The human brain is not part of of the natural organism

Every organism on the planet exploits everything it can to survive. Bacteria once poisoned the entire planet with oxygen due to their own "selfish" activity, and there isn't one locust on the planet that wouldn't eat every last shred of grass to enable it survive and reproduce.

There is no mandate from nature to behave in a way which minimizes our impact on the world around us. The only mandate is one we impose on ourselves (or *should* impose on ourselves) to perpetuate our own comfort and survival. We don't want the world to change because it's useful for us the way it is.

But make no mistake, humans are no different from other organisms in their basic behavior. Our only difference is that we can anticipate probable outcomes to a much greater degree than any other organism.

Human beings are a part of nature. What we build is an extension of nature expressed through our natural abilities. Everything is natural. We cannot screw up "the" world, we can only screw up "our" world.

The bacteria of a billion years ago poisoned themselves and took other forms of life with them, but they gave rise to the oxygen world which we now enjoy. What waits in the shadows for the world that will result from our existence. We won't ever know. But something waits, and it will appreciate our generosity if we're not careful.

This bears repeating. I think the constant contention by so many people in so many areas to the effect that humans are "unnatural" is a relict of the religious conceit that man is a special creation, given power over the rest of the world by the creator. Even that is a wonderful adaptation, because it allows us to naturally pursue our natural goals without qualm.

You have a perception problem which i will address in a moment. First, however, ask yourself what other species there are which understand the system of which they are a part, and never disturb or destroy the system.

"Survival of the fittest" is not a Darwinian phrase. That comes from Spencer. As far as individuals go, survival is the measure of fitness--any individual which survives is ipso facto fit. Survival of the fittest applies to species. The species best able to exploit an environment will survive. That doesn't mean that others won't survive, just that that species will. That's the inevitable result of adaptation by descent with modification. In fact, you're once again shoehorning, looking at the confirmatory evidence (or what you allege is confirmatory evidence) and ignoring that which does not support your thesis. There are any number of species which have thrived and prospered precisely because there are human beings--Roswell has already pointed out that micro-organisms have adapted and prospered because of humans. So have cockroaches, so have coyotes, so have raccoons--there are any number of species which do very well, thank you, precisely because humans exists and obsessively alter their environment.

Other species would do the same, if they possessed the same skill sets. It's the nature of the beast.

I agree. But in addition to that, even people who think of humans as natural, still associate "man-made" with "un-natural". Obviously things that pass through the creative process of human design are uniquely different from things which grow and arise without our intelligent design, but I think it's beneficial for people to realize that even the things we make are a natural part of the world by virtue of being an expression of our natural behaviors.

This distinction is going to get REALLY interesting when our production of living organisms through genetic design start to crawl onto our laps and purr (or whatever it is they're going to do), and then reproduce on their own. Will we call those things "man-made" or will they be "natural"?

Yup.

I added something to my previous post. Sorry to jump in before your reply.

Given that man is natural, all of his productions will be natural. Are the wasps which fertilize fig trees "unnatural" because that relationship has selected them for survival? Are bees "unnatural" because they have evolved to exploit flowers which evolved to be pollinated by them?

This is a silly thread--i'm not wasting any more time here.

I abandoned it for some of the same reasons, but I always check when I see names of people who dont try to blow smoke up my ass.

See ya over there.

Some people pay good money for that very service, and you're getting it for free.

Every animal or plant specie does not exploit everything it can to survive. Not in the way we do it, anwyay. And the way we do it, is really abominable.

Because we have only our brain and lost everything else, we can not see what goes on between animals and plants. We don't have a clue. We can't even imagine it. The human brain tries to imitate nature but it doesn't even know what it has to imitate.

You say there is no mandate from nature for us to behave in a way which minimizes our impact on the world around us. In fact you are with this sentence confirming in a way what I'm trying to say : that the human brain is not part of the natural organism.
I know it is very difficult to understand.

