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Comment by mrob | Hacker News Reader

Redefining words like this harms clarity of communication. Nature means things not designed or built by humans. Of course nothing on Earth has completely escaped the influence of man, but no ordinary person thinks a traffic jam is nature.

Van Mensvoort wants "nature" to mean "uncontrollable". This is doubly misleading, because not only does it include traffic jams (in car-favoring political climates like the US), even the most untouched wilderness is in practice controlled, as it only exists thanks to human civilization making laws to preserve it. The definition of "nature" becomes even more politicized than it already is, as whether something can be controlled or not is largely politics.

The traditional definition has its problems, but just because there's no clear boundary between nature and culture doesn't make the distinction meaningless. Van Mensvoort should coin a new word or phrase for his concept.

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> Redefining words like this harms clarity of communication.

I've yet to read TFA, but, I disagree with this. Natural vs artificial is a false dichotomy, and the existing definition of nature (a biblical remnant) is hampering our ability to envision our world properly, form IT to GMO to medically assisted procreation to climate change to general AI.

Humans are primates, we're part of nature as is everything we create. Artificial just is a subset of natural.

What is evolving is the information vector.

It's been DNA for billions of years, then culture (brain to brain), which actually predates humanity. Big cats learn hunting by imitation. Birds of the same species but of different locations sing different, learned songs, non human primates communicate symbolically and have regional accents.

We refined language, oral communication and developed mnemonic techniques like story telling, singing and poetry, which all must have been technological revolutions when they were invented (technology is a subset of culture).

We then started to externalize it with engraved, then manuscript then printed writing.

Then off course came telecommunication and computers, which are able to manipulate information independently.

This has been a continuum, and trying to set humans aside just because you happen to be one is a mistake.

On one side, you have green nuts who reject en masse nuclear energy (which would help mitigate the ongoing greenhouse cataclysm) and GMO (Monsanto's practices and products are horrible, but one shouldn't throw the baby with the bathwater). On the other one you have conservatives who reject social and reproductive progress because it goes against imaginary "laws of nature".

Now general AI is around the corner, and brains will likely go the way of the dodo.

We're going to get squeezed between global warming/ocean acidification and the robotic revolution. That's not a bad thing in the grand scheme of things, but it won't be pleasant when it occurs.

If we want a chance to make the right decisions to make it at least less painful, we should be armed with the best available mental tools, and putting ourselves out of nature is a basic mistake that we should avoid. We're not magic.

Natural vs artificial is not purely a false dichotomy, because it conveys information. A wolf is nature. A dog is not nature. I don't think either of those categorizations are controversial, even though humans have altered wolf personalities by killing all the bold ones, and even though humans only actively selected a small part of the dog genome, and even though wolves and dogs are genetically very similar. Wolves and dogs are widely accepted as different categories. The existence of marginal cases, eg. dog-wolf hybrids, does not change this any more than the fact that cabbage and kale are the same species makes the words "cabbage" and "kale" meaningless.

You can argue that "nature" is not a useful categorization, and that it's mostly used for political arguments, but the proposed redefinition only makes that problem worse. And it still doesn't solve the problem of marginal cases. All it accomplishes is making the word "nature" more confusing.

I use "wild" or "raw", vs artificial to describe such phenomena, even though it is of little practical use.

How does the redefinition make anything worse?

My take is that, since nature is everything there is, it becomes useless as a concept and can be safely eliminated from the discourse. Its current definition is poisonous.

I agree.

> I disagree with this. Natural vs artificial is a false dichotomy (...) Humans are primates, we're part of nature as is everything we create. Artificial just is a subset of natural.

There's a good illustration of that point that surprisingly is not XKCD:

http://abstrusegoose.com/215

Clarity of communication is not the goal here, perspective is.

When Darwin realized that we were in fact just an extension of the animals he found a new perspective that was very helpful to understand the world around us. It wasn't that evolution is true, it's just the best model we to explain biology.

That perspective is immensely useful for all sorts of applications and thats what Mensvoort is trying to do.

You are indirecting repeating the same argument the people who opposed his theories did. Making humans part of the animal kingdom hurt communication. Of course the question is whats the point of that communication?

I'm not opposing his theory, I'm opposing his language.

You could have made the same argument with Darwin back then. Thats my point.

Creating another word doesn't provide the perspective he is trying to achieve. His challenge isn't going to be clarity but like Darwin to get people even to accept the idea that it's the same.

It's not the same, because "nature" is a common English word, but "evolution" was an obscure technical term before Darwin redefined it. His redefinition did very little harm to clarity of communication.

Its not evolution but humans as animals i am talking about

There's no use in blotting out meaning. You can get more precision and (as he does) make a point as to the inadequacy of a concept - by establishing degrees. It's been done for ages in philosophy.

The insight is that technology is natural. That's it.

Now that might in the end form a new theory that will require a new name (just like Darwin did when his insight was that animals and humans are part of the same tree), but the insight is not a new word but instead the insight it would represent.

You can take the term "a theory of evolution" away and it's still as insightful a perspective (humans come from apes).

I've always been mystified by the modern definition of the word 'nature'. The word itself seems to describe a category without definite bounds. No uniform definition of the word seems capable of capturing all the outlying possibilities that the word seems to embody, yet used in context we all seem to be able to agree well enough on how it should be used. When I discovered C.S. Lewis had composed an extensive essay on the Etymology of nature (or kind) in a collection called "Studies in words" - I had to read it. I've read it several times since. It's absolutely fascinating.

In one vein, nature in it's modern form can simply be rationalized simply as 'uncontrived'. In this respect the article is certainly insightful in that even contrived systems can have emergent properties that cannot be contrived, that must be something other than 'man made'. However nature has always had a noble connotation, and emergent complications that are inarguably [poorly controlled / anticipated / understood] that only stand to ultimately reenforce the futility of our ambition will ever be deemed noble.

Nature is saturated with self organized critical systems (much akin to traffic) but I don't know know that we can see ourselves as pebbles in an avalanche, to do so is unkindly.

Anyone interested in words should read Lewis's "Studies in Words"; it's a wonderful book.

(If you only know Lewis as a Christian apologist and writer of children's fiction, don't be misled; this is C S Lewis the eminent university professor sharing the fruits of his very considerable erudition.)

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