less scruples.

At times like this I like to refer to Darwin's Origin of Species:

Terpsinoe said:
Darwin [...] says: “The face of Nature may be compared to a yielding surface, with ten thousand sharp wedges packed close together and driven inwards with incessant blows, sometimes one wedge being struck, and then another with greater force.” Wedges that stay in the yielding surface are species that survive, but to stick into the surface they presumably have to pop other wedges out.

So that's all well and good; makes sense; follows a nice narrative. My money's still on a gamma ray burst, or other cosmological event, to put us finally to rest. But who knows, maybe rabbid squirrels, or some other thing, will get us first.

[Gez]

The great thing about "survival of the fittest" that most people tend to forget (and especially proponents of eugenism) is that "fittest" isn't "strongest, toughest, meanest, most übermenschenly superior" -- it's fittest to reproduce faster than it dies.

If a random mutation appeared among mankind that made people go through puberty much faster, pop up litters of dozens of babies, and then die of a large assortment of gross organ failures before they're 40s, these people would be fitter than than the people who stay healthy and in shape until they're a hundred years old.

By pure numbers, the fittest species around are bacterias -- too simple to be frail, and evolving too fast to be eradicated entirely by sudden changes in their environment.

[Clonehunter]

Humans are evil. In order to save the world we must all commit mass suicide. If think this is ridiculous you are an evil money grubbing corporate bastard who should stop using animals to perform in freak shows like that puppy bowels thing.

[durian]

DoomUK said:

Why treat "man-made" things and "natural" things separately and speak of them dichotomously, as most of us do?

I take this to be the core part of your question, and in and of itself it seems like a perfectly good one (that is, bracketing the reasoning that took you to it in the first place, of which I am unsure).

As to the answer, my guess is simply that people have found the distinction between the 'natural' and the 'manmade' to be a useful one. Making use of the distinction doesn't commit you to the idea that the natural and the manmade comprise fundamentally distinct kinds of thing - that is, it doesn't commit you to the idea that the distinction between the two carves reality 'at the joints'. It might be a distinction without a (fundamental) difference, though this will probably depend on how the opposing notions of 'manmade' vs.'natural' are cashed out. But however that situation resolves itself, the key point is that there may well be good reasons for introducing a distinction, outside of whether that distinction reflects a genuine or fundamental difference between two kinds of thing. So (presumably) there are a bunch of situations in which it's useful to operate with the distinction between the manmade and the natural (else, why would we have it?), but the fact that such situations obtain is itself neutral with respect to the further question of whether it marks a genuine or fundamental difference. On the latter, if we think that there's a more fundamental sense in which manmade things are perfectly natural, then we may feel inclined to say that it doesn't, but this wouldn't then bar us from continuing to make use of the distinction (although it would then help if, when we did, we made explicit which notion of 'natural' was in play).

[geekmarine]

I would agree with the sentiment that while in the literal sense, everything is nature, it is useful to make a distinction via language between shit we control and shit we don't. If something is bad for the environment (and by extension, us), and we have the power to alter it, then by all means we should act on that. On the flip side of the coin, we must also do away with the notion that everything natural is good, and everything man-made is bad, though.

Allow me to demonstrate. For instance, hurricanes are clearly part of nature, in that they're clearly things we cannot control. That doesn't mean they're not bad, but they're a kind of bad we cannot prevent. Acid rain is also bad; not to the extent of hurricanes, but its bad. The difference, though, is that we have direct control over the chemicals released into the environment to create acid rain. And honestly, I think it's just silly to argue that because bad things can happen without our help, we should get a free pass. Wind can blow trash onto my property - does that mean I'm just going to give up and start dumping my garbage on my lawn?

[Maes]

Gez said:

If a random mutation appeared among mankind that made people go through puberty much faster, pop up litters of dozens of babies, and then die of a large assortment of gross organ failures before they're 40s, these people would be fitter than than the people who stay healthy and in shape until they're a hundred years old.

Isn't that straight from the opening sequence of "Idiocracy"? :-)

Actually, this is a trope that's verified in Real Life: poorer social classes and even entire countries tend to be more prolific and precocious the poorer and less "powerful", in a social/biological/military/economic/educational sense they are. However, rather than dying and leaving only the rich and powerful to dominate the world, they tend to stick around persistently and multiply faster. There might need to be 100 "curs" to 1 "nobleman" to make this viable (the "99%") but it has worked so far.

Whether this is a compensatory natural mechanism or a situation caused by purely societal factors (or even a goal of the ruling elites) is debatable.

However, it HAS and DOES often cause concern to Western countries that feel that they will sometime in the future be swarmed by hordes of "Prolific, dirty, ignorant muslims" from abroad, or even within a country (don't some people in the USA fear that one day there will be a "Black Takeover" or "Latino takeover" of sorts?).

