. Word Count skip - Multiverse: Building A Family

I am going to repost this novel since apparently Webnovel refuses to give me a ranking :(

It turns I am lacking in word count so I'm sorry for this , but I needed to do this to actually get ranked

...

model (left) all predictors are used with roughly equal frequency (depending on how equally they are distributed among the agents) and so cause roughly straight waves of roughly equal slope. In the normal bar model, when the agents' choice of predictor can adapt to recent history (right), the wave dynamics are quite different. A few perennially good predictors produce waves with unusually steep slope, but most usage waves shift between periods of steep and flat slope, often roughly in concert with other waves. This loose but coordinated zig-zagging in groups of waves is a sign of a metastable dynamic in an ecology of predictors&endash;clear evidence of the unpredictably co-evolving selection criteria that drives supple adaptation. The distinctive pattern in the distribution from the normal bar model (right) is an empirical picture of what supple adaptation can be like in the bar problem. Even without any more detailed analysis of the usage waves in Figure 2, we can sense how the difference in this pair of distributions measures the degree of adaptation in the right-hand distribution. The differences between these distributions can be characterized quantitatively (e.g., with the chi squared statistic), but it is also obvious to the eye.

The method of using usage waves to highlight supple adaptation implies many testable predictions about empirical data, including those from natural systems. The underlying form of these predictions is that usage distributions will highlight a system's adaptive dynamics. Since the details of the specific mechanisms affecting adaptation generally differ in different systems, so

Published in Margaret Boden, ed., 1996, The Philosophy of Artificial Life (Oxford University Press), pp. 332-357. Missing two figures.

The Nature of Life

Mark A. Bedau

Department of Philosophy

Reed College, 3213 SE Woodstock Blvd., Portland OR 97202, USA

(503) 771-1112, ext. 7337

mab@reed.edu

http://www.reed.edu/~mab

The philosopher tries to define it [life], but no definition will cover its infinite and self-contradictory variety.

J. B. S. Haldane (1937: 64)

The idea of life, the sense of being alive, are the most familiar and the most difficult to understand of the concepts we meet.

J. Lovelock (1988: 16)

Few biologists today think it is worthwhile to pay much attention to that distinction [between life and non-life].

C. Taylor (1992: 26)

The nature of life used to concern philosophers&endash;think of Aristotle and Kant&endash;but most philosophers ignore the issue today, perhaps because it seems too "scientific". At the same time, most biologists also ignore the issue, perhaps because it seems too "philosophical". But this intellectual context has just been changed by the advent of the new interdisciplinary field of artificial life. Using the resources of both philosophy and artificial life, I will try to revive the question of the nature of life and defend a certain answer to it.

1. Facts and puzzles about the phenomena of life.

Life is amazing. It is all around us in a diversity of forms, ranging from microscopic bacteria to ancient towering trees, from almost inert lichen to transient insect blooms, from birds flocking in the sky to thriving colonies of tube worms at inky deep-sea vents. The first forms of life on earth spontaneously arose out of a preexisting prebiotic chemical soup. From those simple origins has evolved a diverse hierarchy of forms of life, which includes the most complex objects in the known universe. Individual living entities (organisms) maintain their self-identity and their self-organization while continually exchanging materials and energy and information with their local environment. Different species of life flexibly and tenaciously exploit various niches in the environment. When viewed on a long enough time scale, life forms are always changing, adjusting, producing novel responses to unpredictable contingencies, adapting and evolving through blindly opportunistic natural selection.

Not all the diversity and complexity and change in life is adaptive, of course. Random drift, architectural constraints and other non-adaptive factors have their influence. But what is especially distinctive and striking about life in the long run is the supple, open-ended evolutionary process that perpetually produces novel adaptations. In fact, I will contend in this paper that supple adaptation defines life at its most general.

