Every so often I make mention of how we need to connect to one another, to our future Self, and to our world.

This morning I read these words from James Carse, affording me the opportunity of exploring this strange relationship between Humans and the world more closely:

That nature has no outside, and no inside, that it suffers
no opposition to itself, that it is not moved by unnatural
influence, is not the expression of an order so much as it
is the display of a perfect indifference to all matters cultural.

I’m trying to get my head around all of this so please bear with me, but I take this to mean there’s no such thing as un-nature: nature simply is.  Nature is not opposed to itself but in all of its activities remains fully and always nature.

Our language about nature is our way of making cultural sense of it all.  So Carse continues:

Chaos and order describe the cultural experience of nature
– the degree to which nature’s indifferent spontaneity seems
to agree or disagree with our current manner of cultural self-control.

Nassim Taleb teaches and writes on randomness, and the impossibility of prediction – as if we have any control over what we call order and chaos (we recall prediction is interpretation in reverse – another way of seeking control); Taleb identifies ways of working with randomness, Carse also believing this to be the best way:

The more clearly we remind ourselves that we can have no
unnatural influence on nature, the more our culture will
embody a freedom to embrace surprise and unpredictability.

Humans, then, are an expression of nature.  This also must mean whatever we do is an expression of nature too, though we are capable of executing choices which are detrimental to our species.  In the end, Earth is indifferent to whatever damage we do; if we make the planet inhospitable to ourselves (and many other species), Earth will recover, whether it takes millions or billions of years to do so.  Yet we might also say, nature has produced something which can oppose itself, which is not indifferent to its opportunity to live.

When we understand ourselves not to be outside of nature but part of nature we learn how to live more freely and spontaneously.*  Which brings us to technology.

Our technology is part of what it is to be Human – from the first tools of some 70,000 years ago up to today – being Human (as part of nature) has improved both qualitatively and quantitatively because of our inventions.  It offers tools for increasing Human fulfilment and satisfaction expressed through diversity and quirkiness over and over again, but is never an end in itself, having the ability to both free us and enslave us.**   We need the technology but are also harnessed to it – machines need Humans to serve them in order to function.  We can begin to take on their characteristics.^  It is true for too many that their creativity is diminished by machines.

Perhaps, perhaps, the more we learn from nature, the more we’ll be able to create and use our technology to become more Human.

(*One source suggests there’s much to learn from nature, including interdependence, multiplication, energy transformation, multi-usage, symbiosis, and function.)
(** Before we think we’ve found what it is to be Human, be aware “Variability can now become part of an automated design and production chain.”)
(^A computer used to be someone who crashed data, then a machine came along which did this for us so we gave it what had been a Human label or function, but now we say we have become Human computers – meaning machine-like.)