Meta-Nature

Jim Fournier
December 23, 1999

We are undergoing a point of inversion in matter and culture. From this point on, our technological evolution in matter may increasingly be guided by the recognition of the potential existence of a climax technology, a state of Meta-Nature. A state as harmonious as nature in the coherence of its design which, like nature, is only the realization of a potential already inherent in the puzzle that is matter. A state that unlike nature may only bring itself into being through the intervention of humans. And yet like nature, one which exists fully in potential prior to any manifestation in matter; an inherent property implicit in the coherence of basic space. A state which unfolds inevitably out of the most fundamental harmony and symmetry possible in matter. A state which, like nature, is not static but always evolving, but which also, like nature, has a coherence and beauty expressed through absolutely perfected energetic efficiency.

Historical Context

In many ways the history of humanity may be seen as the history of fire---the history of humans chopping down trees to burn them. Indeed the basic operating instructions for humanity, for the whole of human history up to this point, may be articulated as follows. Make more people, and cut down trees (and burn them) to do it. Only in our lifetimes, in the space of a few short years, has this basic primary operating instruction for humanity been inverted. The situation is now, suddenly, one in which the sheer mass of our own numbers is the greatest threat to our continued prosperity, and possibly even survival, on this planet. And the greatest part of that threat is the loss of the trees and other green plants which comprise the other half of our biological symbiosis within the atmosphere.

This situation is at once so sudden and so severe that there is often a great gulf between the experience different generations have in the face of it. Many young people feel the threat so acutely that they cannot understand how the previous generation could have mismanaged things so badly as to allow them to get to this point, while at the same time many older people of considerable intelligence have not yet, and may never, fully realize that the situation is so precarious. This split is not purely generational, and there are many individuals at both ends of the age spectrum who have opposite perspectives to those outlined here, but what is described tends to be true in general. The situation has changed so rapidly that it has overwhelmed, and continues to overwhelm, our ability to understand the magnitude of what has happened in our brief lifetime. Even for those who do understand the current imperative, few appreciate the magnitude of the shift. For it is as if the basic operating instructions for humanity for as long as we have been human, have suddenly been inverted. The new instructions could be described as follows: Don't make so many people, and grow more trees. But the situation and the implications of our moment in history are far deeper than that in all dimensions.

Biochemistry of Fire

If one looks at the history of fire, of humans burning things, an unavoidable trend emerges. We have always burned hydrocarbons. The hydrocarbons on this planet are all the products of plants, whether recently living or fossilized. As the name describes, these are chemical compounds, molecules, composed predominately of hydrogen and carbon. When a plant made them it took the energy of sunlight, in the form of photons, and used them to drive a chemical reaction in which water, H2O, was split into hydrogen, H, and oxygen, O. The hydrogen was then combined with carbon, C, to make the hydrocarbon structure of the plant. The carbon was derived from carbon dioxide gas, CO2, from the air. The CO2 molecule was also split into its elemental components by plants using photons from the sun as the ultimate energy source to drive both this reaction, and the splitting of water. The plants then released the excess (waste) oxygen back into the atmosphere. Animals breathe in oxygen, O2, while breathing out (waste) carbon dioxide, CO2, and excreting (waste) water, H2O.

We can immediately see that none of these three elements is really waste. Instead, planets and animals are embedded in a complementary balance at the most fundamental metabolic biochemical level. The elegance of the biochemical design is far more intricate and subtle than described here, but the basic idea is that the possibility of life for all higher plants and animals rests on this fundamental chemical interchange and balance, using the smallest, simplest and most common chemical elements as the medium of exchange. This continues to be replicated and expanded upon in more and more complex and sophisticated ways. When an animal breathes in air, containing oxygen, it uses this oxygen to "burn", or oxidize a carbohydrate. Again, that carbohydrate is a molecule containing carbon and hydrogen, which was made by a plant using sunlight, carbon dioxide and water. When the carbohydrate is oxidized, literally burned, giving off energy in the form of heat, the energy from the photons of sunlight which the plant originally used to make it are released. This need not be in the form of a flame as we think of fire, inside the animal it happens in a more controlled manner, one byproduct of which is the warm body temperature of some animals. But the basic process involved, at the chemical level, is oxidation, which is basically burning. The byproducts of this oxidation are the recombination of the hydrogen with oxygen, and carbon with oxygen, returning both to the state where the plant found them, and liberating the energy the plant used from the sunlight to put them into this higher energy state in the first place.