There are plenty of puzzles about the concept of life. The concrete objects ready to hand are usually easily classified as living or non-living. Fish and ants are alive while candles, crystals and clouds are not. Yet many things are genuinely puzzling to classify as living or not. Viruses are one borderline case, biochemical soups of evolving RNA strings in molecular genetics laboratories are another. The Gaia hypothesis (Lovelock 1988), according to which the entire chemical and biological environment around the surface of the earth (including things like the oceans and the atmosphere) constitute one living organism, also strains the ordinary concept of life. So does the search for extraterrestrial life. Extraterrestrial life forms, if any exist, might well not depend on DNA-encoded information or, indeed, any familiar carbon chemistry processes. How would we recognize extraterrestrial life if we found it? We have no reason to suppose it will have any of the accidental characteristics found in familiar forms of life. What, then, are the essential properties possessed by all possible forms of life? The search for extraterrestrial life needs some answer to this question, for we can search for life only if we have a prior conception of what life is.

The phenomena of life raise a variety of subtle and controversial questions. Borderline cases like viruses raise the general issue of whether life is a black-or-white property, as it seems at first blush, or whether it comes in shades of gray. Early life forms somehow originated from pre-biotic chemical soup. Does this imply that there is an ineliminable continuum of things being more or less alive, as many suppose (e.g., Cairns-Smith 1985, Küppers 1985, Bagley and Farmer 1992, Emmeche 1994, Dennett 1995)? Another subtle question concerns the different levels of living phenomena&endash;such as cells, organs, organisms, ecosystems&endash;and asks in what senses (if any) the concept of life applies at these various levels. Mayr (1982) seems to be especially sensitive to this question, although he has no ready answer. Recently a third question has been receiving lots of attention (e.g., Langton 1989a, Emmeche 1992): Does the essence of life concern matter or form? On the one hand, certain distinctive carbon-based macromolecules play a crucial role in the vital processes of all known living entities; on the other hand, life seems to be more in the nature of a process than a kind of substance. The relationship between life and mind raises a fourth question. When we consider plants, bacteria, insects, and mammals, for example, we apparently find different kinds of mental activity, and it seems that different degrees of behavioral sophistication correspond to different levels of intelligence. Might the various forms of life and mind be somehow connected?

To answer questions like these and make sense of the puzzling phenomena of life, we need a sound and compelling grasp of the nature of life. Can any property embrace and unify not only life's existing diversity but also all its possible forms? What is the philosophically and scientifically most plausible way to account for the characteristic life-like features of this striking diversity of phenomena? How can we resolve the controversies about life? The concept of life as supple adaptation, explained below, is my attempt to address these issues.

Notice that our ordinary, everyday concept of life does not settle what the true nature of life is. Thus, we are not concerned here with careful delineation of the paradigms and stereotypes that we commonly associate with life. We want to know what life is, not what people think life is. Glass does not fall under the everyday concept of a liquid, even though chemists tell us that glass really is a liquid. Likewise, we should not object if the true nature of life happens to have some initially counterintuitive consequences.

2. Conceptions of life.

My main goal in what follows is to develop one particular conception of life&endash;life as supple adaptation. But it will be useful first to outline some other conceptions of life in order to introduce some of the competition. I will focus on three prominent kinds of views: life as a loose cluster of properties, life as a specific set of properties, and life as metabolization. There are a number of other interesting accounts of life, such as those based on self-replication (Poundstone 1985), autopoiesis (Maturana and Varela 1973), and closed causal loops (Rosen 1991), but this is not the occasion to discuss them all.

A skeptic might question whether there is any interesting single, all-inclusive account of life. The demise of vitalism taught us that no non-physical substance or force is distinctive of all instances of life. The skeptic asks what guarantees that some single property is distinctive of the unified diversity of life. For all we know, the truth about life might be no more unified than a collection of overlapping properties from overlapping disciplines, such as population genetics, molecular genetics, evolution, ecology, cytology, biochemistry, and physiology. Such skeptics often argue that life is characterized merely by a cluster of loosely connected properties. The individual properties in the cluster are held to be typically but not necessarily possessed by living entities; the diversity of living phenomena are thought to bear only a Wittgensteinian family resemblance.

