Nature Considered Evil

In the spirit of consistency, I suggest this page be renamed either to NatureConsideredHarmful? or to NatureIsEvil?.

Side discussion:

Does the page on RefactoringTheHumanBody point to a weakness in refactoring? That most people cannot recognise superb design nor design in a way that adapts well? (see also HowBuildingsLearn).

Probably.

Whoever deleted the response to this bit of self-congratulatory inanity needs to take some lessons in refactoring.

night I propose that instead of making inane demands for designs vastly superior to evolution, you propose examples of great evolutionary design? It might show that the person who can write such outstanding examples of logical reasoning as "speak for yourself" and erudition as "get your facts straight" knows enough about the subject to comment.

The demand for great examples of evolutionary design are equally inane. A mayfly is a structure much more complicated than any we've created, and capable of what are really quite impressive feats. If it isn't an example of a great design simply because there are some obvious changes that could be made to it, nothing will be.

I think the demand for great examples of evolutionary design (though I dislike that term; it's really an oxymoron, in the literal sense) makes a lot of sense. And let me just go on record as saying that I really do admire the human body! I think it's elegant and highly functional. However, any design can be improved upon except in a very limited problem domain, and forms for sentient beings are perhaps the most open problem domain possible.

But it is also worth pointing out that some of the above optimizations are really difficult when you consider that the whole human body is capable of developing from a single cell with appropriate care and feeding. If people had fast copper wiring, they'd need to intake large amounts of copper and then have some sort of mechanism to lay it out, whereas nerve cells are simply produced by differentiation of cells we're growing anyways, and don't require anything that special.

Copper is only brought up in order to set a benchmark easily achievable with standard technology and to illustrate the difference between chemical and electrical signals. If you want to limit yourself to easily available molecules then just use carbon. Diamond is a semiconductor after all, though with a wider band-gap than silicon. Or just use molecular switches. There's no end of things you can do with molecular manufacturing.

Diamond would be freaking hard to create under normal conditions. I agree that there is undoubtedly some faster, cheaper, better alternative to neurons, but it's not obvious to me, and so this goes in the class of brilliant refactorings as opposed to ones like removing the appendix.

Because that's what biological organisms do; MolecularNanoTechnology. The difference is they do worthless nanotech. Where we can conceive of self-repairing ships which swap hardware in and out of memory during high-radiation (near light-speed) interstellar flights, active diamondoid materials 10 times stronger than steel yet more flexible than rubber, and a SpaceElevator, nature has given us slime-exuding skin (yuck!) and heads that explode like a ripe pumpkin upon the impact of a moderate amount of kinetic force (doulble yuck!!). I'm sorry, maybe I'm asking for too much but I expect my only body to be made of materials with more tensile strength than wet tissue paper.

(It's really not nanotech. It's microtech. Very important distinction!)

Give me any design, and I can easily come up with an environment that will smash it to pieces. If people had diamondoid bones we'd drive cars that much faster, and hit things that much harder (maybe not as many of us, though; I wouldn't!). And as for slime exuding skin, that's a great way of cooling something down, and I'm not sure what alternatives there would be except perhaps radiator fins.

Biology is nanotech by the oldest and most important definition of the word. The snake-oil salesmen at silicon valley are using 'nanotech' to refer to the nanometer scale in order to exploit the excitement generated by atomically precise molecular technology. The important thing is the molecular control, otherwise the nanoscale means no more to me, or anyone else, than an ant I never noticed stepping on.

The crucial difference between calcium and diamondoid bones is that the environments you need to imagine to destroy the latter are all going to be contrived and/or blatantly artificial. And since I subscribe to a CarFree ethos, I really don't care about the law of conservation of misery as it applies to drivers. Further, slime exuding skin sucks in water-poor environments like deserts, the arctic and space.

Overheating and overcooling are still worse, though, and you haven't offered an alternate solution to that problem. Diamondoid bones would be great but are difficult to make. On this, see below.

This section was only meant as a comparison of the human body with what we can do and would do given similar technology. For example, diamondoid is brought in because it is a trivial material to construct given nanotechnology. Nature has had nanotech for billions of years. We don't have it and already we can make materials stronger than bone. With it, there would be no comparison.