I'm always surprised when human emotions and caracteristics are linked to natural elements of nature.
How can bacteria be 'selfish' and 'poison' the entire planet? In the same way as an unfortunate spider in the bath creates panic? And in the way that nature is very often described as'vengeful', 'full of rage', 'merciless'?

And about the ravaging locust... as far as I know nature never asked human beings to become sedentary. Of course locusts will eat everything that looks green. How stupid can humans be to to expose green fields in a dry environment in the way they do? There's nothing wrong with nature. How come that all the other animal species and plants survive after 'a visit' of those Biblistic plague locusts? Have we checked already how many species benefit from such a blitz visit?

The people living in Tsjaad, Niger, Southern Algeria probably were nomadic and probably knew very well not to expose a green field. Why did these people start to grow food? I don't know. But I'm going to look it up.

It seems to me that we impose a lot of mandates upon ourselves where a lot of individuals and even groups don't agree with. That is also an argument that I can use to defend the statement that our human brain does not belong to nature. Almost every plant, every animal has an innate program to behave in such and such way that connects to other plants and species. One important thing is that (when there is no intervention of human beings) the progeniture adopts the way of living and behaviour of the parents. It's innate or it is learned.

But with human beings it's a completely other story. No matter how much you, as a parent, would like, your child or children to adopt the same ethical, social, 'professional' behaviour', ... I'm not going to waste words on this. Parents and their children are a gamble. The same goes for nations and their citizens. Politics changes all the time, jurisdiction changes too and varies from nation to nation, in as much that the jurisdiction in one country is completely contradictional to the jurisdiction of another country. Why? And all these imitation laws to create 'law and order' do not connect to the environment.

If we would be part of nature, every individual would behave in the same way, and the progeniture also, everywhere on this planet.

And then you write this : 'We don't want the world to change because it's useful for us the way it is. ' The human world is changing all the time, further away from nature. I don't see the usefulness and who is 'we'?
'We' is definitly not all the embryo's aborted, all children not reaching five years of age because of hunger, and unfavourable life circonstances, definitely not the three persons a week committing succesfull suicide in Belgium, definitvely not the war casualties, military or civil. And civil means women and children. Nature has a certain strategism to protect females and progeniture. We don't. If it would be natural to kill communities, why then do only worms benefit from it?
When the German army withdrew from Russia, dogs ate from the frozen soldiers. Bu that has nothing to do with nature.
In nature every dead animal supports the young ones or the procreation of another animal.
Most of the time we think it is cruel.
Cruelty is when children are forced to kill their own parents, or when a pregnant women has to wait in 24 hours in a doorway waiting for interrogation without sitting down (Chili under Pinochet) or a women that hears her new born baby crying behind a wall untill it dies (concentration camp).
Of course you can say it is history. But is it really? Don't we excell in useless suffering and killing? Is this part of nature? No, it can never be.

We kill ourselves like Dutchies which, when they have no food anymore (bloodlice), start eating themselves. What are we doing with these killings? Making space? Why making space? Because there 's not enough? Why is there not enough? Because we are too many. Why are we too many? Because we breed like mice while we are in fact not animals made to feed predators.
Our system of procreation has gone berserk.

If we would be part of nature, we would never build 'an extension' of nature. We are part of it or we or not. In my vieuw there can not be a 'between'.

And yes, my old mother says 'the worlds is screwed up'. I agree. And because we are 'screwed up', we screw up everything else up. But I read a certain acceptance in your 'we can only screw up ourselves.' Is that on itself not bad enough? And why should it be like that? Where's the glory? Where's the well-being? Where is the 'all for one, and one for all' discipline? That's romance from Dumas.

Most people think and are educated in such a way that they think that nature is or hostile or is a park where you can have a picknick and were the lawn are free of ants.

The comforting thing is that nature doesn't tick with our clock. It will always look for a balance. Even if it has to create a virus to decimate us because we are too many and because we breach the extreme. Or it will follow another strategy : the floods, the droughts. And the first victims are the weakest human beings, those who are in a way already condemned by society but are very productive (they have a lot of children).