A number of such clusters have been proposed. Farmer and Belin (1992: 818), for example, list eight characteristics: process; self-reproduction; information storage of self-representation; metabolization; functional interactions with the environment; interdependence of parts; stability under perturbations; and the ability to evolve. Farmer and Belin (1992: 818) explain that what drives them to a cluster conception of life is their despair of writing down anything more precise than "a list of properties that we associate with life" since

[t]here seems to be no single property that characterizes life. Any property that we assign to life is either too broad, so that it characterizes many nonliving systems as well, or too specific, so that we can find counter-examples that we intuitively feel to be alive, but that do not satisfy it.

Taylor provides a similar justification for characterizing life with a similarly loosely linked list of properties: "Each property by itself, even when considered with others, is unable to clearly delineate the living from the non-living, but together they do help to characterize what makes living things unique" (1992: 26).

There is a special virtue in viewing life as a loose cluster of properties, for this provides a natural explanation of why life has vague boundaries and borderline cases. The main drawback of cluster conceptions is that they inevitably make life seem rather arbitrary or, at least, mysterious. A cluster offers no explanation of why that particular cluster of properties is a fundamental and ubiquitous natural phenomenon. We must acknowledge that there is no a priori guarantee of a single, unifying account of life; such are the possible hazards of philosophy and science. Still, there might be such a account; such are the possible fruits of philosophy and science. To settle this question we must seek and evaluate more unified explanations of life. A cluster conception is a fall-back position that can be justified only after all candidate unified views have failed.

Life is sometimes characterized by a list of properties that are intended to characterize not a family resemblance but something much closer to necessary and sufficient conditions. Most lists are relatively short, and most contain many of the same properties. Monod (1971) lists three defining characteristics of life: "teleonomic" or purposeful behavior, autonomous morphogenesis, and reproductive invariance. Crick (1981) focuses on a somewhat related set: self-reproduction, genetics and evolution, and metabolization. Crick's list is almost identical with Küppers's (1985): metabolism, self-reproduction, and mutability. In The Problems of Biology Maynard Smith (1986) cites two properties: metabolism and parts with functions. Ray (1992) cites two others: self-reproduction and the capacity for open-ended evolution. An especially comprehensive list is produced by Mayr (1982: 53), who thinks that "[t]he process of living . . . can be defined" by a list of "the kinds of characteristics by which living organisms differ from inanimate matter". It is worthwhile summarizing Mayr's entire list:

1. All levels of living systems have an enormously complex and adaptive organization.

2. Living organisms are composed of a chemically unique set of macromolecules.

3. The important phenomena in living systems are predominantly qualitative, not quantitative.

4. All levels of living systems consist of highly variable groups of unique individuals.

5. All organisms possess historically evolved genetic programs which enable them to engage in "teleonomic" processes and activities.

6. Classes of living organisms are defined by historical connections of common descent.

7. Organisms are the product of natural selection.

8. Biological processes are especially unpredictable.

Mayr's list is a quite useful characterization of the special hallmarks of living systems, and it cannot help but deepen our sense of wonder and perplexity about what root cause could conspire to make this striking collection of features present in such an indefinite diversity of natural phenomena. In this, it suffers from the same weakness that besets cluster conceptions of life. We want an account of why these properties all coexist. Rather than settling this question, the list raises it. Of course, as our skeptic will remind us, the list of features might have no "root cause". The list might be refer to something like a medical syndrome&endash;a collection of symptoms with no underlying cause. But when doctors discover the characteristic coexistence of a list of symptoms, they seek an underlying cause, and they sometimes find an underlying cause for what previously seemed to be merely a syndrome. In the same way, it is appropriate always to keep one's mind open to the possibility of finding an underlying cause for any conjunction of hallmarks of life.

