Man-Nature is Unnatural

Nature produces man, man produces nature, man consists of nature, and nature sometimes consists of man. Culture is an articulation of nature; not even its teleology is unique to it. The sculpting of the earth is allegedly 'artificial' when it's a concrete building, but not when it's an anthill, or a spider web, or a forest, or a cavern produced by geological forces. Man's self-proclaimed transcendence over nature is an amazing feat, unless he is queer, in which case it is morally repugnant.¹ Women exist, also.

There is a better man-nature. I have affection for the physicist's characterization. Nature is elegance, inevitability, symmetry, simplicity married with generality, beauty. The unnatural is contrived, fine-tuned, anthropocentric, arbitrary, ugly.² It is the "natural" of "natural units".

Setting \(c=1\) is "natural" in that it cuts unnecessary factors from equations and reduces dimensionality, without any loss of accuracy.³ Space and time are properly united, and our ontology is tightened, an unrealized redundancy is scrubbed away at last. Units of measurement are convention, they are something 'man' (anthro) chooses for itself and imposes onto nature. There are infinite possible choices, and nature is indifferent toward our choice (unit systems are isomorphic). Natural units reduce the space of arbitrary decision, chipping away at these impositions.⁴

There is irony in this inversion of more common notions of man-nature, where symmetry is considered 'artificial' and established cultural conventions 'natural'.⁵ Nature as seen from the internal, contingent, partial view of observers is messy and asymmetric, but the heart of nature is remarkably natural. Space itself doesn't especially distinguish one direction from another, nor does time. Natural nature constructs unnaturalness, that's to say, complexity and asymmetry, through separation, where one considers a part separated from the whole. Space is symmetric, but the particular space near the earth has a special axis (up-down) which gravity conditionally distinguishes from the others (left-right, forward-back). We don't see nature holistically, we only see its interactions with our sense organs, which encode a small (messy) slice. We're looking at it from the inside.

...That all being said, naturalness seems to be failing modern physicists as a predictive criteria. The Higgs is nice and all, but the LHC had much grander expectations. There is a temptation, maybe, to abandon naturalness, or to weigh it more lightly, or to turn to anthropic reasoning.⁶ I don't really want to weigh in on this academic dispute, I'm just here to wallow in appreciation for a concept that appeals to me, and is influential in my intuitions.

1. Homo sapiens cannot fly; it is basic biology. There are no such thing as airplanes.
2. Physics is a branch of aesthetics.
3. One might be tempted to assign naturalness to math, but studying math rigorously reveals its incredible contrivance. Though one can argue physics inherits this contrivance, just averts its eyes.
4. Some great 'puzzles' of modern physics are partly or wholly issues of naturalness: We have a technically functional solution to the mystery, but we are uncomfortable with it, because it is ugly. One can (correctly) say "Who are we to tell nature what is natural?", but then one can argue that this notion of naturalness is an observation of nature's character, not an anthro postulate. Yet, naturalness is conflated with beauty; there is clearly some subjective (anthro) quality leaking in, despite the intended opposition of naturalness to anthropomorphism.
5. Judging genders and sexualities by physics standards of naturalness, the clear winner is the nonbinary pansexual.
6. Do not read this as "anthropomorphic" reasoning. Anthropic reasoning is a way of naturalizing unnatural obervations, sort of. We say, "I observe this because observers only exist under conditions which produce observers." A simple example: The universe is almost all empty space, but by some remarkable coincidence, we find ourselves surrounded by matter. Why? Because empty space does not produce observers, so practically no observer will find itself to be in empty space.