How can you say 'But something waits (that) 'will appreciate our generosity if we're not careful' ?

Nature never waits. It has its own time schedule and it can change the four seasons into one if that is what it needs to get a balance.

Thank you very much for your reaction. It really made me think further. We don't agree but that is not necessay at all. It's very interesting.
Without knowing it, you lighted an aspect of my search which I hadn't considered before (in connexion with lifespan of human beings and their notion of time projected on the future...).

I'm a little bit troubled that I wrote so much. Sorry.

Of course they do.
Well, that's true, we're exceptionally good at it.

I didn't mean to imply that Bacteria are actually "selfish" with the same degree of awareness that we are. I was simply pointing out that bacteria exploit the resources around them without regard for their impact.

Lots of species benefit from events like that. Many species actually require things like brush fires to wipe out ground vegetation so they can survive (redwood tree seeds germinate and grow best in burned out areas). Other species don't survive. Most of the species ever to have existed on this planet are extinct. I agree, there's nothing wrong with nature. The problem you are having is that you are attempting to impose your personal artificial restrictions on the direction nature is going. Nature is always changing. That's normal for it. Species come and go. Whole environments vanish and are replaced with something new.

You see to be under the impression that if humans weren't around that everything in nature would stabilize and nothing would change and all animals would "just get along". But that isn't the case at all. Species become extinct all the time, it's been going on for billions of years.

I think what you're implying is that because we're unique in our ability to effect the environment, that we are not therefor part of nature. But I don't think you're giving due credit to the fact that our skills (and our brains) are a natural expression of the evolutionary process (which is itself an expression of nature).
The world isn't screwed up. The world can't be screwed up. The only thing that can be screwed up is our expectations.

You seem to be lamenting the fact that people are not able or willing to override their basic instincts to consume and reproduce. And that may be a valid concern with regard to our long-term success as a species on this planet (with limited resources), but it certainly doesn't remove us from nature. Instead it solidifies our place in nature as "just another animal", spectacularly powerful (and potentially dangerous) though we may be.

To give yourself some peace, I think you need to accept that fact that we are behaving naturally and that though the natural world may be altered by us, it will always continue in some form, just as it always has.

The challenge for humanity is to override our natural behaviors in favor of new behaviors which maximize the chance of a stable and healthy world for us to exist in. But this is not something we do naturally, it's not part of our instinct nor has it ever been for any other animal on the planet. We are the first creature ever to have this choice. It is un-natural for us to do what you expect of us... but it's not impossible for us to do it.

'Every animal or plant specie does not exploit everything it can to survive' is what I wrote. I should have addesd 'not at the expence of their own quality of life and not at the expence of other species'. That is very important. They will exploit opportunities offered and will exploit their own uniqueness after and during evolving, but all in balance with the rest.
We realise whatever our brain thinks of. Whatever is possible, has to happen, nomatter what the consequences are.
Our brain is not able to receive indices out of nature, nor are we able to send out the right indices to nature. The brain is the obstacle : it is deaf and blind.

'We're exceptionnally good at it.' you replied. The 'execeptionnaly' worries me. Why should we have to be 'exceptionnal' in what we do. Is this planet some kind of an arena? What kind of competition is going on?
And where does the 'it' stands for?

If you mean we are exectionnally good in cultivating 'suffering'? I agree. Sometimes I think 'human suffering' should be expressed in shares on the stock exchange markets. I would invest immediately and become rich. Unfortunately the offer is larger than the demand.

Bacteria or viruses obey 'looking for balance' rules. These rules, I suspect, we don't know. It's almost impossible to know them because we, in the first place, would never have been confronted with them if we would have been part of nature. We worry about it and battle against viruses and bacteria. The result of what we are and how we live. We imply our domestic animals , and even wild animals (seals) into this bacteria and virus offensive.
An important rule might be (with the accent on 'might') is that a surplus of something, elicits a reaction, to restore balance.
F.i. when you have an unnateral high concentration of animals (an indoor poultry farm f.i.), these animals invite bacteria and viruses to go ahead. What do we do? The chicken are fed 'preventory' antibiotics' . Then we discover that some viruses or some bacteries have become resistent to this kind of medication.

