Technology can be disturbing
I bought a printer a few days ago. I was setting it up last night when the LCD screen prompted me to wait and let the machine configure itself. I could hear all the buzzing and whirring and beeping going on inside the printer, but had no idea what was actually happening. It was a black box. I pushed a little button on the screen, waited half a minute and it spit out an instruction sheet for further set up. It was almost like magic.
This has become a standard part of modern life. I push a button on my keyboard and - magically - a letter pops up on a screen. I plug in a refrigerator into the wall and - magically - it starts to hum and cool its inside. I step onto the bus, pass my keycard beneath the scanner and - magically - it beeps to signal its recognition of my identity as a bus passenger.
This is helpful but it seems to me to also be a bit disturbing. Everywhere else in the world we look, we don't find things like printers, buses, refrigerators or computers. We find the non-technological, the natural. When compared to what we see as nature, technology looks like an aberration, as if it doesn't belong. Technology seems like a mutation of the natural order of things, an artificial aggregate of dissimilar parts and pieces that have been forced into an unnatural symbiosis. The natural world is put under examination and forcibly man-handled into submission; we might even see technology as nature being tortured.
When humans eventually go extinct we will leave behind a vast quantity of technological things. Once they were helpful but now that the users are dead, they become terribly grotesque. That is actually the perfect word for how technology sometimes seems to me - grotesque. I can't really find another word for it. Technology appears to be a grotesque manipulation of the natural world, like a cancer that should not exist.
But this also seems to rest on the dichotomy between the world <------------> and us. "The natural world" is not an artifact but a plenum without agents, whereas "us" is filled with agency, purpose, reason. But we are part of the world, we are not separate from it, at least not in any scientific sense (but perhaps in an existential/metaphysical sense). Could there be a science of technology? Could it be that technology is actually one of the many ways the universe ends up organizing itself? Could what we see as artificial, technological, actually be simply a natural expression of the logic of the world?
In a way, the question comes down to: what differentiates the natural from the artificial?
This has become a standard part of modern life. I push a button on my keyboard and - magically - a letter pops up on a screen. I plug in a refrigerator into the wall and - magically - it starts to hum and cool its inside. I step onto the bus, pass my keycard beneath the scanner and - magically - it beeps to signal its recognition of my identity as a bus passenger.
This is helpful but it seems to me to also be a bit disturbing. Everywhere else in the world we look, we don't find things like printers, buses, refrigerators or computers. We find the non-technological, the natural. When compared to what we see as nature, technology looks like an aberration, as if it doesn't belong. Technology seems like a mutation of the natural order of things, an artificial aggregate of dissimilar parts and pieces that have been forced into an unnatural symbiosis. The natural world is put under examination and forcibly man-handled into submission; we might even see technology as nature being tortured.
When humans eventually go extinct we will leave behind a vast quantity of technological things. Once they were helpful but now that the users are dead, they become terribly grotesque. That is actually the perfect word for how technology sometimes seems to me - grotesque. I can't really find another word for it. Technology appears to be a grotesque manipulation of the natural world, like a cancer that should not exist.
But this also seems to rest on the dichotomy between the world <------------> and us. "The natural world" is not an artifact but a plenum without agents, whereas "us" is filled with agency, purpose, reason. But we are part of the world, we are not separate from it, at least not in any scientific sense (but perhaps in an existential/metaphysical sense). Could there be a science of technology? Could it be that technology is actually one of the many ways the universe ends up organizing itself? Could what we see as artificial, technological, actually be simply a natural expression of the logic of the world?
In a way, the question comes down to: what differentiates the natural from the artificial?
Comments (53)
The answer is always the same. Machines are our way of imposing our will on nature. And in doing that, we are being formed as "selves" in turn. We become mechanically minded and disconnected as "human beings".
Hence the essential dissatisfaction of modern life where the balance is too one way or the other - where either we feel ourselves as becoming overly machinelike, or instead, that material nature is "getting out of hand". Illness, power outages, and other sources of unwanted unpredictability.
We want a balance where we are the unpredictable ones and the world functions with machinelike reliability. Or at least we think we do until that gets boring or creates too much responsibility for making up our own individual meanings in life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7W33HRc1A6c
Hewlett-Packard offices... Engineer to Product Manager: "Of course the printers are ready to work when we put them in the box. It's just that customer satisfaction is so much greater after they hear the machine do this phony diagnostic song and dance."
