> What is unnatural about the behaviour of humans.
If we define "natural" to mean "things that happen", then sure, I would see no difference between natural things and human things. But we use the word "natural" to separate some of our actions from the actions of animals.
I think we could come up with a list of things that people do that animals don't do. Looking at actions from the standpoint of culpability, intentionality, objectivity, language, and planning might shed some light on what actions we would consider "natural". For example, feeling attracted to another person would fall under the "natural" category because we would not consider ourselves "culpable" or "use intention" for such an action. Another example: desire paths made by humans in the grass would probably fall under the "natural" category because people do not plan the paths with language or use objectivity to create the paths. We simply walk "mindlessly" and the paths spring up from under our feet. Another example: asking a stranger for directions would fall under the category of "unnatural" because we need to use language and an objective view of the world around us to engage with another person to share information.
Definition 2b is succint: "an inner force (such as instinct, appetite, desire) or the sum of such forces in an individual"
According to this, of course, something like murder is quite natural. Is the stranger giving you directions not following that "nature" within which makes him help you for nothing in return? Is your request for help not a natural thing?
Ultimately, I don't like arguments about definitions, because I think they're a cheap way out: "x is (not) bad because its y"; they also force discussions about all the wrong things, ignoring the core of what both parties care about regarding the issue.
In my previous post I mentioned that I want to separate human actions from animal actions, and that we can actually do that using some sort of test. We have used the word "natural" and "unnatural" to talk about this difference, but I also used lots of other words.
I want to find what essential quality separates people actions from animal actions. It seems to me that all unnatural things got "affected by human discernment". Using that rubric, I find it interesting that all of the definitions of "natural" you provided fall into those categories of either "fundamentally affected" or "not affected" by human discernment where things left in their base state we call "natural" and things left in their affected state we call "unnatural".
Examples:
1. Natural justice - that humans have a kind of justice beyond what nature provide which also implies that humans have sussed out the various justices allotted by nature.
3. Adopted vs natural child - human convention creates long-lasting parent-child relationships without a birth connection.
10. Growing without human care
13. (a) Closely resembling an original, (b) freedom from artificiality -- both of which require a human to create the artificiality.
Bee and wasp foragers give each other directions to food sources every day - not usually by pheromonic recruitment, although a few species including V. mandarinia do use that method, but by communicating. As far as we know, they don't have symbolic language or anything like the same level of abstraction we do, which is reasonable when our brains outsize theirs by eight orders of magnitude, but that doesn't stop them telling each other what they need to know. And that's just hymenopterans; we should also talk about corvids, who are well known to pass knowledge across populations and generations, and also to possess tool use and theory of mind.
The definition of "unnatural" toward which you're extensionally groping here is "things only humans, and no other animals, do". I suspect you are going to find it a considerably narrower category than you presently appear to imagine. I also don't think it is going to lead you anywhere useful; many anarchoprimitivists have trodden this ground before you, and if nothing else it may be worth familiarizing yourself with some of their work lest you find yourself in one of the same pitfalls they so often do.
Human language and animal language also differ in that people use grammars which recurse which shows a sense of abstraction (as you stated) and also objectivity.
Do you see a narrow difference between human output and animal output? Would you consider that difference somehow not "useful"? I think the bird and bee examples do not provide a compelling sense of language in the same way human talking does because animal language appears tightly bounded and human language through its recursive features appears possibly limitless.
You see a difference of kind where I see one merely of degree, and your confidence in the sufficient extent of knowledge of nonhuman language and communication, to draw such clear delineations as you do, strikes me as unwarranted. It is a relatively recent innovation in modern understanding even to recognize that any animals beyond our own species have language; where come you by this idea that we know enough about how nonhuman language works to even attempt so broad a conclusion? - or, for that matter, even enough about how human language works? Anyone who's ever tried to explain a complex idea to someone and have them comprehend it, or tried to become a polyglot beyond the age of about ten, should have a better sense of our own limitations than you evince here.
If we define "natural" to mean "things that happen", then sure, I would see no difference between natural things and human things. But we use the word "natural" to separate some of our actions from the actions of animals.
I think we could come up with a list of things that people do that animals don't do. Looking at actions from the standpoint of culpability, intentionality, objectivity, language, and planning might shed some light on what actions we would consider "natural". For example, feeling attracted to another person would fall under the "natural" category because we would not consider ourselves "culpable" or "use intention" for such an action. Another example: desire paths made by humans in the grass would probably fall under the "natural" category because people do not plan the paths with language or use objectivity to create the paths. We simply walk "mindlessly" and the paths spring up from under our feet. Another example: asking a stranger for directions would fall under the category of "unnatural" because we need to use language and an objective view of the world around us to engage with another person to share information.