Schrödinger proposed persisting in the face of the second law of thermodynamics, by means of the process of metabolization, as the defining feature of life. The following passages outline his position (1969: 74-76):

What is the characteristic feature of life? When is a piece of matter said to be alive? When it goes on "doing something", moving, exchanging material with its environment, and so forth, and that for a much longer period than we would expect an inanimate piece of matter to "keep going" under similar circumstances. . . . It is by avoiding the rapid decay into the inert state of "equilibrium" that an organism appears so enigmatic; . . . How does the living organism avoid decay? The obvious answer is: By eating, drinking, breathing and (in the case of plants) assimilating. The technical term is metabolism. . . . [T]he essential thing in metabolism is that the organism succeeds in freeing itself from all the entropy it cannot help producing while alive.

It is compelling to think that life centrally involves the process of metabolization. For one thing, this nicely explains our intuition that a crystal is not alive (there is a metabolic flux of molecules only at the crystal's edge, not inside it). But perhaps what is most compelling is that any possible form of life that persists in the face of the second law of thermodynamics apparently must have a metabolization (or, as Schrödinger puts it, must feed upon negative entropy). By this argument, metabolization is at least a necessary condition of all physical forms of life.

The main drawback of metabolization as an all-encompassing conception of life is that intuitively many metabolizing entities seem not to be alive and not to involve life in any way. Standard examples include a candle flame, a vortex, and a convection cell (Maynard Smith 1986, Bagley and Farmer 1992). These examples by themselves do not prove conclusively that metabolization is not sufficient for life. An adequate and attractive conception of life need not classify as alive all and only those things we intuitively (even confidently) classify as alive. What matters is whether metabolization is the distinctive feature that in fact explains the unified diversity of life. Any convincing defense of life as metabolization must show that metabolization accounts for life's most characteristic features; this will thereby establish that candles and the like share with all life forms what is essential to life. Whether this is possible seems doubtful.

3. Life as supple adaptation.

It is sometimes suggested that the central feature underlying all life is the evolutionary process of adaptation. What is emphasized is sometimes the blind operation of natural selection, sometimes the general process of evolution, and sometimes the adaptive traits produced by these means. In each case the central idea is that what distinguishes life is an underlying automatic and open-ended capacity to adapt appropriately to unpredictable changes in the environment. From this perspective, what is distinctive of life is the way in which adaptive evolution automatically fashions new and intelligent strategies for surviving and flourishing as local contexts change.

In The Theory of Evolution Maynard Smith (1975: 96f) succinctly explains the justification for this view that life crucially depends on the evolutionary process of adaptation:

We shall regard as alive any population of entities which has the properties of multiplication, heredity and variation. The justification for this definition is as follows: any population with these properties will evolve by natural selection so as to become better adapted to its environment. Given time, any degree of adaptive complexity can be generated by natural selection.

Cairns-Smith (1985: 3) also emphasizes adaptive evolution's central role in accounting for life's characteristic features:

[N]atural selection is only one component of the mechanism of evolution. Any theory that is to explain the variety and complexity of living things must also take into account the varied and varying challenges set up by a varied and varying environment. Nature, as breeder and show judge, is continually changing her mind about which types should be awarded first prize: changing selection pressures have been a key part of her inventiveness.

But nevertheless natural selection has been the key component, the sine qua non. Without it, living things could not even stay adapted to a given set of circumstances, never mind become adapted to new ones. Without natural selection the whole adventure would never have got off the ground. That kind of in-built ingenuity that we call 'life' is easily placed in the context of evolution: life is a product of evolution. [emphasis in original]

These remarks suggest why it is plausible that the process of adaptive evolution could explain all of life's hallmarks. Although I will not review this exercise here, it is easy enough to see how this approach to life can mount plausible explanations of all of the entries on Mayr's list of the distinctive features of life.