Buzz, buzz, snick snick snick; hum, click; hum click; merp meep ...
Welcome to the built environment, all human all the time. Press the red button to start.
Quoting darthbarracuda
Probably not. Somehow the universe managed to get along without our technology for what... 13.8 billion years? It's actually the other way around. We are just obeying the rules the universe laid down.
We began living in the built environment a long time ago. We liked it. It offered a bit more reliability, predictability, and comfort, compared to huddling under a rock ledge in the cold. We covered ourselves with clothing; we cooked our food over fire; we grew food instead of waiting for food to happen. Cool.
So, this alienation from raw nature has a long history, starting on the day we moved indoors, however humble the roof, walls, and door were.
Technology isn't an aberration, isn't a mutation, isn't artificial, isn't unnatural. It is just ours, and no, it doesn't belong in nature. We, however, are part of nature. Maybe that's where it gets confusing. We are as natural as lions, tigers, and bears. When we walk naked out on the veldt, or across the great plains, or in the mountains, or along the beech we belong as much as all other animals belong there. (Careful, you might get arrested for indecent exposure.) But we have to leave our technology behind in order to belong.
But aren't bird's nest and beaver's dams technology? The animals themselves are "machines" far more spectacular than those they build. Consider the wasp. Insects especially look like our own technology. Can humans yet build machines as intricate as insects? Perhaps. Our computers come to mind. In my view the "seems" in your "seems like...an unnatural symbiosis" is key. As I read it, you're translating a feeling into a abuse of the word nature. Beavers and birds don't use concrete and steel. They don't work with right angles as precisely as we do. But they shape the world for their advantage. It's hard not to read a disgust with life-transforming-environment-transforming-life as a desire for stasis, sleep, death. And your words could even be read as a technological manipulation of the symbolic environment for the comfort and success of your own mind. Life acts. Life transforms. Life is "guilty" of this. To the degree that "sentences are viruses," you even seek to colonize other minds. The denial of struggle/dominance is a manifestation of struggle/dominance, one might think.
Quoting darthbarracuda
I'd say yes to your first question. I'd read the second distinction in terms of a spectrum. Apo stressed how the way we change nature "feeds back" to change us. We might say that what tends to feed back is more artificial. But I think what was artificial yesterday is natural tomorrow.
Thanks for responding. I'm probably somewhere in the middle. I do think "man is great." But, yeah, he's on the end of a continuum. Still, I think there is a massive leap. We've been to the moon. I suppose I would emphasize the complexity of the animals themselves, since that arguably surpasses the complexity of our best tech. So Nature was full of technology before we even got here. We use more permanent materials and there are lots of us, so we change the face of our habitat. So we freak ourselves out emotionally among our massive concrete and glass boxes that are conceptually just "bird's nest." For me the alienation is really about population. We are all (or most of us) more or less replaceable. Billions of strangers go about their business as we suffer the grand agonies and ecstasies of life, with no time for or interest in these agonies or ecstasies. We are stamped with numbers, as if demanded by efficiency. So I think the nostalgia is really for some ideal community that perhaps never existed, except perhaps in our childhoods. Modern life is a lonely climb in many ways, but there is a beauty and freedom in this loneliness, too. And I sure don't want to dig in the dirt beneath the hot sun. Give me air conditioning and the internet, and I'll learn to deal with alienation tax.
I like this quote. Self assembling atoms that have taken the form of life and the lifeless.
Quoting 0af
I agree on that too, to a certain extent. Back in 1905 when Einstein published his great theories there was only one of him and a world world population of around 1.5 billion. By today's standards with a world population of around 6 billion, there would be the equivalent of 4 Einsteins running around, and so it is harder to achieve the same level of fame for your ideas or deeds. So too with great writers etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population_estimates
Nonetheless, I can't help feel that while I am replaceable, the world will go on, my thinking is just enough left of centre to make a contribution somewhere, somehow. I think most people in this forum and maybe everywhere probably feel a bit that way too.
Apokrisis will tell you that there are local degrees of freedom and global constraints everywhere, and it's not a bad deduction. In this instance the connectedness with the world really only happens locally. After families, friends, colleagues it closes out pretty fast. At the higher global levels of society we are really just numbers unless we do something to distinguish ourselves, but even then we are still very much just a commodity.
Nope. Techne is 'made by human hands.' A stone axe is techne, a spider web not.
