I've enjoyed Nora Bateson's appearances on the Future Thinkers and Jim Rutt Show podcasts, very curious about this film. Had to hunt a bit to find a streaming source: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/bateson
>The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think
If we eradicate nature and replace it with technology, will we reach a state without problems? If we turn all planes and forests into photovoltaic power stations and use chemical processes to generate food, and everything becomes an image of our thinking processes, will life be good?
Unless humans remain for millions of years, nature has the upper hand. Hence humans should get with nature's program, not the other way around.
Disclaimer: I am for technological advancements, I'm not saying we should stop and go live in caves. I merely think we should try to connect with nature at a deeper level; we'd probably all be happier for it.
let's take the example of replacing all plants with something humans made. Let's take one function (among innumerable others we might know or not know of) performed by plants critical to life: photosynthesis to trap energy to organic material & fill the air with oxygen. could we make something cheap enough to do this? the plants currently do this for free for us. they're also self-replicating mostly. could we build something like that? wouldn't we end up making something similar to what plants were and how they worked albeit with all this unneeded effort? let's say we can even do this, wouldn't you end up making something so similar to plants that it could actually be a plant?
You can ask the same question for all the other functions that plants perform. most of these functions we might not even know of and only realize once it's missed.
in short, it's not economical for us to do. it might not even be possible for us to do fully given all that complexity that millions of years in evolution captures.
life on earth can be seen as a huge huge body of knowledge. dont people mourn of loss of ancient libraries or cultures for this very reason? many of the things entrapped in such a culture or body of knowledge are tacit, unknown, maybe even unknowable, it definitely cannot be exactly replicated once it's lost
> You can ask the same question for all the other functions that plants perform. most of these functions we might not even know of and only realize once it's missed.
> in short, it's not economical for us to do. it might not even be possible for us to do fully given all that complexity that millions of years in evolution captures.
Yes. Human engineering tends to struggle (and eventually fail) against entropy, degradation, and change in order to accomplish one or a very few things. The systems we call life, on the other hand, often play many roles related to the perpetuation of themselves and others, and have (in a collective sense) successfully persisted in the face of highly variable conditions for millions of years.
Unneeded efforts is where all the technology began. Some ape grabbing a stick instead of shoving more leaves into his mouth. Investing time and resources, thinking, that's where technology starts.
We use technology to create more food than nature provides voluntarily. Plants have become technology and we will use them as long as their synthesizing processes are more efficient as pure technological ones.
But at one point, it will be more efficient to go full synthetic. If you kill all life, all fungi, all bacteria, everything will be dead matter, and like rocks on Mars or frozen seals at the poles, nothing will move in an uncontrolled way and everything will be in line with the way humans think.
For sure, we have killed precious knowledge and as you say, we will never get it back. But that's due to humans being short-sighted and acting in a non-technological way. Like guns, it's not technology that is destroying the rain forest and reducing biodiversity. It's humans who follow their natural urges.
> Unneeded efforts is where all the technology began.
let's say i grant this, but will you employ the said tech unless it is useful for you to do so?
the question here is about the purpose of going all synthetic.
1. sure, if say man can devise a way to manufacture a multitude of food "synthetically", that us just one purpose served i.e. food. you can keep replacing these various purposes that plants provide to human life. Let's say at one point all non-human species become extinct by human means or otherwise. after this we discover a purpose through their lack (even without this said discovery, it can be likely that we might not even know what we have lost, that could be or even then might have been useful to us, humans). now isn't that a tragedy? basically even if the "synthetic" means of some purposes to which other species benefit us were to be made economical somehow, that does not justify wiping them out even looking only through the lens of HUMAN benefit.
2. what is "synthetic" and how can synthetic means of achieving these purposes be made economical? first to have such an economy we would have to replicate the chemical efficiencies of photosynthesis etc. basically, copying life. second, we would need the self-replicating capacity too since this goes a long way towards economy, right? again, copying life. we might as well discover something the scale of a cell with self-replicating molecular architecture might be the way to go about it. we could as well end up making something which looks a lot like life actually and take a hell of time to achieve it, even provided we end up copying a whole lot of it (because it would be massively difficult, even this being a huge understatement, without a reference point i.e. existing life). now if all life on earth except humans if wiped out hypothetically through some means, this effort would be justified even if prone to instant failure because of our imminent deaths. but otherwise i don't see a point.
