Unicorn Wanderings — 5 of 8: Nature
Many seek to protect nature as if she were an old lady who needs help across the street. We are often concerned about the impact “man” is having on nature and seek to preserve the wild places. It is easy to forget that men and women are also nature. As a bird builds it nest and beavers create dams, we all alter our environment to better suit us. In case of humans, the problem is what they often think is good for them is not and they are creating a nature few of us can survive in. Plants enjoy the high carbon dioxide concentration created in the atmosphere. Unfortunately that concentration is also warming the globe and creating chaotic climates that threaten the survival of many species. Other species will be fine with it. Nature will continue with or without us for a few billion or so more years.
Get Nesbar Ardmac’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
What makes “nature” the entity in need of protection? I sometimes wonder if that is the god for the godless? Their unicorn to search for and die for. Nothing inspires more devotion than your creator and the arbitrator of your eternal destiny. So am I devoted to either the unicorn or to the little white mice that wrote the program I am helping to execute? I suppose in this situation the unicorn is an intermediary. She receives my devotion as part of her program and I rely on her to communicate that devotion to the mice.
The mice’s program has resulted into some interesting natural phenomena. Fractals -my first thought is they aren’t really natural — nature just reflects some attributes that are contained in the mathematics of a fractal. I know fractals are not “in” or “cool” right now, but my mind gets frozen at a few points in time, and one of those is when fractals were the coffee table book. My neighbor wrote programs to generate fractals and did a school project that used a fractal to generate a stream network. The program was pretty simple compared to the complex patterns with infinite detail it could generate. He didn’t figure it out — he just adapted it from someone else’s program. In hind sight, it would interesting to know if he found that in a book because he did this in the early days of the internet. There was FTP and Gopher but WWW was still not quite out.
So if the mice have written a program, I guess it is not that surprising that now and then we create some code that is not too far from theirs. And we are learning to hack their genetic codes which I can only assume is part of their program. Is it conceivable that the program could evolve beyond its programer? The robot become a sentient being? If we program the robot to react like it is feeling pain, does it? At what point does the fact that the robots frown can be attributed to the decision tree that triggered the mouth to frown indicate it really is sad? The neurologists are mapping out our brain — so is my desperate cry in the night simply a reaction to preprogramed responses that deserves no sympathy or comfort because it is simply a programmed response to my mood? In contemplating this, I feel good about my decision to always be polite to Alexa.
So when the sentient robots come will they be part of nature? My first thought is yes. Is the beaver’s dam unnatural? I am nature and if I make the robot, is it not part of nature’s creation? I think it is. Which leads me to a likely flawed conclusion there is nothing unnatural.
