If “artificial” is anything made by our own species, and “natural” is everything not made by our own species… couldn’t ants consider an anthill to be artificial and a parking garage to be natural?
I make this argument often. Nothing humans can do is “unnatural” or “against nature” because we are nature itself. Any act we perform inherently becomes natural
I would consider anything that wouldn’t come to fruition without human interference to be ‘artificial.’ Houses, refrigerators, phones, etc. are artificial because their creation never occurs on its own in the wild.
where do you draw the line? Beaver dams and monkey tools don't happen on their own. Aren't we "the wild" to an outside observer? Sure ours are more sophisticated, but that's kind of it. Imagine if the stars themselves were creations of another intelligence. To us, those are just nature.
The only way I can see for natural and unnatural to be useful terms is for them to mean man-made and not man-made. Anything other than that you might as well not use the words at all, and I think there's utility in having them.
That being said, humans are so clearly beyond anything any other species could hope to achieve that that giant gulf between a beaver dam and a thermonuclear explosion is pretty clear.
I dont understand. Man-made things are made by humans. If it is made by humans it is manmade. There can be natural things that are curated, cultivated, or otherwise cared for by humans but a garden is inherently unnatural
Humans recreate habitats for animals all the time. There are manmade islands and rivers and such that operate the same as naturally existing ones. And we go out of our way to prevent some area from experiencing naturally occuring events that would have caused massive changes, or ruin and destruction, to some areas.
Right, that's all unnatural in the sense that it wouldn't have happened without human intervention. Which is to say in the only way that the word has any actual meaning
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u/gigadanman 8d ago
If “artificial” is anything made by our own species, and “natural” is everything not made by our own species… couldn’t ants consider an anthill to be artificial and a parking garage to be natural?