Meeting 1 Notes

Co-ordinator = Roger Harnden

PARTICIPANTS

• In what sense do we say that ICTs have a direct or an indirect implication in the natural world?
• I would like that the group explores the differences between hard technologies and soft technologies being ICT an example of the latter. Do they have, if any, different kind of implications in the natural world?
• Nature if the outcome of what has been constructed by previous generations. In the opposition between nature and culture we continuously reconstruct nature because, in my opinion, we generate knowledge in our culture interactively that we tend to impose to others.
• It could be possible that one generation artifacts become the next generation artifacts. Nowadays transgenic food is one of these artifacts.
• After Newton it became possible to define nature in terms of objects, forces governing their motion and so on; after Darwin it became possible to define nature in terms of natural selection, evolution, and the survival of the fittest.
• We are using description here in a constructivistic sense, there is no nature "out there" that we are describing but we are constructing nature with the descriptions we are providing. In a sense any external reference remains unknown.
• Nature, generally speaking, is anything that has a longer time scale than any human existence.
• If we say that nature is not something that is out there but it is something that is constructible then obviously there is a question about what nature we like to consider as nature as a reconstructed nature.
• Values, to me, are nothing that can be considered as good or bad (as carbon dioxide) but they are something that I can attach to a guiding principle in my life, and a guiding principle might be: I like more of this or I like less of that. But this, in itself, is not part of the definition of what nature is but I can attach something to it.
• Perhaps what we need to understand is the co-existence of differences or at least to act with that in mind.
• It seems that there is a scale of context against which we can make distinctions of meaningful acts. 
• The notion of desirable or the notion of value very often have an historical element. For instance, about a century ago people started to think that there were inner properties in human beings, for example intelligence. Therefore if there is an inner property that does not change that means that you can see it as a property of the individual. With the time, the whole notion of what it is to be a human being has changed. Nowadays we no longer say that there is an intelligence, we have many different definitions first of all, and secondly we are aware now that what is intelligence is that which is supported by something else. So if you have a sufficiently rich structure around you, you may be more intelligent that you used to be.
• I consider love of God and obedience as one of the most interesting medieval stabilising forces in society.
• Regarding descriptions it is interesting to notice that in the seventeenth century one of the main questions was: can we improve on our observations? Nowadays the question is: can we improve on our values?

CRITICS

• Can you focus your discussion in the following aspect: how our current understanding of technology can affect our definition of nature in the near future?
• It seems that the recent Kyoto agreement could be related to your discussion in the sense of calling for an awareness of the implications of the use of science and technology to nature.
• I would like to see emerging from the discussion of the group some particular instances of the statements about social construction of technology.
• Can we say that with the help of ICT we create new natures which escapes what we know is the natural world, the so called "virtual realities". Virtual meetings are a good example of this different "natural" settings.
• There are now some technologies that allow to teach some surgical procedures by virtual communications and that could imply that in the near future we can actually have surgeries carry out at large distances.

PARTICIPANTS

• I think that everything that is derived from the latin word "Natus" that means the world (e.g., natural, nature) is under pressure by technological and cultural evolution. Radio-frequencies, for instance, are now experienced as natural.
• I would say that the reverse arrow has a meaning in an aesthetics sense so we can enjoy, perceive nature and find inspiration in it. My point will be that in a functionally differentiated society we expect these arrows to have different functions so the aesthetic arrow is different from the discursive process in which we reconstruct nature. So we have to specify how these arrows operate in a differentiated society.
• It seems that with time we have been increasing our consciousness and that means we have increases our capacity to make more distinctions and carry out more debates about what is considered to be natural.
• In my mind nature has been enriched in the following sense. If we think that our position in the world as being somewhere, as part of our local environment, what we used to do is to assume that anything that is outside of our local situation has in essence a timeless aspect; it is God, it is nature or the forces of nature. What I propose is that this relationship has been changing according to a number of metaphors that we have been using over time. For instance, the first metaphor to identify the relationship with this timeless thing was sexual. The second one was no longer sexual but a radio-type of thing, we could talk to nature. Nowadays nature is precisely where we are, so anything that we do is being enriched by the knowledge of that environment. We create our local weather, our local interactions, our local nature. So what I think we are going to use as the construction of nature in the future is the notion of "being at" and this raise a problem for the environment of where we are.
• ICT help us in our own perception of who we are; in a sense we are more able to handle tension between mind and body because we can think of ourselves as being embedded in a network of relations where you define yourselves and so we can think of ourselves as more enjoying and more aesthetic in terms of pleasure.
• Nature and the metaphor we use to describe nature is the major influence in explaining some facts. For instance, in the case of the exploitation of woods, people used to think of them as an inexhaustible resource therefore they were using it as an inexhaustible resource. Nowadays we have a different opinion. Those attitudes that we devolved two hundred years ago have to be adapted in order to survive in the same type of environment.
• When we define something as a raw material we are approaching nature (at least the part of it where those raw materials are part of) in a very particular way. If we do not consider them as raw materials but as biodiversity the approach to nature will be different.