I'm not discouraging gaining knowledge about life and how it works, only that the argument of wiping it out to be replaced by everything synthetic, even someday doesn't make sense. do understand there is no such thing humans someday having all the knowledge. that day will never arrive.
Evolution has local optima. Octopus and dolphins kind of have the intelligence to create civilizations but they are stuck in water. Dolphins never have the time to re-evolve feet because predators will hunt them down. There are C3 and C4 plants [1] but without technology, it is very unlikely that C3 plants become C4 plants.
Enter technology, and food production can be optimized. Combine those processes with others, and you can create plants that don't exist yet but are much better at creating food.
Technology doesn't mean that plants are outright destroyed. But it is very likely that new processes will be more efficient. To hedge against the threat of not knowing, seed banks will be kept. A risky move compared to keeping nature alive, but I doubt that anybody in power will maintain a rain forest over using the area for more efficient means of energy and resource creation.
Maintaining nature only makes sense if we are interested in knowledge as the primary driver. But the primary driver is power. Like Alexandria and Baghdad, there is no way that knowledge will be maintained when it stands in the way of power.
> Technology doesn't mean that plants are outright destroyed.
> A risky move compared to keeping nature alive, but I doubt that anybody in power will maintain a rain forest over using the area for more efficient means of energy and resource creation.
> Maintaining nature only makes sense if we are interested in knowledge as the primary driver. But the primary driver is power.
I understand the sense in which you are saying all this, and I agree, this might be how things go about provided humanity even survives this century provided we reach this hypothetical synthetic economic optimal. lots of ifs. and risky as hell, very very risky. but yeah probably how things would go by, the best one can be is sad.
tbh if you ask me I really doubt human enduced climate change can ever be mitigated through collective human effort. we'd rather chose annihilation over it.
I think you might be overestimating. What is state of art biological engineering based upon? Current life processes, at best such technologies are "hacks" built on top of life on earth -- standing on the shoulder of giants. As far as I have heard we haven't yet managed to build or even know the entirety of the biological stack.
Yes. We can point to processes and relationships at various organizational scales and levels of abstraction (e.g., physical principles, chemical gradients, genes, hormones, morphological growth, phenotypes, ecosystems) but knowledge remains fragmented and we do not understand how everything comes together. Synthetic biology is a misnomer, imo; biological engineering is a much better term. Human-engineered machines and living systems are currently worlds apart in terms of causal complexity.
This isn't to say we shouldn't pursue it, just that we ought to realize how primitive our tools still are. We're fiddling with things we don't understand. We might as well try to do it consciously now, since centuries of unconscious intervention have put us in a bit of a bad place, existentially speaking.
> But at one point, it will be more efficient to go full synthetic. If you kill all life, all fungi, all bacteria, everything will be dead matter, and like rocks on Mars or frozen seals at the poles, nothing will move in an uncontrolled way and everything will be in line with the way humans think.
If you kill all life, that will be the end of humans. There is no going "fully synthetic". Human life depends on other life.
This urge to bring everything under human control does us a disservice.
We don't have to remain human. I am pretty sure that at one point, consciousness will be transferred onto machines. The economy won't justify keeping entire human bodies alive.
If we intend to upload ourselves into anything, it will need to be an organism unto itself, however artificial. A machine will not suffice. The challenge is akin to creating life de novo.
It seems easier to just quit destroying so much of the kind we already have.
Of course it is easier. But putting nature first would create the difference between how nature works and the way people think. I was wandering if we would be better off if we remove the difference by removing nature itself.
I think you're externalizing "nature", but my guess is that Bateson would include our own biology, impulses, instincts, and cognitive biases in his definition of "nature". We are a flawed biological brain that can also perform some logical computation (in the same way that you can implement a digital computer using analog electronics). The latter often conflicts with the former.