So I agree completely that bacteria exploit the resources around them without regard for their impact.
You mean with 'impact' the farmer-slave of bio-industry, and the death of chicken. If these chicken would have been presented in a supermarket alive with burned beaks, plucked feathers...
I've never seen in a supermarket a chicken like that to promote its meat.
That 'impact' is 'lack of balance'.
The 'lack of balance' is caused by : high concentration of one specie in a limited space. Space is very, very important.
Up till now I have three major rules to observe : concentration or numbers, space and also time. If one of those three is 'out of balance' (whatever that balance is...), then of course viruses and bacteria are invited to eliminate what tis too much until a balance is reached.

About what you wrote concerning the 'locusts. I don't think nature changes at all. It shows changes because it looks for this balance, but I'm pretty shure that the rules and the laws or whatever, it lives by, have never changed. We change the environment and nature changes our changes or our impact in our environment, but the goal is to reach a healthy balance.

And I don't think that species are extinct because of the bushfire that incites certain seeds to germ. In a natural bushfire animals die, or are in their flight vulnerable and exposed to predators. Perhaps those bushfires coincide with the breeding season of certain predators.
Nature is not going anywhere. It's not because we constantly have the feeling that we have to make progress and go somewhere that we have to transpone this on nature.

Yes, species come and go. But they come and go slowly and peacefully. And whole environments vanish and are replaced with something new slowly and peacefully.
That is natural.

What is not natural is to drain land and complain afterwards when there's an alligator in the swimming pool or back yard, or a herd of wild boar on your lawn, or that a fox has killed all your pet chicken.
Voices are raised : kill the alligators, kill the foxes....
If someone on this place is changing the environment, it is the homo sapiens. Not even a spider is allowed in our world. Everything must be 'clean' and 'sterile'. As if that 'clean' and 'sterile' is not a clear invitation to bacteria and viruses,... ? The void of it only.

Yes, I'm convinced that everything is okay where there's no intervention of human beings. It is 'Eden' before 'the tree of knowledge' in which you know what happened.
Someone ever, in a long past, must have noticed a change.
And afterwards the version ( something oral ?) changed and changed and was interpreted in favour of I don't know who.

Being chased naked from the garden of Eden was not exactly a very promising start for our ancestors, I imagine.
And the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge...

The less I intervene in my small garden, the more diversity I remark in plants, animals, insects.

I don't follow you when you say that our skills (our brain) are a natural expression of the evolutionary process. I try but I can't.
To us our skills are the best there is, the most performing, the most powerful. To me these skills don't have much value. It's as if a ram is very much 'showlike' performing banging its head against a wall, while a small distance away, the gate in the wall is wide open And if it's not a ram, it can be a scientific team exchanging a lot of information to find a way, a theory, a method of theory even, to find a way to make a hole in that wall.
And during that long process, not only tha gate is closing, but also the holes in the wall, never located, never observed.
And whover wanted to get to to the other side of that wall, never saw that the wall was'n even very high. A child could have climbed over it...

'Expectations' : you can't fill your stomach with expectations. Nature has millions of calendars, and at the same time it doesn't 'know' time, the way we experience time.
There is a'timeless' drive in nature to look for balance or to keep it. And a lot of humans live and die in unfulfilled expectation. Expectation has always been some kind of a hype in human history. It has been abused.
What about not having any expectations and live from day to day?
(This is a suestiuon that just popps upo and to be honest I don't know any answer myself!)
But I'm thinking of a text I long ago read about some colonial official who wrote that a Massai offender of a small crime (colonial justice), died in his prison cell. The observation was that the 'prisoner' could not vision that he was there for a certain time. He 'thought' it was forever. So for him it was death. And so he died.
Some specie of birds have that too.