Perhaps the difference between refactorings and comparisons should be emphasized by moving the 'photosynthesize' and 'excrete toxins' points to the refactorings section.

A mayfly is a structure much more complicated than any we've created, and capable of what are really quite impressive feats.

The only reason people may be impressed with mayflies is because they're accustomed to the advanced decrepitude of nature in general. I refuse to be so impressed. Show me a conscious insect and I'll be impressed. This is well within physical limits.

Asking for a conscious insect is like asking for a disposable pen that plays La Cucaracha. It might be neat, but it's a waste of time in terms of the general functionality. And, for the record, most people aren't impressed with mayflies until they realize exactly how difficult it is to get something like that working.

For something as worthless as flesh to be put together by something as idiotic as evolution into a shape that remotely works .... It's a freaking miracle is what it is. Also leaves me distinctly unimpressed. The kind of 'impressed' we're talking about is a programmer being impressed that a million-line C++ project works. Because it's in C++, it's 'impressive'. It would not be nearly so impressive if the same project were written in a high-level language. For a while I was impressed that bone's relative strength compares favourably to concrete (or was it steel?) then I realized that since we're talking about MolecularNanoTechnology, it actually sucks. It's all relative to what you're used to. You just have to get used to what's possible.

I suppose you have never written a hello world program, because it's a waste of time when you could be writing the next top-selling artificial intelligence? And flesh is a remarkably complicated substance, full of all sorts of structure. We've yet to create anything that even begins to compare. That doesn't mean we won't, but the stuff should be treated with some respect.

Here's exactly why I'm unimpressed by the human body. It's at least a thousand times too big, in each dimension, for the amount of functionality it holds. The mass of a single human body could sustain more than a billion human-level intellects if used efficiently. This is far from the "every design can be slightly improved" platitudes seen above! If programmers wrote code that was a billion times too slow or engineers designed bridges that were a billion times too massive, they'd be shot. But nobody bitches about evilution because it's so darned beautiful and marvellous. We are slime people, and we won't ever fix that fact if everyone's ego is too fragile to face up to the fact.

I don't see why we can't say that the human body is not perfect and at the same time respect the amazing complexity and functionality it has, as you seem to suggest is impossible. And yes, the functionality is unbelievable. Very few things assemble copies of themselves from goop, and I don't think there's any consensus as to exactly how easy it is. You can probably get much smaller devices than cells if you are clever, but I've yet to see a proposal for replicating something as intricate as a nanobrain without a lot of supporting structure. Bodies aren't just containers for intelligence, remember, and in fact the basic structure developed without one. So it should come as no surprise they might not be ideal containers, and this should not be counted as a design flaw. As for people complaining about evolution, people do every time they get appendicitis, and nobody said that it being evolutionarily good enough for our bodies to give out after a century or so means that it is good enough for us.

You're right that nobody ever said it. But someone clearly implied it by responding to serious proposals to improve the human body with snide remarks. Also, personified evolution (ie, Nature) is the ultimate mother-figure, just like Jehovah is the ultimate father-figure. This probably is a factor in why people who play with GAs go gaga over evolution instead of rationally dismissing it as uninteresting and irrelevant (see GeneticAlgorithms). To restore some objectivity and distance from nature, I choose to cultivate a little hatred of nature. The Dark side of the Force is quick and powerful.

Consider also perspective and expectation. To someone who expects sentients to dismantle the planet (including biosphere) in order to construct something vastly more complex and beautiful, an obsession with what nature has done is like a desire to preserve the artifacts of cannibalistic savages.

Nature can't construct a biosphere to support more than a billion sentients given billions of years time. Sentients should be able to construct support structures for billions of billions (10^18) of sentients in less than 10,000 years of consciousness. Now, that will seem to be too futuristic to most people but the only other option is self-annihilation. Actually, that's the most likely option, and one of the reasons why is people's inability to cope with the future. People can admire cave drawings all they want so long as the values they so nurture don't endanger the civilization of which I'm an integral part.