[myk]

Yes and no.

DoomUK said:
So why don't we treat industrialisation - with all of its less-favourable qualities such as pollution and global warming - as a part of nature? Why treat "man-made" things and "natural" things separately and speak of them dichotomously, as most of us do?

The root of this dilemma is in respect to a matter of values in relation to what we do and the act of being. Nature is existence, which obviously includes us, but especially in terms of consciousness and ironically in how we can distinguish ourselves in relation to it. In that sense, nature is anything that isn't human and isn't ourselves. Specifically and individually but also as a general "race".

Nature is then also the foundations of where we act and what we act against, and hence a normative reference. Either positively because our actions seem limited and flawed within it, or negatively because of our self-love compared to it. Nature is bestial and filthy when we can see the artificial as a useful and benign safeguard, but it's pure and a sanctuary when the artificial turns harmful or oppressive.

The artificial is natural because it's part of nature, which is everything that doesn't transcend us, but it's also not natural because it stems immediately from us and our deeds. As for what transcends us, we can't say much about it, but in a sense it's also ourselves in terms that we transcend nature by our acts, consciousness levels and distinction from it.

[Gez]

Maes said:

Isn't that straight from the opening sequence of "Idiocracy"? :-)

Not really, because that opening sequence claims that natural selection favored the strongest and smartest. And that was never the case. Being strong and smart is merely one way to be fit, since it allows you to protect your offsprings more efficiently and make it so that your progeny doesn't need to number in the thousands to survive into the next generation; but it's just one way. There are others. And it's not the end goal, just a way to the end goal.

The end goal is to breeeeeeeeeeeed. Whether it's by making just 3 kids and being practically sure they won't die, or by making ten thousand kids and figuring that even if 99% of them die there will still be enough around, it doesn't really matter in the end.

Species with high maintenance costs (such as superpredators and large animals) will prefer to have few kids and make them count. Species with low maintenance costs (small critters and bottom feeders) figures out that with the heavy pressure caused by predation on them, they'd better go the swarming route.

Humans managed to mostly remove themselves from natural selection through predation and diseases, thanks to becoming so smart that they could protect their entire communities against most dangers, cure diseases instead of protecting the herd from contagion by letting afflicted individuals be eaten by some random predator, and all that kind of things. We help our fellow humans, even when they are weak and frail and otherwise "unfit", because it turns out to be in the best interest of society at large. Because even people with various handicaps that would make them unfit if they were born a wombat or a water buffalo can still be extremely valuable to have in the human community. Stephen Hawking would be a perfect example.

Since human reproduction isn't anymore the tango partner of natural selection, then instead it gets subjected to artificial systems. One of them is wealth.

When you have a lot of wealth, you tend to think that having wealth is super-important. That it's the measure of one's worth. Therefore, you don't want to cut that wealth into many small parts. It's better to have just one heir or two, max, so that the they can stay on top after marrying people from the same caste or above.

When you don't have a lot of wealth, though, you don't see the world that way. What's important, though, is people. People with hands to work. People who produce work that brings food on the table. Making kids is an investment that pays off, because the kids will work, and they'll take care of you in your old age, just like you took care of them in their old age. Wealthy people don't care about that, they can just hire caretakers.

So, the optimal calculation for wealthy people is to make as few kids as possible (while still making a non-null amount of kids, otherwise who's going to inherit the wealth? In the absence of heirs, it'd probably go to the State, meaning it would risk ending up being used to benefit poor people, which would basically be the same as defiling your grave) while for poor people the optimal calculation is to make as many kids as humanely possible.

So the poor keep breeding faster than the wealthy, but do not think this will result in the wealthy disappearing entirely.

As for whether mankind is becoming dumber as a result: first, do not equate wealth with smarts. There are plenty of rich people who are incredibly stupid; you just need to read some tabloids if you want a proof. Secondly, mankind becoming more stupid is a long process that predates our civilization. Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal, despite the picture we often have of "cavemen" as stupid and primitive brutes, had bigger brains than we do.

[Maes]

Gez said:

Species with high maintenance costs (such as superpredators and large animals) will prefer to have few kids and make them count. Species with low maintenance costs (small critters and bottom feeders) figures out that with the heavy pressure caused by predation on them, they'd better go the swarming route.

I wonder what would happen if some sociologist claimed that Westerners , smart and and rich people are K-selected while Africans, Asians, Muslisms, the poor and the ignorant, are r-selected.

Gez said:

We help our fellow humans, even when they are weak and frail and otherwise "unfit", because it turns out to be in the best interest of society at large....[snip]...Stephen Hawking would be a perfect example.