I endorse a specific version of this approach to life. I will content myself with developing the general form of my view and defending it against various objections. Since the notion of adaptive evolution plays a pivotal role in my account, I will focus most of my attention on clarifying the relevant sense of adaptation and illustrating how it can be given a precise, quantitative, empirical explication.

Evolving systems that (according to this approach) underlie living phenomena involve a specific form of adaptation. The systems are automatically evolving in an open-ended manner and thereby continually producing new adaptive traits. The essential principle that explains the unified diversity of life seems to be this suppleness of the adaptive processes&endash;its unending capacity to produce novel solutions to unanticipated changes in the problems of surviving, reproducing, or, more generally, flourishing. Some forms of adaptation are rigid, such as those exemplified by artifacts like street lights or thermostats which have strictly limited options: turn on or turn off. By contrast, supple adaptation involves responding appropriately in an indefinite variety of ways to an unpredictable variety of contingencies. (The contingencies are "unpredictable" in the sense that the living system has no chance of already adapting to them.) Phrases like "open-ended evolution" (Lindgren 1992: 310; Ray 1992: 372) or "perpetual novelty" (Holland 1992: 184) have also been used to refer to this same process.

One might think that natural selection will inevitably produce supple adaptation, but this is wrong. When selection is made on the basis of a fixed fitness function, the resulting

Published in Margaret Boden, ed., 1996, The Philosophy of Artificial Life (Oxford University Press), pp. 332-357. Missing two figures.

The Nature of Life

Mark A. Bedau

Department of Philosophy

Reed College, 3213 SE Woodstock Blvd., Portland OR 97202, USA

(503) 771-1112, ext. 7337

mab@reed.edu

http://www.reed.edu/~mab

The philosopher tries to define it [life], but no definition will cover its infinite and self-contradictory variety.

J. B. S. Haldane (1937: 64)

The idea of life, the sense of being alive, are the most familiar and the most difficult to understand of the concepts we meet.

J. Lovelock (1988: 16)

Few biologists today think it is worthwhile to pay much attention to that distinction [between life and non-life].

C. Taylor (1992: 26)

1. Facts and puzzles about the phenomena of life.

2. Conceptions of life.

1. All levels of living systems have an enormously complex and adaptive organization.

2. Living organisms are composed of a chemically unique set of macromolecules.

3. The important phenomena in living systems are predominantly qualitative, not quantitative.

4. All levels of living systems consist of highly variable groups of unique individuals.

5. All organisms possess historically evolved genetic programs which enable them to engage in "teleonomic" processes and activities.

6. Classes of living organisms are defined by historical connections of common descent.

7. Organisms are the product of natural selection.

8. Biological processes are especially unpredictable.

3. Life as supple adaptation.

adaptive evolution's central role in accounting for life's characteristic features:

[N]become adapted to new ones. Without natural selection the whole adventure would never have got off the ground. That kind of in-built ingenuity that we call 'life' is easily placed in the context of evolution: life is a product of evolution. [emphasis in original]

These remarks suggest why it is plausible that the

Department of Philosophy

Reed College, 3213 SE Woodstock Blvd., Portland OR 97202, USA

(503) 771-1112, ext. 7337

mab@reed.edu

Few biologists today think it is worthwhile to pay much attention to that distinction [between life and non-life].

C. Taylor (1992: 26)

ents in philosophy about the relationship between humanity and the rest of life on earth, rejecting the dualistic view that humans and nature are two separate categories, and preferring instead to see society and nature as inextricably connected 'socionatures'. This view emerges from academia, but is also a common feature of the non-western worldviews of many human groups around the world.

Debates about whether people and nature are one are important because they provide the foundations for thinking about how we as humans should relate to the rest of nature. However, they can, in my opinion, also distract us from some important practical issues. Take the example of the 'separation from nature' thesis described above. From the purist socionature position, separation of people from nature is by definition impossible. Therefore there is no need to think about re-connecting or repairing a link between people and nature. This makes sense logically, but it seems to overlook the quality of relations between constituent elements of nature, whether human or non-human, which surely do matter.