We can't fill our stomach with expectation but we often continue to live the way we live, driven by expectation, wether is it hope of winning the lottery, or wether is the belief that this life is not important but that in heaven forty or more, or less virgins are waiting, the gate to heaven, the final judgment day... or the expectation of getting a signature from an idol ised musician or actress or a stamp...
Is expectation the same as hoping, believing in something, dreaming, gambling, praying? Thinking?
Nature doesn't have all that fuss. It can't be screwed up because it is timeless an d without expectations. But our world is screwed up and our expectations are in constant need of fresh fuel.

We are not powerful and dangerous. We are just damaging the whole thing. Most of all we are powerful and dangerous to our own kind.

I don't believe in a stable and healthy world for 'us'. And I don't believe in 'having a choice'.
That's all part of 'expectation'.

And of course there can never be a return to a stable and healthy existence we cultivate so much to expect.
Our brain is the obstacle.
But perhaps it would help a little bit to step down from that throne, and take a look, or wonder what goes on outside our clean, sterile world, or our open gutter, lice infested world.

I'm careful with the term 'instinct'. There are definitions contradicting or challenging each other. A prove that we don't have it and/or don't know it very well.

Thank you ! I learned answering your remarks and views.

Do you understand anything about spiders?

Uhhh... I hardly know where to start.

I have the impression there are two opposite streams of think :

a) 1human being is unnatural = a relict of the religious conceit that man is a special creation

a) 2 man stands above anything else. Fauna and flora are creations of God, especially created to serve man.

b) humans are not part of nature, they have invented religion to imitate the laws of nature. That's the only step towards nature they do (civil laws also, ethics and morals).They don't succeed. All these human rules have to be adapted all the time, they even contradict each other (a widow woman in Iran threathened to be stoned because of adultery???, death penalty in one state, and no death penalty in another...).
Religion fits into that status. It's simply trying to avoid chaos. Man doesn't obey its specific legislature to fulfill a function in nature anymore. Religion and contradictionary jurisdiction are proves that man is not part of nature.

In my theory there is no religious relict. To me religion is as good as any jurisdiction : a way to create order, a way to benefit certain groups of people , a way to exert power over other people. It has nothing to do with nature. Religion still sees nature as a concurrent, a rival. That's why in most important monotheistic religions nature is painted as hostile, as the real enemy or as the wrath of God.
Some people find enormeous strengh and hope in believing, but to me it's politics. As is jurisdiction and the endless polemies on ethics and moral values.
The 'religious' element' is part of being not part of nature.

If we would be part of nature, we would never have gone religious. It's as simple as that.

I can understand why you think this thread is silly.

Bees and wasps do what they do in balance with everything else.

What humans do and produce is not in connection with nature and it's certainly not in balance with nature.
We exploit nature, small groups try to preserve on and other... and that's it. We don't understand nature at all. Our brain is the obstacle.

And there is no solution. We can never go back to nature. And there is no school to learn how to be part of nature.

So you must be right. This is a very silly thread.

I don't disturb them and they don't disturb me.

That's already an achievement of some kind, I guess.

And, no, I don't know their Latin names. I can always look it up. But why should I do that?

I don't give them pet names either.

When my ploceus birds have young ones, I chase all spiders, in and out of the house and in parks. In capturing them, you get to know them a little, when to catch them , where and how. But there is much more.
I discovered that when I'm hungry, I see them better. And when you go in one direction, you don't see them, but if you turn around and walk along the same way, suddenly they are all there.
I suspect they have reasons to build their web in a certain direction. it's not at random at all. There 's a whole system behind it. I'm only speaking of those big ones with a cross on their back. But there are others.

I've also discovered that wild birds don't eat these spiders as long as they hide under a leaf or hang in their web. But once the spider is out of its own environment and in a critical situation, it becomes prey for birds.

I'm discovering spiders. And everything else that moves in the garden.

I understand. It's too much at once.

Even for me. And I realise I'm not ready at all. So many questions...

You missed the whole point of my inference. Here:

The human brain is part of our natural organism.