This is generally true only in times of abundance where you can afford to wait for the potential payoffs. But the slightest crisis is enough to trigger a "return to the basics" and turn any society into a crude FFA, where only a sort of cynical practicality survives.

Speaking of "cynical practicality", I recall a personal instance which involved a person which you could have called "handicapped", and a person having grown up in a relative shithole of place.

The guy I'm talking about was a co-student from Colombia, whom I met while in Italy years ago. At the time, I had an Italian female friend who had undergone spinal cord cancer (!) surgery when she was 13 yo, and that left her with motory coordination problem, strabism, a facial paresis, frozen facial features and even unable to close her eyelids. She was, effectively, a handicapped person.

The Colombian's guy comment "Hey cholo, she's perfect for some latino hermano to marry her and obtain the Italian citizenship!". So, yes, he did see a "use" for her....perhaps justified (?) from his point of view (and thinking that she'd even be grateful for finding a latin macho) but still, cold and cynical.

Gez said:

When you don't have a lot of wealth, though, you don't see the world that way. What's important, though, is people. People with hands to work. People who produce work that brings food on the table. Making kids is an investment that pays off, because the kids will work, and they'll take care of you in your old age, just like you took care of them in their old age. Wealthy people don't care about that, they can just hire caretakers.

Actually, this not at all true in urbanised societies anymore, and this has become painfully evident in the West with the ongoing economic crisis, which has hit urban-dwellers the worst.

Numerous offspring are indeed helpful in less advanced rural/agrarian economies, or for Gypsies, who exploit them in different -but still effective- ways, but are a hindrance in urban settings, except maybe for emerging countries: if you have, say, 10 children in Dhaka, Bangladesh you might indeed get all of them to work in a textile factory. Shitty salaries, yes, but they'd be working. Where in the West can you do that any more? With 10 children you'd be pretty much finished, and you'd have absolutely no guarantee that any of them would ever amount to anything, let alone be able to support you.

Gez said:

for poor people the optimal calculation is to make as many kids as humanely possible.

Take away their welfare benefits (?), take away any salarial bonuses, tax multiple offspring more (as they did now in Greece, having many offspring is considered as a proof of wealth(!) and raises you minimum taxable amount accordingly), and see how much water that statement holds.

In any case, the parallel with Idiocracy seemed appropriate to me because it portrayed a situation where uncontolled offpsring-generation is typical of the social strata who can less afford it and, in urban settings, benefit less from it.

[Maes]

Maes said:

I wonder what would happen if some sociologist claimed that Westerners , smart and and rich people are K-selected while Africans, Asians, Muslisms, the poor and the ignorant, are r-selected.

Self-quoting and double-posting here, but how naive was it of me to assume that none else seriously considered such a thing....

[fraggle]

Your argument doesn't make sense because you don't have any clear definitions for the words you're using.

[Maes]

fraggle said:

Your argument doesn't make sense because you don't have any clear definitions for the words you're using.

Well...ants and bees certainly fit some of the definitions of being "industrialized": they consist of an entire colony of individuals devoted to one specific macroscopic goal (surviving) and in doing that they have "mass production" and streamlining of various other processes and sub-goals (e.g. collecting pollen, making honey, milking aphids, digging tunnels, building hives etc.). They are so specialized at what they do that you could call them "industrialized" in many senses. After all, aren't ants and bees often used as metaphors for hard-working, dedicated, industrious etc. individuals?

[DoomUK]

fraggle said:

Your argument doesn't make sense because you don't have any clear definitions for the words you're using.

Should I start with I [had]?

Why can't you play nicely like everyone else is?

[Phobus]

DoomUK said:

So why don't we treat industrialisation - with all of its less-favourable qualities such as pollution and global warming - as a part of nature? Why treat "man-made" things and "natural" things separately and speak of them dichotomously, as most of us do?

Because we (humanity) have arrogantly elevated ourselves above all else around us and treat ourselves as the master of it. We're intelligent enough to have an awareness of self and therefore consider ourselves to operate outside of "the natural order", whereby we're choosing to do things and nature just "is" (to coin from Gez). We are not beholden to nature and can only choose to preserve the natural order where convenient to us, rather than fit in with it.

This bleeds through to our treatment of extinction, natural disasters (they're not disastrous for nature, mind - nature doesn't care!) and other stuff. Events we feel we should control (flooding in Britain, to use a current example) but evidently can't should probably serve to remind us that we're not actually the be-all and end-all of the world, but instead have us clamouring to fight how things are and protect ourselves. Most sensible people know we could avoid having homes flooded if we didn't build them on flood plains (the clue is in the name), but we build there anyway and then work to survive and overcome the problems when they occur.

