jpbrooks

ar·ti·fi·cial   Pronunciation Key  (ärt-fshl)
adj.

Made by humans; produced rather than natural.

Brought about or caused by sociopolitical or other human-generated forces or influences: set up artificial barriers against women and minorities; an artificial economic boom.

Made in imitation of something natural; simulated: artificial teeth.

Not genuine or natural: an artificial smile.

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The whole idea that the artificial is "unnatural" appears to rest on the idea that there is an aspect of humankind that is not a part of nature or that functions independently from nature. But it is rather easy to see that this idea is itself "artificial" since no such aspect of humankind can be readily identified. It is simply a consequence of one way of dividing up the world; one which is probably more oonducive to inquiry into the control of natural processes rather than the mere partcipation in them. But I place emphasis on the idea that the "dividing up" of the world is "artificial" since there is no way to verify that a particular (known) aspect of the world is actually separate from nature.

(I'll return later.)

[ July 15, 2002: Message edited by: jpbrooks ]</p>

joedad

So is unnatural the same as unreal?

I'm reminded of that line from Star Trek, "Nothing unreal exists."

joe

jpbrooks

I suppose whether one holds that unnatural is synonymous with unreal depends on one's view of the world. Certain kinds of naturalists would probably hold that the terms are synonymous.
I'm not making any claim as to whether "non-natural" entities actually exist in the world. My point (stated in other terms) was that intelligible inquiry about the world could not proceed without the assumption that our ways of knowing about the natural world are connected to the natural world in some way. Thus there is no way to demonstrate the "separateness" from nature of any thing in the world that we have come to know about.
The question that then arises is does this hold if the thing in question is Consciousness itself? I think so, but I realize that this issue is controversial as seen, for instance, <a href="http://www.herts.ac.uk/humanities/philosophy/JCS.html" target="_blank">in this article</a>.

Articles such as <a href="http://www.balancedscience.net/rulesofnature.html" target="_blank">this one</a> and <a href="http://www.lehigh.edu/~mhb0/repcon.html" target="_blank">this one</a> seem to suggest (to me at least) that the main philosophical objections that philosophers who oppose naturalism present are epistemological in nature rather than metaphysical. In fact, methodological naturalism and (metaphysical) supernaturalism, for example, are not incompatible views.

[ July 15, 2002: Message edited by: jpbrooks ]</p>