But if the hydrocarbons that the plant creates are in a higher potential energy state, thanks to the energy of sunlight that the plant used to boost them into that state in the first place, then any hydrocarbon could be vulnerable to being dropped back into a lower energy state. All that is needed to complete the reaction is the oxygen to combine with them, and a little energy to get over the hump to start the process. The hydrocarbon could be thought of as being in a little energetic valley high up on a mountain. If you can boost it over that initial energetic hump, its all down hill from there. All it takes is a spark. This is the magic of fire, the oldest discovery of humans, the practical understanding that we could exploit the same trick we use inside our own metabolism externally-we could burn things. The discovery of fire is arguably the first thing which separated humans, or proto-humans from other animals. At a chemical level it is merely the externalization of the same basic reaction that separates us from plants. We are the great oxidizers. By the way, in a bit of counter intuitive alchemical paradox, the other chemical product of oxidation, combustion, to complete the chemical balance must be water. Not only does the carbon combine with oxygen to make CO2, the hydrogen does as well to make H2O, water. So we can see that not only are plants and animals themselves in balance with each other, but humans in our behavior with fire remain balanced only by plants, thus the more we humans play with fire, the more we need plants to keep things in balance, to literally clean up the mess.

Now we are ready to look at the long term history of humans, plants and fire in its broadest strokes. First humans, and other animals, ate plants, metabolizing them, oxidizing them internally. We still do, except for the most rabid carnivores who only eat other animals who eat plants, but the effect is the same even after passing the buck. The energy source must ultimately be plants which captured the energy from sunlight. Except for a few worms in high temperature sulfur vents on the sea floor, photons are the only meaningful source of energy for life on this planet. (We also get a little energy from the heat emanating from radioactive decay in the Earth, but as far as I know no higher organisms are able to make their living solely from that source.) So that digression aside, photons and thus plants are it. When humans first learned to use fire we were essentially doing the same thing we do inside our bodies, outside, burning plants, liberating stored photons from the sun. Only now we could burn all kinds of plants we could not eat. So we started burning trees.

For a long time that was enough. But eventually, we went on to harder stuff. At first we were still only into "soft" fuels. We burned peat, a soft fossil fuel. That was the first step in our addiction to fossil fuels. It got us started, but wasn't really much different than wood. But when we started burning coal we got a more concentrated fuel and therefore hotter heat than when we burned wood or peat. Then we added coke, (you can see this really does begin to look like a serious addiction problem) and then oil. Here you can see that we have gone from a soft solid in the from of wood and peat, to a solid with coal, to a liquid with oil till we finally get to natural gas, which is of course, a gas. There is nothing remarkable about this sequence from most people's perspective, it is simply the natural sequence of historical fuels used by humanity in the course of industrialization. Yet there is also an equally obvious trend emerging if one understands how to look for it. Not only does the sequence go from a porous material, to a hard solid, to a liquid, to a gas, but at each step the ratio of carbon to hydrogen changes. Remember that what we are actually doing when we burn something is to oxidize it. This means that we are combining oxygen with hydrogen from water and with carbon to form carbon dioxide. We don't really need the carbon, each carbon carbon bond has only about the same energy as a single carbon hydrogen bond, and when broken contributes carbon dioxide (the global warming gas). When we combine the hydrogen with the oxygen we get the energy we want without the CO2. In addition, the carbon is heavy, twelve times heavier than each hydrogen by itself, so the less of it we have to carry around, the better. And this is of course exactly what happened. Each time we found a source with more hydrogen per carbon, it proved to be more compact, efficient and convenient. So we have switched to progressively higher energy density fuels, from wood, to peat, to coal, to oil, to natural gas, each has had less carbon per hydrogen, until we arrive at pure hydrogen. Then we are at the end of the line. The sequence converges at its natural endpoint. Ten thousand years of human chemical history, really several million years of biochemical history on Earth, converge on pure hydrogen as the inevitable natural end point of this sequence. When you get to hydrogen you can't go any further in portable chemical fuels. It's the smallest, lightest element in matter. You can't go any farther. You're there.

