Biomimicry

[Philosopher]

I just wrote a huge post and it was beautiful, went to get link, and the page refreshed. So basically ill sum it up.

Biomimicry is the method of using natures models in order to solve our human problems. The fact is that nature has been researching and developing technologies for millenia, all while sustaining this planet. There is no waste in nature, because it cannot afford to be inefficient like us. We look for quick solutions, when we should be taking responsibility for our innovations and planning a recycling loop.

 

[hixidom]

The idea of biomimicry is a cool concept :thumb_up: , but...

I wouldn't say that nature's way is the best way. Nature has come up with many solutions, but it is improbable that those are the best solutions because nature's way is a brute force algorithm. It is a slow, mindless, random search for an optimal solution that is easily surpassed by human intelligence, reasoning, and ingenuity. Granted nature invented human intelligence [accidentally], but everything that improves the quality of life is human invention, often created from elements of nature that would otherwise kill us. Nature's goal is not to facilitate life, but is to destroy it. Nature's version of perfecting a solution is to brutally kill off less-than-superior life forms.

I think we come up with some pretty cool technology inspired by nature, but to give nature the credit and call it "mimicry" when we, in a matter of years, improve upon a design that took nature millions of years to come up with is a bit too much, in my opinion.

EDIT: I guess it also depends on how you define "nature". I think of it as a force that molds life, rather than as life itself. We could say that everything humans create was indirectly created by nature, since nature created us, but I think that people usually draw a line in the sand somewhere between "natural" and "human" accomplishments.

 

[jamie]

ahh..this mentality makes me sad for humanity.

 

[hixidom]

Humanity is also an invention of humans. Nature is not humane.

 

[Vodsel]

nature's way is a brute force algorithm. It is a slow, mindless, random search for an optimal solution that is easily surpassed by human intelligence, reasoning, and ingenuity.

Keeping the discussion about "mind" and its source and definition aside, intelligence is not a human exclusive trait. The fact our intelligence appears to work better for our own purposes does not place human intelligence in a peak above other nature's developments. By now we should probably move a little further than old fashioned anthropocentrism, imo.

Nature's goal is not to facilitate life, but is to destroy it. Nature's version of perfecting a solution is to brutally kill off less-than-superior life forms.

Isn't attributing nature a "goal" after defining it as a mindless, random search contradictory?

I think we come up with some pretty cool technology inspired by nature, but to give nature the credit and call it "mimicry" when we, in a matter of years, improve upon a design that took nature millions of years to come up with is a bit too much, in my opinion.

Anything is easier when working on the shoulders of giants, and in this case the giants are not human minds. You already pointed out the impossibility of defining a border between human developments and nature developments, but you still reduce superior intelligent developments to human technology. Species have been using and optimizing natural events (random mutations, if you want) for many millions of years, taking advantage of the assets provided by the genes in an intelligent way, making mutations useful in some sort of pseudo-lamarckism. What makes us different from those developments? The time scale? I don't see how you can separate human advances from global natural advances in a qualitative way.

In any case, I don't want to enter a labyrinth of semantics... There's a potentially astronomical amount of natural developments we have not even started to grasp yet, much less to implement in our society or to "improve". We better not dance the happy dance again looking at our bellybutton. We've done that a thousand times before and time has always put us back in our place.

 

[Animistic]

Hixidom,
I'm going to have to disagree with you on saying nature's way isn't the best way. All you have to do is look at how self-sustaining man-made systems are compared to natural systems. I don't disagree that we can't perhaps improve upon nature's 'technology' but only if it's inline with nature's way. Natural systems act producing no waste and produce most varied designs and strive for non-linearity. Man-made systems absolutely produce waste, almost all look the same and are absolutely uniform, just look at a city. It's all just a bland boring concrete jungle, totally energy inefficient and shows no diversity. Lack of diversity in nature leads to death, in fact I'd say man's technology follows the 'archetype' of death but that's a story for another day. Nature's ways seem to always enforce nature, man's way seems always to slowly kill man, that's an excellent example of man's intelligence for you.

Also the idea that life would 'evolve' into something completely different if life was whiped from the face of the Earth and then allowed to come back is absurd. Natural forms are created by natural forces which are the same all over the universe and therefore natural design reacts with it's environment and isn't some kind of roll of the dice. If you're interested in reading more about the way natural forms are created go read On Growth and Form by D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson.