Transcript show: 'hello world'. Nope, I never saw the point of writing that. I don't get the point though. Well, I don't get how it applies.

Flesh is a remarkably complicated substance and it should be treated with respect. The respect that is based on fear and the bitter hatred of an old & powerful enemy. Certainly not the awe, affection, love and adoration which are the only possible explanations for the inane "superb design" comments near the beginning. Flesh is evil and it's out to kill you. That's why we need to think about getting rid of it. This nobody does because they can't dream of casting off this mortal shell. Instead, what they do is muck around with genetically modified foods for fun and profit, thereby creating even more opportunities for flesh to kill you. Just because I'm against corporate hubris towards genetic engineering and genetic diversity, doesn't mean I'm going to join a ritual dance to some NewAge Nature goddess.

The first airplanes were slow and crashed more often, that doesn't mean they were out to delay and kill people, it means they have a design which though impressive can be improved upon. As stated, nothing has ever yet improved upon the functionality of flesh, which is capable of growing and reproducing and forming remarkably complicated structures. If you are planning on building things out of exotic materials then you won't, you'll have to opt for a single space-inefficient factory producing enough efficient things that it's worth the trouble. There's nothing wrong with that, but it is a different thing altogether.

You say that early planes weren't out to kill you with the objectivity of looking back upon history. I don't believe you have such luxury when you're unwillingly strapped into one of those early death machines. The opinions of the maniacs obsessed with their own inventions aren't even worth considering. Maybe flesh isn't out to kill you but so what? This is a very personal matter which will inevitably generate some emotion. I believe that hatred and fear of flesh are more rational, useful and lucid than adoration.

Pleah. It's never worthwhile admiring what you have, you should always be disdaining it in anticipation of what you will have some day, if only you work hard enough? I don't subscribe to that ethic, seeing no reason to, and without it there doesn't appear any particular reason to hate ourselves beyond those aspects of us that are actively problematic. And as I said, it is fully possible to consider the problems of something while remaining impressed by it.

What is the definition of "actively problematic"? It seems to me to be dependent upon one's knowledge of and consciousness of human limitations. Is the fact that I cannot perceive infrared actively problematic? I consider it so if I am conscious of some important use I could put the ability to.

A C++ programmer doesn't know what he's missing. A Smalltalk programmer writing in C++ may quickly learn to resent the language. The difference is expectation and consciousness. I resent Unix because I am conscious of its many limitations. Consciousness leads to resentment, resentment leads to hatred, hatred leads to despair, despair leads to suffering ... wait a minute, that's not good.

Just perhaps, the dynamic runs in the other direction so that it is easier to accept and appreciate the problems of something when you already resent or hate it. Feel the power of the dark side, Obi Wan.

Also, I have never proposed reconstructing the human body with exotic materials. Lacking MolecularNanoTechnology, growing and self-repairing structures are basically impossible to us. As I point out above, the unit of reproduction using our present technology is the entire industrial sector. What I have tried to do, and it appears I have failed in keeping them separate, is offer refactorings of the human body (ie, no exotics) and comparisons of the human body to standard non-nanotech construction materials. To even begin a fair comparison between what nature has done and what we can do, you have to start with nanotech.

This is the third time people claim that the human body "can be improved upon". This is like saying that someone burned at the stake during the Inquisition was "harmed" by the Catholic Church. It's a pathetic euphemism. When you have 9 orders of magnitude between the efficiency of the human body and that of engineered sentients, it is flatly impossible to describe the latter as an "improvement" upon the former. In engineering, a difference of only 3 orders of magnitude between otherwise identical objects is sufficient to make them completely different. Here we're talking about 3 orders of magnitude in each dimension. Every time the phrase "can be improved upon" has been brought up, it's been solely to focus on puny improvements to the human pattern and deny that something radically different, something completely revolutionary, is easily conceivable. That phrase means "yes the human body sucketh but it only sucketh a little" and this is a blatant lie which is extremely offensive to me.