I can explain what I mean here using an analogy. Imagine a prisoner locked away in solitary confinement. Nobody would deny that she or he is a human, despite the fact that they are denied any direct contact with the rest of humanity. But equally, nobody could claim that the prisoner is experiencing a rich social life. In other words, the prisoner belongs to the category of humans but is nonetheless disconnected from the rest of humanity in their day to day lives, doubtless with negative psychological consequences (otherwise solitary confinement wouldn't be much of a punishment).

I believe the same argument can be applied to people and non-human nature. A human in solitary confinement is no less part of nature than a jaguar roaming the Amazon rainforest, but is experiencing a greatly diminished set of relations with the rest of nature (other than the food they eat and the armada of gut bacteria they carry with them). The same argument could apply to a non-human organism kept in captivity. By analogy with the term social life, I propose to call the collected set of ongoing relational experiences we each have with the rest of nature (including our gut bacteria and other people) our 'natural life'. This term seems to do what is says on the tin as a descriptor of ones interactions with the rest of nature. It is not entirely new – Thoreau wrote about natural life extensively, but in his case it was used to describe a particular positive vision of the 'good' natural life, whereas I intend it as a neutral descriptor of all forms of connection or disconnection with the rest of nature. There are also echoes of Leopold's land ethic, which rejected the dualist separation of people and nature but went on to emphasise the quality of relationships between human and non-human, declaring "A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise."

If we now return to the various claims made about separation from nature, we can perhaps re-frame them as having in common a concern about the 'natural life' of many contemporary people. Rather than arguing that they are 'separate' or outside of nature completely, the focus is shifted to whether people are experiencing as many elements of nature, or the same quality of experiences, as in the past. Instead of crunching into a philosophical dead end, we are now left with a whole series of questions that demand to be answered. To what extent is human wellbeing a product of one's natural life? How might the natural life be measured or changed? Does direct contact with non-human nature matter, or can a fulfilling natural life be achieved through watching nature documentaries, reading books or eating food? How do one's life experiences and status affect the need for a natural life (e.g. do desirable elements of a natural life change as one gets richer)? Should some concept of natural life be built into ideas about multidimensional poverty or human rights? How can the concept incorporate the potentially negative aspects of connection to nature, such as predation, conflict and disease? What do policy interventions such as the Ecomodernist Manifesto imply for the natural life (some kind of reshaping away from everyday connections with local nature towards occasional but spectacular interaction with far away 'wild' nature)?

Many of these questions are already being explored in research on things like biodiversity and happiness, some of which I am involved in. I am therefore not proposing the invention of a new arena for research, but rather finding a different theoretical framing through which to understand it. I am also thinking about possible links to Actor-Network Theory, which seeks (in my limited understanding) to avoid pre-determined categories and to focus instead on the constantly unfolding network of connections between human and non-human actants. This seems similar to my aim to move away from the crude binaries of the nature/culture debate and to focus instead on what actually happens – the lived experience of nature. There may also be interesting links to Jamie Lorimer's writing on multinatures, which suggests that there is no single nature or even socionature, but rather a jumble of different 'natures' experienced by human and non-humans alike. Perhaps the natural life of an organism is just another way to describe the particular version of 'nature' that is experienced by that organism.

I hope that the ideas presented here will stimulate further thinking about the relationships between humans and non-humans. I would like to move on from crude nature / people binaries, and focus instead on the quality and content of experiential connections with the natural world that comprise the natural life, and that I believe are far more useful (and interesting!) to study. At the same time, I realise I have barely scraped the surface of thinking about nature and society in this article, and I would welcome your ideas, corrections and suggestions.

Leave a comment

Clem on January 29, 2016 at 3:35 pm

Excellent. I like the way this thinking is headed. I also appreciate the reference to actor-network theory, hadn't heard of that before.

