The things of nature

Reading the piece by Sherry Turkle mentioned below got me thinking, as I have off and on for some time, about nature. In the work on nature and natures I did for Physiologia, it became clear to me that natura and its cognates, and before it physis and its cognates, were fighting words. Nature, generally speaking, is good, and non-nature or un-nature bad; but occasionally the polarities are reversed, and nature must be dominated or conquered, replaced by what Pascal was already calling the “second nature” of upbringing and education, or by the higher nature of the intellect, the super-nature of faith.

Machines are nature for Descartes. More precisely: the distinction between nature and non-nature (or “art”) is destroyed by the doctrine of the animal-machine. What remains is a merely quantitative distinction between our machines and God’s: number and size of parts. In letters to Alphonse Pollot written in response to Pollot’s criticisms of the animal-machine, Descartes deconstructs the distinction between bêtes and automates. He asks his reader to imagine a person born into a world without animals, in which things known to be machines do all that animals do in our world. That person, visiting our world, would not judge of our animals that “there was in them any true sensation nor any true passion as in us”; but would judge instead that our animals were “automata which, being composed by nature, would be incomparably more accomplished than the automata he himself had made up to now” (AT 2:41).

A cat type communication robot.
Source: Omron Corporation 16 Oct 2001
via Cosma Shalizi.

(Nature, here as often elsewhere in Descartes’ writings, is a pen-name of God.)

The fable is intended to show that animals need not be supposed to have souls like ours. But it shows also that the distinction between nature and art is unstable. The machines that the visitor grows up with are nature so far as the visitor is concerned; our animals are just more of the same. Nature is, at least initially, what you grow up with.

I am just old enough to have spent my first years without a television in the house. I vaguely remember the advent of that first TV—an RCA, in a cherry-veneer cabinet that, having outlasted its contents, was later used to store sheet music. At the neighborhood movie house I went to—alone, for twenty-five cents—there were still newsreels and serials; but for me the news has always been something you watched on TV. Until recently, that is: now I read the news online, and for my students that is becoming the natural outlet. TV is for entertainment, for spectacles, not for finding out what’s happening now. The now is online. That is its new natural place.

My students are just old enough to remember the advent of cellphones, and some still don’t have one. But more and more the cellphone, and the possibility of always-being-reachable that comes with it, is just there, like the sun and the sky, part of ordinary existence. You—a middle-class you, at least—will soon have to choose not to have one. Nature, aka culture, is the default.

Descartes agreed that we are inclined to distinguish animals from machines. You might even say it was natural to do so, part of what Descartes calls the “teachings of nature”. My cats seem to be pretty good at discerning the living from the non-living. Bugs capture their attention as no toy can. Kittens will chase all sorts of things, or even non-things like a flashlight beam; in a few months, they learn to distinguish things from non-things, and self-movers from non-self-movers, and finally the living from the non-living. None of those distinctions is infallible, of course. In odd situations they and we can be fooled. Nature had no occasion to provide us with insurance against the evil genius or the mad scientist.

The distinctions are pragmatic. Their job is not to probe the cosmos and its constituents, but to promote well-being. If they carve nature at its joints, that is incidental. It is part of what used to be called the logic of such distinctions that not all possible cases are settled; that settling new cases is a decision, not a discovery; that in the settling of cases, the terms of the distinction can figure both as established and as in contention.

A child interacting with Gandalf. Source: Justine Cassell, “Body Language: Lessons from the Near-Human”. To appear in a volume edited by Jessica Riskin (University of Chicago Press).

So one might argue at one and same time that because it is “natural”, the market is good, and also that the “natural” in human affairs is an unfettered market economy, and any other system a perturbation or perversion. That is not yet circular, but it becomes circular if the unfettered market is said to be natural because good and good because natural.

When proponents of a distinction argue that it has a basis in reality, as the scientists of race did a century ago, then it is reasonable to show that it doesn’t. But the purpose of racial distinctions was to reinforce social divisions. In relation to that the biological argument is at cross-purposes. Injustice is the issue, not genes. So too it might strike you as perverse that a child should be given a mechanical cat as a pet instead of nature’s own; but the question is what contribution a pet, mechanical or not, makes to the child’s well-being. To put it that way grants that the mechanical cat might serve just as well. A disturbing possibility perhaps. But Descartes’ visitor from the world of machines wouldn’t think so.

Intuitions of perversity tend to lead to judgments about the natural and the unnatural. But where justified, their basis is either in fact—but not in facts about “nature”—or in morals. In that case the perverse is morally wrong or prudentially unwise. But not unnatural.

Turkle, Sherry. 2006. “Diary”, London Review of Books 28.8 (20 April 2006).

Des Chene, Dennis. 2001. Spirits and clocks. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001.

Addendum: Looking at the Omron site, I see that I’d forgotten this nice piece of ideological salesmanship:

Envisioning a society embodying a wide diversity of values, where everyone can live comfortably at peace (what Omron calls the Optimization Society), Omron sees the importance in the realization of a machine that can communicate with humans and understand them. A machine that is gentle to humans and responds appropriately to an individual’s needs. Natural communication between humans and machines is made possible with the cat type communication robot NeCoRo.