Anyway I could bang on about this for ages but I am sure we will have to agree to disagree on this so I'll just end with a nice, telling and relevant quote from arguably the biggest genius of human history.

"Those who are inspired by a model other than Nature, a mistress above all masters, are laboring in vain" - Leonardo da Vinci

A.

 

[3rdI]

maybe im wrong but I see any human advance as ultimately an advancement of nature as we are as much a part of nature as anything else, I see a bee hive as nature and also a skyscraper.

I think the idea of a human separation from nature is totally insane and wierd

 

[Philosopher]

I disagree, respectively. I think nature is very intelligent, maybe not in the same way as us, but nonetheless most plants can turn sunlight into energy efficiently and humans have been trying to do the same but are no where near as efficient. Also although nature may be brute and the survival of the fittest may seem mindless, but it is actually a very successful method of weeding out the failing or unintelligent species and promoting the more advanced. Also we should give nature the credit and call it mimicry because in most cases we cannot actually create ecosystem like intelligent technologies. In the millions of years plants have been creating and using new methods of accomplishing goals the earth has thrived. But in only the past 1000s of years that humans have been developing technologies we have depleted much of our resources and polluted the environment.

I'm not saying humans are less smart than nature, remember we are of nature. I just think we need to remember where we came from and learn from our surroundings instead of suppressing them.

 

[universecannon]

Nature is self-intelligent IMO, no matter how you look at it. Considering we are just as much a part of nature as a wave is a part of the ocean, then in that sense alone it is self-intelligent: we are it experiencing itself. If its goal was to destroy life, as you say, then its certainly been slacking the last 3 or 4 billion years, what with how much life has proliferated.

I think we're like fish in water here, and that's partly why we think its just some dumb/random process. Although its also due to our upbringing and conditioning...

If you were to see the evolution of the earth compressed into a 2 second time-lapse, you would see higher level organisms, plants, human civilization, and so on exploding out of earths ocean of elemental constituents in an astonishingly self-organized and coherent display of processes unfolding within processes. I think the galaxy was bound to have life just like an apple tree is bound to have apples eventually. that old line that the earth "peoples" just like an apple tree "apples".

It seems ironic that people would marvel in awe at a sufficiently realistic mechanical insect capable of flight and call it Artificial Intelligence...when meanwhile an actual living insect is lightyears beyond it in both its complexity and self-organizing/intelligent nature and yet most people would never attribute it the label of intelligence at all. I think this really highlights the contradictory nature of our perspective on all of this.

Also, the model that the success of nature is primarily due to competition is largely a fabrication of the human mind that has been overturned. Its much more about survival of the cooperative than it is about survival of the fittest. The problem is that much of this cooperation goes unseen to the naked eye; which is why we weren't aware that almost all trees have symbiotic relationships with fungi and other organisms, why all of nature is engaged in a biochemical communication dance, and so on

 

[joedirt]

ahh..this mentality makes me sad for humanity.

^This

Nature is self-intelligent IMO, no matter how you look at it. Considering we are just as much a part of nature as a wave is a part of the ocean, then in that sense alone it is self-intelligent: we are it experiencing itself. If its goal was to destroy life, as you say, then its certainly been slacking the last 3 or 4 billion years, what with how much life has proliferated.

I think we're like fish in water here, and that's partly why we think its just some dumb/random process. Although its also due to our upbringing and conditioning...

If you were to see the evolution of the earth compressed into a 2 second time-lapse, you would see higher level organisms, plants, human civilization, and so on exploding out of earths ocean of elemental constituents in an astonishingly self-organized and coherent display of processes unfolding within processes. I think the galaxy was bound to have life just like an apple tree is bound to have apples eventually. that old line that the earth "peoples" just like an apple tree "apples". Big grin

It seems ironic that people would marvel in awe at a sufficiently realistic mechanical insect capable of flight and call it Artificial Intelligence...when meanwhile an actual living insect is lightyears beyond it in both its complexity and self-organizing/intelligent nature and yet most people would never attribute it the label of intelligence at all. I think this really highlights the contradictory nature of our perspective on all of this.

Also, the model that the success of nature is primarily due to competition is largely a fabrication of the human mind that has been overturned. Its much more about survival of the cooperative than it is about survival of the fittest. The problem is that much of this cooperation goes unseen to the naked eye; which is why we weren't aware that almost all trees have symbiotic relationships with fungi and other organisms, why all of nature is engaged in a biochemical communication dance, and so on

^This.