An aspect of this you may be thinking about which concerns me is the value assignment going on within notions like beauty (see Aldo Leopold's ethic you've quoted). While I agree wholeheartedly with Leopold's overall direction, I have some difficulty when I imagine someone might be cast as unethical because their particular concept of beauty is not locked in to some societal average. The natural realities of death and extinction are very widely considered as bad or ugly. We are IMHO too quick to paint as ugly those natural things as predatory kills, disease, and genetic deformities that make us uncomfortable. Indeed our seeking to be comfortable – limiting our exposure to the violence of the natural world may be why we construct our niches as we have.

Being comfortable isn't necessarily a bad thing, but like a lot of other things we desire – it can be overdone.

So while I like the concept of viewing the plants and animals around us as fellow agents and actors in a milieu we find ourselves immersed within, I hope we limit imposing human centered values onto them. Projecting our beliefs onto our fellow humans is poor behavior, and we at least share a common natural life with them – the failure to appreciate the nature of other life forms could exacerbate the dangers possible from our projecting upon these "others".

It just now occurs to me how salient the title of your blog fits to this conversation. We must be ever vigilant to realize we interact with our fellow life by 'Thinking Like a Human'. Would that from time to time we might try to see the world through a lens built by other fauna and flora.

Mike Jones on February 1, 2016 at 7:20 am

People are nature. To believe that we are something separate, is a reflection of biological and ecological ignorance. Nature's rights are fundamental to human rights and human wellbeing. Aldo Leopold's philosophy tells us that love of land and love of self are one and the same. Our attempts to dominate nature with technology is a fear based response to uncertainty, a misuse of the power that technology and fossil fuel energy have given us. We are currently in a situation where nature may well end human evolution and send us to extinction because of our childlike abuse of technology and our sense of entitlement to live in a perfectly predictable and stable world.

Ian Christie on February 1, 2016 at 1:07 pm

Many thanks for an excellent post, Chris.

Actor-network theory can be unduly obscure and taken too far, but the insight that not only humans are agents is a powerful one. However, we don't need to regard non-humans as agents to see them as 'morally considerable' beings who have interests and intrinsic value that we (as unique bearers of responsibility) must take into account. That line of thought is compatible with many approaches to ecology, ethics and human embeddedness in 'nature'. One that you might want to consider is the Integral Ecology set out by Pope Francis in his encyclical of 2015, Laudato Si. I'm no Catholic, and nor are many of those who admire this work: you don't have to accept the theology to see in the encyclical a powerful framing of human responsibility and connection with other species. I think it could be fruitful for secular ecological-social thinkers to explore this work seriously.

Another related approach, which I favour, is to consider our relationships with each other and with the 'more than human' in the light of the ethics of care and dependency, which rests on the recognition that we are, in Alastair Macintyre's term, 'dependent rational animals'.

Finally, I'd make a plea for research and advocacy that can bring your kind of thinking into the land use planning system, which offers a milieu for considering and acting on our embeddedness in nature but which is by now reduced to a machine for commoditising both social and environmental value as 'capital'.

msandbrook on February 1, 2016 at 3:34 pm

I have been round this loop. The feeling it engenders in me is uncomfortable, similar to what I feel when I wonder where the universe ends, and if it does end, what's beyond it.

Is it useful to distinguish between humans as animals and humans as thinking beings?

At one level, of course, everything we are is part of nature, our technology, our ability to pollute and all other aspects of our existence. Despite a widely held belief to the contrary, the economy is a subset of the ecology, not the other way round. We evolved as part of nature, so nature must be responsible for inflicting damage on itself.

But while this is true, what is also true is that nature has provided, or has evolved in us, the faculty to think independently. Our emergent property is conscious self-awareness. Sadly, this faculty is bounded, (Bateson argued that our consciousness is a lot less than we crack it up to be). This bounded rationality allows us to first think and then act in a way which is apparently against nature. Nature has given us an individuality, within the great individuality, which appears to allow us to act against ourselves and against nature itself.