Where we are now note

It may be very important for us to put things in perspective at this point in our history and realize where we are on this great sweep of inevitable evolution in chemistry, to see that there are only so many pieces in the puzzle, that we have turned them all face up, and we can now see how they fit together well enough to recognize that there are fundamental chemical solutions in nature, which nature figured out millions of years ago and basically has not been able to improve upon ever since. It has instead continued to reuse them in ever changing permutations and ever more complex systems, but always based upon the same fundamental biochemical solutions which it devised millions of years ago. In that sense nature does represent a stable base line of unchanging design coherence and perfection with respect to humanity over the time span of human history and prehistory. Nature may be represented as essentially an unchanging flat horizontal base line out of which the slowly ascending curve of human novelty emerges.

The Baseline of Nature

One may think of nature as a baseline out of which humanity emerges. This is not to say that nature is unchanging, there is evolution, there is change, but there is also something that remains constant compared with the relentless novelty which humanity initiated. Whether one calls it history, or change, or progress, or degeneration, there is without question some sense in which the advent of humans, or at the very least the advent of human civilization represents some discontinuous and irreversible break with the prior state of nature. Whether this is good or bad is not the question at hand, only the observation that it this situation exists, and it seems to be accelerating - rapidly. That is to say the advent of human culture, and especially human technological civilization, has brought with it some sort of time rate of change function, wherein not only have we departed from a state of pre-human nature, but the amount of change that happens in a given period of time has been steadily increasing since the beginning of that process. Indeed, it now appears that the time rate of change of that rate of change is increasing, i.e. it is accelerating. This is not news. Virtually everyone in the modern, or post-modern, or ultra-modern, or whatever we choose to call the world now, feels this to such a degree that we are all to some extent terrified by it. There is, for anyone reflective enough to pause to consider the situation, a looming sense of foreboding and trepidation as all of the indicators angle steadily upward toward vertical and we have an uncomfortable feeling in the pit of our stomachs that this must inevitably become unstable - sometime in the very near future.

This is the situation we face now, at the millennial moment, a state which all but the most prophetic could not even foresee, a hundred, or even fifty years ago. The change, and even the acceleration of change had been there, steadily increasing for millennia, but it only now, in a single generation, perhaps over the space of only a few decades that it becomes so obvious that no one can miss seeing it. But before this point, back in the distant past of humanity, at some point we diverged from nature and set this all in motion. What was it that defined that split, that divergence, and when did it occur?

This has been roundly debated and I don't propose that we will be able to advance that thinking here. For our purposes we don't really need to know when it occurred, or exactly what marked it, whether it be the advent of the use of fire, or language, or domestication of animals, or the wheel, or even the advent of the opposable thumb, doesn't matter much. It is enough to recognize that somewhere along the line humanity diverged from nature and we are left with a sense that there is some clear distinction between that which is "natural" and that which is "manmade." This distinction is not always as clear and distinguishable as we might think it is, at least at the margins where indigenous peoples manage forests and other similar phenomena, but for the most part in the modern world the distinction is clear, and so looking backwards we have a sense that this distinction has held to a greater or lessor degree stretching back at least for several thousand years, and really for tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of years. Indeed how else would we be able to distinguish stone tools worked by hominids from random "natural" stones. The point is almost trivial. Or so it seems, at least at the end of the spectrum characterized by artifacts. Again it becomes more fuzzy and difficult if one begins to question where the boundary is with respect to a natural system "managed" by humans, a fishery, a forest etc, but with the dawn of agriculture it becomes clear that humans are no longer managing a natural system, they are now stepping in and controlling it. With agriculture we see the distinction has become clear, inside is the human controlled, manmade realm, outside is nature. Inside are the domesticated animals, outside is nature where they go to graze. They may inadvertently be altering nature in the process, but from the human point of view there is a clear distinction between us and our flock on one side, and nature red in tooth and claw on the other. For all of human history, until very recently at least within the lineage of domesticated agricultural humans from which our civilization has descended, nature was something that would leap out of the dark and eat you, something to be feared, and thus where possible subdued, subjugated and controlled. And for good reason! From this perspective. This is not to suggest whether this perspective was right or wrong or politically correct or not, only to point out that from within that world view, until very recently, nature was something not only "other" than the human realm, but "other" and frightening and dangerous.