Of course, this approach to our surroundings does work to some extent, as humanity has taken over the majority of the globe and defeated some illnesses. However, we haven't overcome nature entirely as we still die, still need to feed and drink and so on... I'm not sure what humanity is aiming for with this immortal utopia we seem to be trying to create, but I'm sure there's a lot of problems we'll discover and have to overcome to maintain or reach it. I'm sure the ethics in achieving said utopia would probably not be welcome today, too...

[gggmork]

It just depends on definitions. I once read a definition of 'artificial' as 'anything manmade', as opposed to natural for the rest. According to that definition, no.

But regardless, just about everything man does is "disruptive innovation". Nature was so complex and intertwined. Each part was simultaneously a separate entity and part of the whole, the biggest mass of synergy. Evolution took place on a glacial time scale for so long, so everything was counter-adapted to everything else on the same slow time frame. Everything fit like a key into its environment, like a koala only eats eucalyptus, and those are 'middle earth' concepts.. evolution sculpted all the way down the the smallest possible scale, the koala itself is a mass of synergy made of each individual cell, in a population of koala tangled in all sorts of overlapping food webs. It was all a holistic biosphere.

Human brain fueled technology disrupts this in such a short of time frame relative to glacial evolutionary history, that all the keys of the individual components of the biosphere aren't fitting to their locks anymore. There's invasive species everywhere due to transportation. All these non human animals are hopelessly desperately thinking with their inferior brains, made nearly obsolete by man. So when a dog hears a police siren it howls because it thinks it is a howling wolf, or a moth flies into a lightbulb (I mean what the hell is a lightbulb, my genes are programmed to navigate by starlight) and cows/chickens/etc are hopelessly exploited in factory farms, completely unable to comprehend their situation. It is sort of like human brains have descended the world into hell and the whole biosphere is dying. And even though social superorganisms like religion try to desperately make things better with a made up thing called ethics, the reality is our genetic evolution is full of crocodiles biting faces off, hyenas performing vivisections, wasps that lay larva in unconscious hosts to eat their way out. Every living thing was rewarded by how it could best steal the energy of other living things by eating its flesh, stealing its sunlight stored in the plants that photosynthesized it at the bottom of the food pyramid. The more women you rape, the more nature will reward you with offspring, the more people you kill the more nature will reward you with fewer competitors. The elites know this truth, and use ethics as a weapon against us, making us feel 'guilty' when doing something 'wrong'. This gives them a monopoly on evil, which nature rewards. Everything that evolves exploits the thing it evolved from. All of life is a replicating ouroboros, eating its own tail. Thus predators evolved from the same genetic line as prey, yet now eat the prey which they used to essentially be. This will happen again with the elites. They have evolved from us technologically, by stealing our innovation, and they are the new super predator. So be prepared for whatever equivalent of factory farms for all non elites. Our only light is knowing one day the elites themselves will spawn an evolutionary branch that will eat their tail. It'll constantly form a fractal of evil until the whole thing collapses.

[Phobus]

Didn't think I'd be saying this, but I fully agree with gggmork. My only hope is that, in this instance, the super predator isn't beaten by a strain of itself, but overcome by the predators it preys on (us).

Do humanity a favour, kill a politician, CEO or other "elite" today.

[myk]

Oh right, the old Synergic Genophagous Oedipus Complex of Evolving Villainy theory!

[darkreaver]

No.

Humans are not a part of nature. Humans are the work of the Devil.

But seriosuly, humans are a part of nature, so what we do is also. I mean, ant hills are a part of naure, right?

[Quast]

darkreaver said:

ant hills are a part of naure, right?

Those and bee hives, bird nests and beaver dams and rabbit warrens. Though by myk's definition above they would not be, which I find silly.

Anything not natural is supernatural.

[gggmork]

Quast said:

Those and bee hives, bird nests and beaver dams and rabbit warrens.

Those are what Richard Dawkins calls the 'extended phenotype' (genotype is the dna 'program' and phenotype is the physical manifestation of that program like a beaver's dna vs the beaver itself). The whole interesting thing about DNA genes is that they are replicators (this is the heart of survival of the fittest- whicever replicates with best longevity, fecundity, and fidelity is the 'fittest'. Even replicating ice crystal patterns can be fit. But beaver dams are tied to the replicator of DNA genes, and evolve at the same glacial pace as the genes of the beaver. Memes are where humans start to differ, a new replicator beyond genes. This new replicator fuels memetic, as opposed to biological, evolution at a much greater speed. Ants are incredibly simple just robots obeying pheromone guides. They don't have complex brains, or technological external manifestations of brains like books/computers which can harbor the new type of replicator called memes, which can then fuel faster memetic evolution.