I have problems with calling beaver dams and birds nests 'technology'. Neither birds nor beavers wield their behavior deliberately or consciously. Beavers, for instance, bring branches and mud to locations where there is the sound of running water. That's how they keep their dams ingot repair. Put a speaker on a perfectly fine beaver dam, play the sound of running water, and the speaker will get patched.
A bird that uses grass to make it's nest can not switch to mud, and visa versa. Bees must make 6 sided cells in their honey combs -- it can't be 3 or 4.
I don't want to diminish in any way animal lives. Beavers, birds, bees, and beetles all perform wonderfully at their live-maintaining tasks. Neither do I want to diminish our animal lives. Most animals are part of natural systems. Wetland biology depends on beavers, and pollination depends on insects like bees. Humans don't seem to belong to natural systems. That's one of the problems we grapple with. (We can certainly fit harmoniously in natural systems, but it generally means living a much different kind of life than we normally aspire to.)
Of course we are not replaceable. "You are all replaceable" is management talk for restless workers who might be thinking about organizing a union. We are all individually unique in not just one or two ways, but many ways.
Someone else can perform the boring tasks I do at work. That doesn't make me replaceable. Or you, either.
NO.
We might get treated like commodities, but that is an abomination.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAOEAeh9AGk
Figuring solutions to complex problems is humanities splinter skill though. Rather than changing to suit the environment, we change the environment to suit us. But just like the building of the dam is hardwired into the beaver, so too attempting to solve complex problems is hardwired into humanity and provides a few more degrees of freedom in the application.
You are right, we are not commodities at our local level. I should have started the heirachy with self, then family, friends, colleagues. But the system does tend to close off after this level. Once we begin to be viewed through the collective eyes of "society" we become very much commodified.
You might be surprised at how limited is the population that actually believes in such goop. Those who work in the technology or medical fields might, in comes with the territory, but most people view such deplorable descriptions for what they are - propaganda of the ultra-rich. Slave owners of old as well as their feudal lord compatriots would spew out similar turn off phrases so they could use humans to gain wealth and then kill them off. Come to think of it, the Nazis had a very similar philosophy about non-Aryans.
BTW, one can thank modern day science for dehumanization. Humans have become expendable to the point that opioids have become acceptable killers. As for technology, half of all Americans have just had their identities stolen from Equifax and will have to spend a good part of their lives combatting all kinds of identify theft. Trust me, life user to be much, much better.
It should be recognised I am not stating a moral position that beyond a certain level all people should be viewed as commodities, but rather that beyond a certain level they are commodities to society. We are the workers in the factories, Tom Cruise is the actor who can pull the most money at the box office.
You could define a commodity in this sense as one aspect of the whole person that is represented as the entirety of that person. Even Einstein is commoditised by society for his genius, nobody cares that he had he preferred lasagne to spag bol. unless they feel that by eating a lot of lasagne they too might become a genius.
As an example, the landlord put up my rent six months after I moved in here because the perceived value of the market had increased. My house is positively geared meaning that the landlords repayments are less than what I am paying in rent. The difference is a bit of extra cash in his pocket. The irony of course is that if I had had the initial capital to buy the house I would be paying less now than I am in rent. I argued my case with the landlord (through the agent - never direct - that's not allowed), that my income hadn't gone up in the previous six months and this new rent is not what I had agreed upon. I asked him to reconsider. The answer. No - because I was a commodity. It went up again six months later.
Have you considered a career in writing? :)
I just want to add to this comment that they can. It's adaptation to the environment, best seen through consecutive generations.
Yes. Heidegger has a famous piece on the problem of technology. Essentially we become obsessed with the present-at-hand and begin to see the world in terms of calculable entities that must be weighed and measured and sorted to maximize efficiency and production.
Quoting apokrisis
But do you think there is something "natural" about, say, a Christmas icicle light string? Normally we wouldn't call this a natural phenomenon, as it was created by human hands. But actually, it was probably created by a machine, which was created by human hands. But that opens the door to seeing the Christmas lights being made by nature itself. There doesn't seem to be a strict cut-off being what is natural and what is artificial.
And of course, what we see as "natural" could very well be a strange anomaly in the big picture, and that the long stretch of time gives the illusion that it isn't.
Quoting MikeL
Yes, this is similar to what I was getting at, but not necessarily in an awe-inspiring way, although I will agree it is remarkable how flexible reality seems to be. Like it's almost unbelievable how something like a printer is even physically possible. Why is there so much flexibility and diversity? Why not just the same and nothing more?