 

[hixidom]

There are a few main points common among several of the posts:

1. Life, including human life, is part of nature.
- The idea of biomimicry is to imitate nature, which wouldn't make much sense if we defined humans and human technology as natural to begin with, so the idea that humanity and nature are separate things is already built in to the definition of "biomimicry".

2. Nature promotes life. After all look at all the life on earth.
- That is a major exception considering that life on Earth is the only known case of life in the entire universe. For any natural resource or event, we have no reason to claim that it helps life any more than it hurts it. If a natural resource or event does benefit life, it is because life is ingenuitive and versatile, not because nature is intelligent.

3. Look at the perfect and harmonious system that is life on Earth.
- The concept of harmony is a completely human perspective. From the perspective of every other living thing on Earth, nature is a killer, and the wilderness is dangerous. All living things (though especially animals) require other living things to die in order to live. How is that even remotely harmonious? You can say it's just part of the circle of life but, to conscious beings such as ourselves, life is not a circle, and if you had to commit an atrocity to sustain the one life you have, you would probably do it. That would be the natural instinct. Only now that we are elevated from nature (and, subsequently, from constant fear of death) can we call it a beautiful thing. I've never seen a wild cat that wasn't happier in a loving home. The caring womb is just a romantic retelling of the real story of nature, which is all wildfires and ice-ages as far as I'm concerned. Life has done pretty well considering all that nature has done to try to bring things back to equilibrium.

4. Nature is intelligent
- I think it really is random, and that random actions and intelligence are mutually exclusive. Random actions are like the limit where intelligence goes to zero. We may be trying and failing to duplicate "natural" phenomena, but at least we are trying, whereas nature's "solutions" are purely accidental. It all happened randomly, based on natural laws with which only God could've predicted that life would form. It's like infinite monkeys banging away at typewriters, and us praising their brilliance when the works of Shakespeare happen to be produced.

 

[jamie]

Ahh..the whole "we are nature too so anything goes" thing is getting old. This is just lazy logic. It is not hard to see the difference here.. You dont have to look far to realize that what humans are doing with technology is often not congruent with what goes on in the rest of the biosphere..and most importantly..it is NOT the same thing. Deal with it.

BTW..the term "nature" has roots in something more like "she who gives life" than just this whole "anything in the universe goes" definition that people are currently using. How does something like fracking or monoculture give life? These are things that inevitably take far more than they give and threaten to destroy the only systems that support such processes in they're entirety.

If people really want to just us it as an umbrella term than fine..doesn't really help though. Words and definitions aside...we all know the truth. We all know how crude and destructive and really just unproductive much of the technology we apply today is. That is not nature. It might arise within the universe. Does that mean I have to call everthing in the universe "natural"? No I don't. That was not the original intended definition.

In reality nature is far more advanced a system that we have come up with. I think you all know this too. You don't even have to invoke ideas of consciousness or intelligence..though I see a level of intelligence far beyond what humans are currently exhibiting every time I look outside.

 

[jamie]

"The concept of harmony is a completely human perspective. From the perspective of every other living thing on Earth, nature is a killer, and the wilderness is dangerous. All living things (though especially animals) require other living things to die in order to live. How is that even remotely harmonious?"

You will find more real ecologists talking about things like "coherence" and not harmony..even though really harmony does fit as well to natural and intact ecosystems. When you view the system as a whole there is a stunning and unfathomable level of deep coherence that holds the whole thing together. It really is a level of harmony unmatched by anything humans have currently implemented. You cannot pick the thing apart into it's subjective parts and hold that up as an example of the whole. Coherance does not imply that things don't live and die in a give and take scenario. It means that there is a greater unifying order that holds the system together as a self regulating whole. It coheres.

Spend some time working with polyculture and biodynamic farming. It becomes apparent pretty fast that nature is far more coherent than we ever imagined.

The idea that you can extend that model to our current technology is just absurd. There is nothing coherent about our technology. It is destroying the ecosystem. It is not playing a role in the coherence of that system.

I at least am holding out in the hopes that someday we will develop a technological culture that we can really call coherent. When our tech is entirely integreated into the greater biosphere that gave us life and deserves respect, in a coherent way that gives life back, than I will agree that we can call that nature. Until then it is not natural and the argument that is it is more like psychological masturbation lacking any direction. It is a destructive paradigm being carried on the shoulders of a people with a psychopathological illness.

