Philosophy discussion

What is nature?

What isn't nature?

Is nature an uninteresting topic? Is is it too big to talk about? Or has the Goodreads philosophy forum just fizzled out?

Perhaps it is too big a topic. After all, everything we sense is nature. If we want to talk about what is not included in nature, we will have to talk about religion or metaphysical speculation. Anything we can know anything about is natural - science can explain it, at least in principal. However, that's not to say we can't talk about other stuff. We just can't really know anything about it. It's fun, though. And it helps us understand how we humans got ourselves in the predicament in which we now find ourselves. In the western world, it begins with Plato. Who was it who said the whole of modern philosophy is but a footnote to Plato? Wittgenstein said that the world is all that is the case. Maybe if we can figure out what the heck he means by that, we can make some progress.

Religion and metaphysical speculation emanate from brains evolved of sufficient complexity to produce them. Even if the entities they describe--gods, souls, or Platonic essences, for example--are real, why aren't they also natural?

What is natural is what is coming into being (the word, originally from Latin, means something like 'birthing', or 'generation'). Eternal forms and such things are not 'coming into being', so they're not natural in that sense. It would be accurate, then, to say that 'natural' is synonymous with 'material'.

I look at pictures of the Andromeda galaxy and try and understand what it is I’m suppose to be seeing. A billion/billion stars and maybe there are a trillion such galaxies and I’m suppose to believe this is all nature? How can it be so?
I’m told that life started as tiny bits of bacteria or DNA and eventually over time expanded into Sequoia trees and Orcas and Bach. And this is nature, too? How can it be so?

How do you define nature?

I guess nature is what I see going on outside. All the living stuff, plants and animals and I guess the weather too.

But not galaxies?

I guess I like my regular nature as green and wet, but yes galaxies of course have to be counted as part of the big picture: all the stuff gas and dust and all, but should include gravity?

Unless gravity is unnatural or supernatural then it would seem to be part of nature, like tadpoles, sea foam, and shale. But as always, it's a question of definition. I know what "nature" means in the colloquial sense, but philosophically it seems, to me, to be a concept of questionable utility.

Going back to the beginning then nature seems to be the name that we have attached to what I see when I go outside: the place and things that inhabit the natural world. It probably does not as a name include rocket ships or ice cream vending machines.
I guess we don’t have to call what’s outside anything at all. My point in mentioning the vastness of the visible universe was to question the reality and or the utility of so much stuff. It’s become as explained too big to believe, and so I feel faced with a dilemma: either not believing what I see is real or questioning the need or origin of so much extra stuff.

ps. Gravity might certainly qualify as supernatural.

I don't think a philosophically useful definition of nature can include the phrase "the natural world." It's tautological.

If rocket ships or vending machines aren't natural, what about beaver dams or ant hills?

Why does the apparent size of the observable universe make difficult to believe in it? Would it be easier to believe in if it we could just see the Milky Way galaxy? Or just the solar system?

How might gravity qualify as supernatural?