Nature Versus Technology (blogpost of choice)

The quote below is an introduction to an interesting philosophical read on nature versus technology (in all its branches, 'digital technology' and otherwise)

"The question of technology versus nature must be set within the larger question of culture versus nature, as it is an intensified form of that more general issue. Technology involves artifacts, both in its etymology, from the Greek tekhne, 'art' or 'skill,' and in its central idea, the body of knowledge available to a culture for fashioning and using implements. Generally in anthropology all and only humans have a technology. More specifically, this dimension of culture has dramatically escalated in modern times, with the coupling of science and industry. That also presses the question whether such technology is natural, a question made more urgent, and puzzling, in cultures with high technology.

The parallel question is whether nature ends with technology, whether technology can and ought to bring nature to an end, and that question too has its urgency. Technology versus nature? That suggests a contest, and that technology might win, and nature be defeated. The question what is natural thus leads to conservation questions, asking whether and how far, in a technological society, the natural ought to remain. Willy-nilly, the technocrat is making decisions in environmental ethics. Those decisions are likely to be confused without a philosophical analysis of the technological and the natural."

Some other key quotes from the article to ponder and peek your interest with...
"Unlike coyotes or bats, humans are not just what they are by nature; humans come into the world by nature quite unfinished and become what they become by culture. Information in nature travels intergenerationally on genes; information in culture travels neurally as persons are educated into transmissible cultures. The determinants of animal and plant behavior are never anthropological, political, economic, technological, scientific, philosophical, ethical, or religious."

"Using a metaphor, nature is the womb of culture, but a womb that humans never entirely leave. Nature can do much without culture-the several billion years of evolutionary history are proof of that. Culture, appearing late in natural history, can do nothing without nature as its ground. In this sense, nature is the given. No culture can ever be independent of nature, not unless some future society learns to produce matter ex nihilo. Culture will always have to be constructed out of, superposed on, nature."

"Humans depend on air flow, water cycles, sunshine, nitrogen-fixation, decomposition bacteria, fungi, the ozone layer, food chains, insect pollination, soils, earthworms, climates, oceans, and genetic materials. An ecology always lies in the background of culture, natural givens that underlie everything else. Some sort of inclusive environmental fitness is required of even the most advanced, high-tech culture."

"The rapid development of contemporary technology opens up the possibility that, in the next millennium, nature will be less and less constitutional, as it is more and more modified, in the increasingly technologically sophisticated world of the future. Nature will become not so much redundant as increasingly plastic. The technicians can get houses out of trees, also clothing out of crude oil, a turkey with more white meat by gene-splicing, and this molecule out of that molecule, even this atom out of that one, whatever x out of whatever y. Human life will depend less and less on working with natural kinds (feldspar, turkeys, cellulose, or carbon) and more and more on artifacted kinds (vinyl, transgenic turkeys, fiberglass, or Teflon).

How far might this go? Engineers are hard at work on artificial photosynthesis.[7]Might we prefer this, if it gives us a better food supply? Biochemists have already made artificial blood, where the hydrogen atoms are replaced by fluorine atoms.[8] Such blood is being tested in medical treatments because it is resistant to leukemia and to certain toxins. People might come to prefer it. What would be wrong with people with artificial blood eating artificial food? One way to answer is to set this question in a larger framework, to look at what might be the end of which this is the beginning. What would be wrong with people rebuilding the planet? This forces the question whether and how far we really do wish for nature to be replaced by technology."

"Earth will be a managed planet. ... At the one extreme in range is microtechnology, already realized in computing and genetics, with nanotechnology in prospect.[10] We can design our children, or make transuranic elements. At the other extreme is planetary engineering, for example in weather manipulation."

"In our epoch, we have seen the coupling of science and technology. The next century will indeed launch a new millennium. The industrial age. The technological age. The postmodern world? The postnatural world?"

"Humans have always had to rest their cultures upon a natural life support system. Their technosphere was constructed inside the biosphere. But in the future that could change; the technosphere could supercede the biosphere. The focus of science would no longer be the laws of nature and how we can use them. Classical science has been grouped into the natural and the social sciences, depending on the object of study, nature or culture. Interestingly, today we have a new domain of science: the sciences of the artificial. Computer science, for example, is a science of artifacts."

I don't agree with all that is said in the article, especially about chimpanzees and their lack of culture and developing technologies (the undergraduate primatologist in me couldn't help but disagree with this statement), but the entire text by By Holmes Rolston III Technology Versus Nature: What is Natural? is well worth a read and a thought-provoking discussion with your friends.