There are two points in all of this. First, in some very real sense there is, or has been, a bifurcation on this planet, at least from the point of view of the humans, into two realms, the natural and the manmade. And second at least from the point of view of the humans the natural realm has often been perceived as dangerous or at least frightening until very very recently. Leaving this second point aside for the moment the first point seems so obvious as to be trivial. Any child can tell you what is natural and what is manmade. But how do we do it? It seems so innate that we take it for granted, and yet this encompasses a tremendously complex and sophisticated set of distinctions. Perhaps it has become much easier in the late 20th century as so much of what is human made is now composed of materials, like plastic, that nature never made. So that is one very easy criterion right off the bat. If its made out of a material that nature doesn't manipulate it is human by default. This could be extended to most types of metal, glass and ceramics as well. On the other hand there are plenty of objects composed of "natural" materials which have been manipulated in such a way that we see the handiwork of humans. Textiles, woodwork, paper, etc. The list is endless. There is no end to the possible expressions of human ingenuity and cleverness which cannot be mimicked by nature.

But what if we start from the other extreme. What if we start with a natural object. How can we tell it was not fabricated by humans? Some might be quick to point to genetic engineering and say that now we can't tell. But that is not the argument I wish to explore at present. For the time being lets put that aside and confine ourselves to human intervention where we really understand more completely what we are doing. Or for those that would still take issue with that, lets confine ourselves to the question as it existed throughout the sweep of human history right up to a few years ago. What is it about a natural object that separates it from a human artifact? Perhaps one answer is that this is the wrong question. Nature doesn't make artifacts, humans do. Nature makes systems of organisms, or rather biology does. It might be argued that nature actually encompasses a number of different realms, including the geological and cosmological as well as the biological, but it is the biological which will be most interesting for the current discussion. Even within that frame it might be argued that for as long as there has been animal husbandry and selective breeding of plants as well as animals, it has been virtually impossible to tell on this side of the ledger, i.e. it has been impossible to tell what is really natural as opposed to what is manmade or perhaps really, man-manipulated. Yet when one looks at an animal, or with perhaps greater difficulty, even a plant it is often clearly discernable which are wild and which have been tampered with or "bred" by humans. This distinction can be ephemeral and rarefied but non-the-less discernable, though once again it leads us away from the clearly obvious and rational explanations into a realm of sense and sensibility and intuitive aesthetics. And it is perhaps here that the answer to the genetic engineering challenge to this question might be found. Will the fruits of genetic manipulation really be any different than those of cross breeding, not in magnitude, but in kind. By that I mean we will obviously be able to take things much farther from nature through genetic engineering, but will the results be any harder to distinguish from wild than the results of selective breeding of animals, or will they instead be even more obviously not wild, not natural, and thus human made. If you feel that the later is the case, then you are most likely intuitively assuming a much subtler distinction between natural and manmade than any based merely on materials or even on the existence of biology. There is a subtle coherence and design in nature that human artifacts almost invariably fail to equal - almost invariably.

Perhaps great art comes closest to capturing a coherence, elegance and beauty found almost invariably in nature's designs, and very rarely in those of humans. If one looks into the behavior of natural systems, not even at the level of their visual appearance, but at the level of their functional efficiency, there is a synergy which human technological systems have not even begun to aspire to. It is as if every element serves multiple purposes and solves multiple problems at once, and the net result is that the whole system functions harmoniously. As a designer, one sometimes has moments in a design process where this seems to happen. It is as if one is in the final stages of untangling the Gordian knot and the more one undoes one problem the more it frees up others and the whole solution just unfolds as if it is doing itself, like the final moves in a winning game of solitaire - its all down hill. Contrast this with the apparent state of the world in late modern/post-modern times. It is as if all of the problems are intractable and the more we do one thing the to attempt to solve one problem the more it throws three others into a deeper state of crisis. It feels as if the modern technological approach to problem solving by dint of brute cleverness through intellect and control has tied itself into a Gordian knot. It is just the opposite of what happens in a successful design flow state, and very much the opposite of what seems to be apparent in the design of all of nature's systems. So how does the successful design flow state feel? It feels as if one is discovering a solution, which was already present in potential and had to be teased out, discovered, in order to be brought into manifestation. It is very much an experience of humility and awe rather than intellectual triumph and control.