 

[jamie]

it is like how people will compare our buildings to beaver dams and bird nests. Except a beaver dam plays a critical role in the regulation of the water tables of wetland ecosystems..our houses and skycrapers don't play any beneficial role for the ecosystem aprt from housing us(and making us sick due to flame retardants and wood preservativlives, sealing agents, paint outgassing etc)..entire forests are cut down in mindless ecological genocide complete with the many thousands of species that live there.

What we build is more like what you might see taking place in the wake of a rabid animal, sick and deluded.

Im not denying that our technology did descend out of some kind of evolutionary trajectory..but it is not the same as what goes on in fully integrated systems and coherent organisms. We exist in a state of de-coherence.

 

[joedirt]

There are a few main points common among several of the posts:

1. Life, including human life, is part of nature.
- The idea of biomimicry is to imitate nature, which wouldn't make much sense if we defined humans and human technology as natural to begin with, so the idea that humanity and nature are separate things is already built in to the definition of "biomimicry".

I completely agree here. We are nature and nature is us. This is certainly a high level insight.

2. Nature promotes life. After all look at all the life on earth.
- That is a major exception considering that life on Earth is the only known case of life in the entire universe. For any natural resource or event, we have no reason to claim that it helps life any more than it hurts it. If a natural resource or event does benefit life, it is because life is ingenuitive and versatile, not because nature is intelligent.

This however seems completely opposed to point 1 above. Nature doesn't promote life. Nature is life. Earth maybe the only life we currently know of, but considering we can barely see a tiny tiny fraction, perhaps a rounding errors worth, of the universe I think it would be silly to assume we are the only life.

Also is it possible that the current definition of life is a little to limited? I mean can we deny that there is an energetic force embedded within and without the entire cosmos vibrating with dare I say life?

3. Look at the perfect and harmonious system that is life on Earth.
- The concept of harmony is a completely human perspective. From the perspective of every other living thing on Earth, nature is a killer, and the wilderness is dangerous. All living things (though especially animals) require other living things to die in order to live. How is that even remotely harmonious? You can say it's just part of the circle of life but, to conscious beings such as ourselves, life is not a circle, and if you had to commit an atrocity to sustain the one life you have, you would probably do it. That would be the natural instinct. Only now that we are elevated from nature (and, subsequently, from constant fear of death) can we call it a beautiful thing. I've never seen a wild cat that wasn't happier in a loving home. The caring womb is just a romantic retelling of the real story of nature, which is all wildfires and ice-ages as far as I'm concerned. Life has done pretty well considering all that nature has done to try to bring things back to equilibrium.

The harmony in life is observed when say an insect population is killed off only to see another rise up and devastate entire crops. You framed most of this in terms of single individuals, but that is rather limited thinking and again in contradiction (somewhat) to point #1.

From my perspective there is only one thing. One life. One ever continuous process bound by one constant: Change. Call it the Tao if you will. Life, the Universe, is perfect because as fas as we can currently tell that is all there is. We can't even define something that would be outside of this system anymore than a fish can fathom what's outside the water...much less the fact that there is a planetary system in a spiral galaxy in an unfathomly large universe. Truly we are little more than fish in this regard.

4. Nature is intelligent
- I think it really is random, and that random actions and intelligence are mutually exclusive. Random actions are like the limit where intelligence goes to zero. We may be trying and failing to duplicate "natural" phenomena, but at least we are trying, whereas nature's "solutions" are purely accidental. It all happened randomly, based on natural laws with which only God could've predicted that life would form. It's like infinite monkeys banging away at typewriters, and us praising their brilliance when the works of Shakespeare happen to be produced.

If we are in no way seperate from the universe and we are intelligent then doesn't that by definition imply that the universe is also intelligent? I say for us to call ourselves intelligent is to call the universe intelligent.

Is that your will? Did you give it to yourself?
What about your heart...do you beat it?
Did you secrete those hormones from your pituitary gland?

Were does our cognitive capacity come from? Did we give it to ourselves?
Where do the thoughts in your head come from? What is the source of this 'I'.
Why do you like the colors that you do?
Where does a childs love for his mother come from...is it really just oxytocin?
For that matter what is love?


How far in front of you do you have to extend 'your' hand before you touch the universe?

Peace

 

[adam]

You might want to look into Buckminster Fuller, he was a designer, architect, technologist among many other things, but he took his inspiration from nature saying it was the best teacher and we should strive learn from its forms.

 

[Parshvik Chintan]

what is love?

it appears i am utterly unable to help myself..