What I see to be disturbing at times is how technology resembles a form of torture, a mangling of an assortment of unrelated things, put together in ways that, had humans never existed, would never come to be this way on their own.
I'm by no means advocating biological intelligent design or any bullshit like that but it's remarkable how the world is so flexible and allows us creative human beings to come up with seemingly endless new creations.
I'm a computer engineering major. I have some experience with engineering in general and I can tell you that many things that seem to work "perfectly" as if by magic are the result of many, many failures, and may barely function properly itself. "Whatever works" is how engineers tend to go about things. And it's surprising when you learn how things work - sometimes it's cool but for me at least I've found that I'm more surprised that this is actually the way it works. How things work in the inside of the black box can oftentimes seem counterintuitive or unexpected. Often it seems like it shouldn't work, but somehow it does.
Actually I think one of the disturbing aspects of technology is the fact that technology's teleology is entirely imposed by humans. Even the identity of these technologies is a projection of humans. When humans go extinct there will likely be some leftover technology that no longer has an identity. A book will no longer be a book, it will just be a "thing". Some mutated assemblage of random pieces, held together by a purpose that no longer exists. It's creepy.
Quoting JupiterJess
Thank you. I've considered it but not in any serious degree.
It's time to give man and his technology a chance. Please, be a bit more patient.
Yes, this is the essential feature of life. It is continuously learning, adapting and evolving. It is moving against entropy. Tools are in constant state of decaying. They are not self-organizing.
The crow is, indeed, remarkable. Parrots too show remarkable capability. For that matter, so do squirrels when they want something. In order for animals in general to survive and evolve, they had to have some skills and adaptability. And, contrary wise, humans can be remarkably dull and blunt.
For further evidence, just observe today where people choose over and over again to build their homes in Florida. And observe how many people in Florida choose to stop flying out of airports and spewing junk in the atmosphere creating the very environmental conditions that are destroying their homes. But then again, humans are quite certain that technology will save them against 15 foot storm surges.
Good point, but a little longer than 70 years. 1839 for photography (with developmental events preceding); 1840s for the telegraph, (with developmental events preceding); Franklin investigating electricity 1752; the Leyden jar, 1740s; Bell's telephone, 1876; transatlantic cable, 1850s; electrical generation plant, 1880s; Germ Theory 1876 (with developmental events preceding); viruses identified, 1890s; transatlantic radio transmission 1901; Darwin's big book, 1859...
So many bits and pieces had to fall into place before any of this could happen, and they started to fall into place with increasing frequency after [pick a date: 1600? 1700? 1800?]. As you say, over the last 70 years there has certainly been remarkable acceleration of understanding about matter and energy.
Like it did in Houston.
Man can change building huts from straw to building huts from mud. Man can migrate to better climate. Man can get things he really wants, just like squirrels, or even better.
It is one thing to be enamoured by the beauty and attraction of nature; it is another thing to extrapolate from that beauty to declaring that man's achievements are inferior to those of nature. (For one thing, man is part of nature; what ever man does is an act of nature, by extension. Man is not supernatural or outside of nature. Man is a natural being, and the artificial things he creates are a sign of his ingenuity.)
I don't know whether to compare the posts in this thread to poetry, or to "rooting for the underdog".
So I cut through the mustard, and called it "70 years" for "Hi-tech", and that almost seemed to have stuck... until you came along with your post. :-)
Absolutely. But it is hard to remember that stuffed into a small chair at 30,000 feet, eating the 10 lousy peanut pieces wrapped in plastic generously provided by Delta.
But you are right. Stone age tool making was a well-developed technology. I read the other day in the New York Times that Neanderthals had learned how to extract a pitch-glue from birch bark. They used it to fasten points to shafts.
You mentioned Heidegger who had this idea of ready-at-hand. This may be a useful way of thinking of human relationship to technology. Arguably, the reason why our branch or hominins evolved the way it did around 2.5 million years ago, is a ratcheting effect of two forces- tool-making, and complex social networks. Focusing on the tool-making part first, our species' attitude towards nature has always been one where we find opportunities to transform raw materials into tools. Other animals do this, but we seemed to be at home with tool-making. The process of tool-making was less of a struggle, more frequent, and required more complex steps than other animals. There is evidence that the complex procedures for tool-making and broca's region of the brain (primarily involved in language processing) is tied together. Thus, even language could have been ratcheted up by tool-use. Combined with the need for social learning in complex societies language became more useful, itself being a tool of sorts to get other things done more quickly. Social learning had huge benefits, creating a variety of cultural ways to solve problems. And so a niche was created based on social and cultural learning. Again, presumably tool-use drove this niche, and in turn was subsumed itself in a larger phenomena of cultural learning in which technology was a large facet, but not the only one. Language and concepts, driven by tool-use also created the complex system of social, and self-reflective species we are currently. Species with only intermediary skills at the cusp of this tool-making niche that was starting to develop must have died out rather quickly while ones that were able to function most effectively with this new adaptation, survived more efficiently. Thus, the relatively short span to the modern man from first species (like Homo habilis).