That the human body is a simple chunk of slime is equally false, if less blatantly so, and is equally offensive to some. Basically the problem is this: it could be greatly improved, but not in easy or obvious ways, and it's hard to despise nature for not having done so when sentience is somewhat incidental to the fitness criterion it is using. It's not much like the Inquisition.

It can be vastly improved in perfectly obvious ways. For example, the total immunity to virii detailed above. Housing a human consciousness in a vessel 9 orders of magnitude more efficient is equally obvious, to me. Nobody said it would be easy but it is all straightforward, obvious even, and we should devote attention and planning to the possibility.

People plan for tornadoes and floods, and greet the indifference of those who could do something with anger. Well, here's my plight: I'm dying of old age. In a mere century, I'll be dead. Doesn't that strike you as a horrible fate that should be given some serious attention and planning? But you're entirely right that I can't despise nature, which I don't, for I should despise the indifference of people who dismiss improvements to the human body. I should honestly and vocally express my anger at them, my hatred of them. Right?

But nobody here is in a position to do anything, and you don't shout and random people after a flood that they could have devoted their lives to constructing dams instead of whatever else was more pressing at the time. We have nothing like the technology we would need to significantly change human design. But I'm not saying we shouldn't try to improve on things, I'm saying we should keep perspective and understand the significant goods we already enjoy. Mortality is no fun, but doesn't it beat never having existed at all?

I'll say 'no' just because I don't believe the question to be meaningful but most people would say 'yes'. :)

We don't have the technology yet but we will have it 'soon' and if people aren't ready for it when it arrives then it will be squandered. Just like space technology was squandered on a nationalistic and militaristic exercise. We have to prepare ourselves now so that people don't say the nanotech equivalent of "but what will rockets push against in empty space?"

The real dangers of nanotech are 1) that the military of some country controls it, 2) that corporations control it, and 3) that the abundance of wealth which even pre-nanotech technology will bring about will cause us to go insane and destroy ourselves in an orgy of slaughter (a documented psychological phenomenon). People can't evaluate these dangers rationally if they're obsessing over some fictional GreyGoo problem. And the only way they can stop obsessing over GreyGoo is if they fully appreciate that the human body sucks.

Truth isn't determined by democracy, but social policy can be.

Fair enough. But I don't think instilling an irrational hatred of one system is necessary to move on to another, not in a case like this where there are already enough people enthusiastic for change that, all things equal except tech, they would form a nice lead to show the others what can be done. That doesn't stop technocracy but on the other hand, everyone was exceptionally enthusiastic for space travel, and simply decided they were done once someone touched the moon. Finally, note that GreyGoo would be a problem if could construct cheap robust replicators, and would be something for a progressive civilization to watch out for, the same way that we ought to be watching out for nuclear war.

The reason space technology was squandered was because nothing constructive was ever done with it. People were enthusiastic about meeting Martians and building Venus colonies. Once they realized this was impossible, the lunar program stopped and there was nothing left. Instead of going to the moon in one-shot rockets to do a little geology and photography, a lasting and flexible space infrastructure should have been constructed. A refueling station in orbit would have made those inane moon trips cheaper, enough to pay for itself, and would also have made possible lots of things that still aren't (eg, trips to Mars, asteroid mining, et cetera). It's interesting that the only useful achievements of space technology (communications satellites and the Mir space station) were both products of a technocratic dictatorship, the Soviet Union's space program. The point being that it isn't sufficient for a few people to be enthusiastic for "change", and that it's certainly not sufficient that a few knowledgeable people "show" the others what can be done.

As for GreyGoo, it's only a problem if someone intentionally sets out to construct it. The notion that nanotech will, or even can, mutate and evolve is groundless and stems from the irrational expectation that our technology will resemble nature. Does anyone know of a single instance in all of civilization where this has been the case? So the threat of GreyGoo boils down to a lunatic (eg, a US military General) unleashing a weapon of mass destruction. The solution to this threat is precisely cheap robust replicators (in the Star Trek sense of "replicator") that can make individual space rockets so people can get off this dirtball. A nanotech "replicator" is presumably useful if people are to construct it. Star Trek replicators are useful, autonomous bacteria are useless. And people scared that bacteria will annihilate our species are SmokingCrack?.

