Something created by man is still occurring within "nature". God creates Man, Man creates BEC, ergo god created the BEC. Again it's irrelevant whether it occurs in nature or manipulated in a lab, because that lab is still a part of this Universe. I'm saying that it's not prevented by the laws of physics, therefore the only barrier is a technical one. Traveling faster than the speed of light isn't allowed by the laws of physics (as we currently understand them), therefore no amount of technical know-how or funding will allow us to exceed it. My quibble is that you said "every" object (that's why I bolded every in your post).
fair enough. my question was whether it was a phenomenon that occurred on its own. i just wanted to know that. i wasn't trying to make a distinction between created by man and created by God. how about the laws of chemistry? can carbon -- the diatomic element -- exist as a gas? do BECs ever include non-gaseous substances?
because when i recited HONClFBrI, i forgot that the C was part of Cl, which is Chlorine. my bad. sorry. btw, it's only the 3rd mistake ( that I'm aware of ) that I've made today. cool, huh?
i've taken a bit of time to think about this, and i have to say that it's kind of a stretch to grasp your thinking. what you're essentially saying is that anything that exists, regardless of its etiology, is a naturally occurring event/phenomenon. to wit, a sponge -- the kind that lives in the ocean -- and a Lamborghini Miura are both naturally occurring phenomena? or are you saying that phenomena which are created with the fundamental elements of physical chemistry are natural because of what compose(s) them? the fact that they would not occur without the province of Man's manipulation of the elements of physical chemistry is irrelevant? where is the line drawn? is a Lamborghini Miura a naturally occurring phenomenon?
It's certainly not supernatural...We are natural agents, so strictly speaking, everything we do is natural as well. In our everyday language, we usually distinguish between natural and artificial, and it makes sense up to a point. It makes it easier for us to communicate everyday stuff. But there's really no difference when we talk about the nature of a thing. It doesn't matter who or what made it, all that matters is whether it exists and what it's composed of. A Miura (nice choice BTW) is made up of entirely worldly materials, therefore it is natural, and a Miura exists, therefore it is naturally occurring.
to me the distinction between naturally occurring and other than naturally occurring has to do with how the agency that creates the other than naturally occurring phenomenon operates. you cannot say that a car is comprised of "worldly materials" with a straight face. there are parts of a car that are synthetic. we start with a raw material and we turn that into something that could never occur without the application of techniques and forces that don't occur in nature. off the top of my head, plastic is an example. i know that there is a wide range of what constitutes "plastic", from a naturally occurring one -- chewing gum -- to PEEKs, which are synthesized thru a rather complex process. even leather stretches the idea of naturally occurring, but since it's just the outside of a beast, i won't push too hard. i think the difficulty here is that there is a directedness to the development of things like plastics which requires the organization and storage of information to the degree that it is fantastically improbable that something like a polyetheretherketone would "happen" without an external agent that was able to control the sequence of events to effectuate a specific outcome. exercising that kind of control makes a phenomenon not natural. it is not within the nature of the materials themselves to produce randomly the substances that can be produced thru synthesis.
This is where you're not getting it. The car isn't made of supernatural materials or unobtanium, it's composed of particles and atoms perfectly operating within the laws of physics as we know them in our observable sphere of universe, thus they are the result of natural processes. You need to modify what your own personal definition of "natural" is.
You are on the right track when you refer to the organization of information, but don't think of it as "control". All objects in the universe are essentially organized information, and they are all informing other objects, thus affecting change. A human being is an object just like any other and is part of the natural process.
Dear Lord Jesus Christ, and by Jesus Christ I'm referring to blond, good-looking, lightly-bearded or clean-shaven Jesus Christ, not hippie-looking Jesus or swarthy, more Middle Eastern Jesus - who's probably more historically accurate - not that guy. So dear clean-shaven or lightly-bearded-like-Mike-Piazza Jesus, we give thanks to you and to everything you do. Your love and acceptance washes over all of us like the warm healing waters in one of those European toilets that cleans you inside and out. I believe it's called a bid-ett. Dear blond, almost Swiss-looking Jesus, we ask you to allow us to accept everyone in this thread tonight, regardless of their religious beliefs, whether it be Muslim, or Hindu, or Jewish, or witchcraft.
nah. you are reinventing a definition of "natural" to conform with your viewpoint. the traditional meaning of "natural" has the sense of "not brought about through human activity or consciousness". if you want to think that complex polymers are naturally occurring because they are hydrocarbons and hydrogen and carbon are naturally occurring, fine, but they only exist because they are made to exist by human activity, thus they are not "natural". find an accepted (book) definition of "natural" that supports your POV.
You have no idea what you are talking about, and it's not even worth my time trying to show you your own foolishness.
No, you're pigheadedly refusing to accept that the word may be used in more than one sense to try and shield yourself from the truth in whatever blind alley you've led yourself up on yet another thread. http://www.thefreedictionary.com/natural
As we talked about earlier this year with mice, more progress being made in neuron brain mapping on animals: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/04/fly-brain-map/
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=when-build-brains-like-ours I don't think most of the public yet understands how quickly this is happening as we hit the neck of the exponential growth curve. Edit: Maybe it's just because it's 3:50 AM or because I'm high but this was a really good article.
The latest: Reverse-Engineering of Human Brain likely by 2030, Expert Predicts We're alot closer than you might think: "A supercomputer capable of running a software simulation of the human brain doesn’t exist yet. Researchers would require a machine with a computational capacity of at least 36.8 petaflops and a memory capacity of 3.2 petabytes — a scale that supercomputer technology isn’t expected to hit for at least three years, according to IBM researcher Dharmendra Modha. Modha leads the cognitive computing project at IBM’s Almaden Research Center."
Yeah, don't live with someone called Sarah Connor. I don't think Diego has seen the Films!! Diego, I am looking for Sarah Connor...
your dictionary gives these first three definitions: 1. Present in or produced by nature: a natural pearl. 2. Of, relating to, or concerning nature: a natural environment. 3. Conforming to the usual or ordinary course of nature: a natural death. re: 1. there may be some polycarbons that are produced by nature, but, in the main, they are produced by man's ingenuity. to call that "produced by nature" is disingenuous. that would mean thermonuclear devices are naturally occurring. re: 2. we understand this use of the word "natural" and it isn't relevant or being applied in the current argument. re: 3. conforming to the ordinary course of nature means that something would occur "on its own", without the superaddition of additional information or organization not present in the matter at hand. you can put something in water, boil the water, and what you put in the water may be different from how it was when you put it in, in some way, like an egg. that would be an example of a natural process, because an egg could fall into a hot spring and become hard-boiled. it is within the nature of an egg to respond to naturally-occurring heat in such a manner. but you cannot extend the analogy to every situation you choose by saying that man is part of nature, so anything he might do is natural.
Uh, well... The process of protein denaturing (what causes an egg white to turn, uh, white under heat) is a natural process that can be caused by many different things. Where do you draw the line between "natural" and, uh, "unnatural"? Is a stick artificially sharpened and used as a spear "natural"? If the tool is found in that state, is it natural? How about if the fabricator and user is a chimp rather than a human (observed in the wild, BTW)? We are products of the exact same processes that generated every other single living thing on this planet. Every animal, including us, shapes the environment in some way when it interacts with it. Heck, plants change the environment they exist in. Why is an anthill natural, and a skyscraper not?