Language and concepts, transforming raw materials to useful items to survive (and entertain), is pretty much part of our species. It is natural in that it was our hominin niche. Exaptations from tool-use, led to cultural learning which then became so useful, it was probably adapted for in the ability to use languages more readily and form concepts and syntax more easily. Terrence Deacon's idea that perhaps rituals became the basis for language can be part of the equation. Beyond this example, I would have to start a new thread on the more particulars of language evolution and the many theories that abound with this phenomena.
You say, in the context of your concerns about technology in the modern era (at the end of your op), "In a way the question comes down to, "What differentiates the natural from the artificial ?"
I think you will definatly find Martin Heideggar's, (relatively) short and accessible 1954 essay, "The Question Concerning Technology", helpful in answering this question.
Regards,
John
I agree, more or less. But I was proposing what feels "unnatural" about modern life. It's not the stuff we've built but all of the strangers out there. Imagine a post-apocalyptic tribe of 30 living in the ruins of downtown New York. Everyone knows everyone in their uniqueness. Would the ruins be so disturbing and unnatural?
Of course you have a point. Humans are revolutionary compared to animals, as well as massively self-conscious. They think about their thinking, which includes thinking about this thinking about their thinking and so on. They can even grasp their absurdity and futility, in a certain sense, though this grasping is arguably just more adaptation. As apo might say, the perception of futility might nevertheless help us unclog the heat death.
But what if we are visited by aliens who stand to us as we stand to beavers? The sound they play by the water for us will entice our great thinkers and poets to rhapsodize. But they'll use the simplicity of this "sound" for them as an argument for a qualitative break between our technological status. (Just a playful thought experiment...)
I think you've put your finger on a great issue. Those whose ego-ideals involve creativity are perhaps the proudest of us. Of course I include myself. The fantasy is to have said something both significant and original, or to have produced a non-conceptual musical work, perhaps, with a potent, unique "flavor" of feeling. This fantasy is threatened by the millions of strangers, some of them maybe the true "Einsteins" instead of us. The horror is that one might be a second-rate imitation, a superfluous poor-man's version of the thinker, poet, composer, scientists. At least the mediocre scientist can be a useful foot-soldier, but the mediocre creative type is ( at worst) noise obscuring signal.
Quoting MikeL
Exactly. I think that's the heart of alienation. Having only commodity value for the vast majority of other human beings. We exist for them as skills/credentials with a fluctuating if not radically uncertain market value. So capitalism is stressful. But the flip side the privacy that comes with this alienation. In a small town, folks are in your business. In the city you are just a passing face, perhaps worth scanning on the subway between stops, if even that.
The bottom line is that we are not living within our means.
New technologies often are the result of the need to cope with problems created by previous technologies.
More significantly, as Richard H. Robbins organizes, outlines, and conveys so effectively in Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism, the culture/system that has dominated the globe for the past 500 years, capitalism, requires perpetual economic growth. For the system to work, more and more things have to be commodified.
I would argue that when Silicon Valley designs and makes a new printer, a new gadget, a new operating system, etc. it is because something--anything--new has to be made to get consumers to consume, earn returns for investors, and the many other things that keep the system functioning. Hence, Steve Jobs said "It isn't the consumers' job to know what they want".
Whether it's McDonald's french fries, the latest printers, or a lot of things in between, how often do people in the affluent Global North really like, need or want the products that they consume? A lot of it collects dust and barely gets used, ends up in landfills, etc.
The problem is not "technology". The problem is stuff. See Annie Leonard's "The Story of Stuff".
We have things being made and consumed for the sake of being made and consumed so that more "value" can be calculated by economists and added to GDP. We have a system that now dominates the entire globe and requires perpetual economic growth and is completely incompatible with sustainability or any other living within our means. You should not be surprised by the meaningless, random stuff that such a system produces.