The only thing that can mutate and evolve is AI and software. So the GreyGoo problem is actually a software problem. And since the notion that dumb software can win a war against AI is absurd, we don't have to worry about software errors, only about AI. Now, if people accept that the human species will go extinct, as it must inevitably, then we need only worry about the transition to an AI civilization. Once that's done, we can worry about war between AI societies but that would hardly be new.

I also like constructing and arguing extreme positions, especially if they're unpopular. So no, I don't hate nature. But I don't like it either. I'm perfectly indifferent towards it. However, given the blind adoration I saw here towards nature, I'm willing to spend a bit of time arguing for blind hatred instead. I like symmetry.

The main reason you're seeing so much blind adoration of nature is in reaction to increase amounts of blind hatred - nobody's going to come by just to say they think so too. I don't buy that the best way to counter an insane position is another insane position, as opposed to say a rational position between the two. So it might be easier, it also defeats the point, in my view.

At the risk of sounding extremely childish; he started it. I don't think your model fits the facts, especially the chronology, but the facts do fit my model of extreme resistance to anything psychologically challenging.

Also, the difference between blind love and blind hatred of nature, as I've constructed it, is that the latter is rational. It is important to understand and appreciate just how much flesh, and the human body, sucketh. If the only way to do that is to hate nature then this hatred is justified. It is a common human emotional pattern that in order to reach a balance, one first swings to the opposite extreme on the spectrum. I can provide many examples of this pattern. This pattern is actually a GoodThing since it's a sort of personal ThesisAntithesisSynthesis. It allows people to understand the full spectrum of ideas before arriving at any conclusions. Try hating nature for a while, really resent its caprices, and it will give you a new perspective on things. Another example of this dynamic is hatred of Unix, which is also necessary (or inevitable) if (when) you understand its many onerous limitations. And on that subject, nobody can possibly claim that a few people's deep public hatred of Unix causes the Linux-heads' blind love of their decades obsolete OS.

I didn't say it causes it, I said it brings it out. The same way that a bright light brings out the griminess of an old painting or darkness brings out the brilliance of a shining white light. The blind adoration is there, I just make it obvious by providing the necessary contrast.

Admittedly, most people in love with Nature will tune out any arguments obviously hateful of it. This fact contradicts my belief that reason will prevail every time, and my delusional faith in reason explains my not making any allowances for human insanity. However, it's also a common pattern that people will agree to reasoning which demolishes their worldview only to resurrect their worldview after they've completely forgotten the reasoning. If I present arguments showing why nature sucks to people who love it, they may be willing to listen to them and agree with me but they will forget any such arguments after a remarkably short lapse of time. They'll first start by forgetting just how much nature sucketh and say things like "sure, it can be improved upon". To make a lasting change, you have to get them to feel hatred for nature at least for a moment.

Nature only sucks when you compare it to what is theoretically possible, as does pretty much everything else, by a lot. At the same time, the universe is mostly vacuum, followed by dust, gas, and chunks of relatively simple compounds, while nature is full of extremely complicated structures, some of which are actually sentient, and so is exceptionally impressive on those grounds. The arguments of a pessimist against optimists are entirely reversible, both groups are looking at things selectively. A fair perspective would be one that tries to understand both. Beyond that, you are being silly.

"There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct or more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. The innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and only lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new." -- Machiavelli

That is to say, optimism and pessimism are not balanced. The theoretical reversibility of pessimistic and optimistic arguments masks the fact that they aren't given equal weight by biased people. The few people who can see both sides of the equation are honour bound to favour the disadvantaged side, the new world order I find myself advocating at the expense of nature, in the interests of fairness. Trying to establish a fair perspective in an unfair world is not a silly matter. As I said earlier, I'm aiming for symmetry.

Why is such symmetry necessary, or even desirable? I don't see what difference it makes if one only finds fanatics on a single side of an argument. If someone here ended his every contribution with red must be destroyed, I hardly think I would be doing the world a service by ending mine with cyan must be destroyed. Truth is not determined by democracy, much less by weighted average.

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