I wouldn't me making this argument if I thought everyone thought like me. We have a great capacity for understanding and changing nature, yes. And also the need to believe we are apart and special. But we're not. High rise buildings and fiber optic cables are as natural as anything else that grows on the planet. Drawing a line and calling "artificial" or "designed" on this side is completely arbitrary.

I get what you're saying, and I actually like it. I myself have called Life a singular phenomena that describes a (very) complex 4D shape of which we humans are all just a part (and as a group are currently only about as impactful as a large asteroid!). But if you follow this to far you get some nasty results, mostly around a feeling of inevitability and hopelessness, which I honestly don't think has a rational basis. The world is strange and even one good idea, one chance, could turn things around for Life in general, and humans in particular. It certainly needs to be a big change, something like a "phase shift" in human affairs. We certainly cannot bring our traditional values into the future, which were predicated on living in a world that would push back against our ambitions. Nowadays, the ONLY thing restraining humans is humans, and yet self-restraint has never been so out-of-fashion.

I think your take is very interesting and I agree with the sentiment in general. But humans are different sociobiologically from other animals. As far as I know, we are the only ones that cook our food, which caused drastic changes in the guts of hominids, because the energy required to process food was farmed out to the cooking process and literally to the grass-eating animals we ate. Every since fire and further technological developments, humans have gone against nature and evolution.

I get what you're saying and agree in spirit, but I think it is zooming out a little too far to say that technological development is just another natural process. Yes, it is in a way, but things like computation are truly different beasts. No, humans are not special in terms of our importance, language, meaning, or even intelligence, but my thoughts are that technology is a separate process from natural processes. It is distinct from evolutionary processes.

If you have some interesting reading, I'd love to know it. I haven't necessarily considered the question of technological processes being an extension of natural processes.

As a practical matter I just don't think it's useful to lose the distinction between artificial and natural, even if I cannot define precisely when something is one or the other. In the same way it's not useful to lose the distinction between "selfish" and "selfless" which is a good enough reason to reject psychological egoism.

I think it's okay to accept something is true in an "ultimate sense", but not in a practical sense. e.g. that all technology is a natural process since the causal chain that led to it happened or rather was allowed by physics. To wit, plastics really are natural because humans evolved to be able to make plastics. If you argue against plastics being natural, then you might argue that anything "made" by an individual organism is artificial, which is clearly absurd.

No super interested in finding a resolution here, since I don't think the common meanings are problematic.