So when we talk about reconnecting, I believe we mean reframing our conscious thinking. As we ingest the universe to stay alive, we are part of nature. But as we think, as a precursor to action, we can choose to do things which go against nature, especially when our limited consciousness assumes the world is linear and like a machine, rather than a constantly unfolding complex web of cause and effect.

To think in unison with nature we need to be in unison with nature. To be in unison with nature, we need to think in unison with nature.

Mike Jones on February 1, 2016 at 6:47 pm

I like Bateson's thoughts on an ecology of mind which suggest that reframing the way we view and subconsciously interpret the world is the way forward. Rautenbeek and Cartier wrote about it in terms of "dezombification" as a process of social learning about the consequences of human use of nature, that might enable us to evolve from Homo economicus to Homo sustinens. Richard Norgaard has recently written about the fundamental need to surrender our beliefs in neoclassical economics and the ideology of neoliberalism if we are to adapt to global changes that we currently face.

Neurology is demonstrating how plastic the brain is and how rapidly it can develop new connections between neurons and pathways that link our senses to the sub-conscious and conscious parts of the brain for more deliberate, proactive decision making. The difficulty is that people tend to strongly resist the surrender of their beliefs because of those beliefs have survival value under a given set of conditions. The open minded and quick witted who are willing to reframe their bounded rationality will do well in times of turbulent change. Perhaps H. sustinens will emerge as a consequence of the Anthropcene.

rxfletcher on May 2, 2016 at 5:02 pm

Thanks for this thoughtful discussion Chris. I agree that the question of how to get beyond the nature-culture divide is crucial to the future of conservation and of sustainability generally. I also agree that understanding everything humans do and experience – whether in a national park or a jail cell – as part with a larger biophysical reality is likely key to this. But I wonder whether the idea of the "natural life" is really the best way to get us there. I outline my own perspective on this issue in a recent article (link below), but essentially I worry that using the term "nature" at all may be part of the problem we need to overcome.

For "nature" to exist as a distinct concept then there must be something that it not nature to which it can be contrasted. And that "not nature" that helps define nature is almost always human consciousness and the products thereof. Using the word "nature," therefore, commonly invokes the sense that we are speaking of something from which we understand ourselves as separate. Advocating connection with nature, from this perspective, can be seen as something of a contradiction in terms, since this very advocacy tends to reinforce the sense of separation between humans and nature that it seeks to overcome. We can of course try to redefine the term to eliminate this issue but it carries so much historical baggage that this may prove quite difficult.

Trying not to use the word at all might prove a more fruitful strategy. I agree that actor-network theory offers a potential way to do this, since it allows us to discuss "assemblages" of different entities without needing to invoke the nature concept at all. What if we could give up the idea of nature entirely and instead just describe the things that actually exist in the world and the significant connections among them? Then we could focus on the relative consequences of different lifestyles or courses of action rather than worrying about which is more "natural"…

https://www.academia.edu/24385245/Connection_with_Nature_is_an_Oxymoron_A_Political_Ecology_of_Nature-Deficit_Disorder_

csandbrook on May 3, 2016 at 11:05 am

Hi Rob – many thanks for this. I've read your paper and would encourage others to do the same. I see your point about the baggage that comes with the term 'nature', however it is deployed. Certainly my intention was that 'natural life' would include interaction with other humans and human ideas / artefacts as well as with non-human nature, but as you say this may be missed because of knee-jerk assumptions about the meaning of nature. On the other hand, I'm not sure that reverting to no label at all (how is your 'assemblage life' today?) is a practical solution! I look forward to discussions with you and others on how to take this forward.

"The real challenge for today's conservationist is to learn to think like a human." (Adams, 2007) http://tinyurl.com/93xhbfe

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Chapter 14 - . Word Count skip