How about medical technology? How much of that are people willing to give up?
Capitalism also has a process called "creative destruction". Audio tape (reel to reel or cassette) augmented the vinyl record, and did nothing to the turntable. the compact disk, on the other hand, was introduced to destroy the installed base of 33 rpm records and turntables both. Why do that? Because the market in vinyl recordings and turntables was matured and was saturated. New recordings could be turned out, but huge sales figures and high profits would not be forthcoming.
In one fell swoop, the recording industry switched from one kind of gear to another, and opened up the whole market to new sales of old product, as well as new product. (Everybody except a few aficionados that stuck with vinyl.) Sales bounded forward, along with profitability.
Windows replaced DOS. The MP3 player replaced cassettes and CD players. New iPhones no longer have a convenient plug for headphones. Newer phones use pads instead of plugs to recharge the batteries. There are many instances of a new product line rendering the old product line dead.
Creative destruction accounts for a major chunk of both change and more junk. Then there is style obsolescence, which auto manufacturers have used for a long time. New cars are as styled as fashion runways, and people want to be 'in style'.
There will be some aspects of creative destruction which will be beneficial. Book technology was perfected a long time ago, and I love books. Maybe the digital reader is creative destruction of the printed book, but I find the digital readers much easier to read (bigger print size, more contrast). I wish it had come along 60 years ago.
Is it the wood shack, reading by candlelight (you could read in the daytime, ya know), or dying at 30 that you find unsatisfactory? By the way, 30 was the average age of longevity in bad times. Child and maternal mortality kept the average so low. If you made it through childhood diseases and graduated to your own shack in good health and plenty of candles, you might well live to be 50.
I like flat screen tv's and the Internet and modern medicine and products in stores. I can't imagine functioning a hundred years ago.
Emile Bin's Hamadryad
***
Hans Rudi Giger's art amplifies disgust and terror of technology as a projected onto the natural world. Might as well be a riff on the theme in Bin's Hamadryad.
The simple difference would be that the artificial doesn't have the means to make itself.
Nature makes itself whether that be at the level of rivers carving out their channels or bodies turning food into flesh. The artificial only happens as the result of someone having the idea and the desire to manufacture the material form.
Right, like I implied earlier, the artificial is that which does not have an identity or telos itself but rather exists for a purpose that has been applied by the manufacturer. Take away the manufacturer and the user and you're left with a material object, bottom-up reductionism with no natural purpose.
Hi Apokrisis. It's always good to read your posts. Just a couple of questions for you. What do you mean by "means" in the above statement "it doesn't have the means to make itself"? A robot assembly factory is able to slap together pieces to make another robot. Do you mean resources?
Also you personify Nature in your second statement. Just going back to your previous discussion, what is your position on panpsychism v semiotic machine behaviour?
Lastly you say the AI only happens as a result of someone having the idea and desire. Could AI also be a generator of ideas or desires?
Because I don't have a problem crediting nature with purpose, even if it is not much of a purpose in being the general tendency to entropify.
So ordinary language gives us two choices - either to chose mentalistic or physicalist terminology. Dualism is baked into our linguistic culture. Biology would offer more accurate jargon, but that might go down so well.
Quoting MikeL
Someone would have to have built the factory, supplied it with power, stepped in to fix the software glitch that halted production, etc. And then the factory is building robots, not building factories.
So natural things are autopoietic or self-making. They develop rather than get built.
Quoting MikeL
Ask Siri.
I've read you before talking about the purpose of nature to entropify in other posts. I'm a bit vague on your meaning. If entropy is the purpose, why bother with the speed hump of life?
I'm not concerned about your wording of nature, I was just curious.
Of course it's contribution in cosmological terms is infinitesimal. But green forest does a better job than bare rock at turning hot sun rays into cooler infrared radiation. The energy goes back into space at a much lower spectral temperature that would otherwise have been the case.
As to the Matrix, it's a film. Does simulated rain make you really wet? Would a simulated factory make real robots?
No, but the program that tells the machine gun to shoot anyone who steps over the fence sure shoots real bullets.
Quoting apokrisis
So life is a manifold. To what end - the cooling of the universe faster I mean?
Maybe we should let the NYT writers fill the empty spaces on this forum, and we all just shut up. :-)
You, as I certainly don't see what you are describing. In the respects of what is natural, I see no difference between my computer screen and the tree outside.