What is natural?

I've been trying to organize some of my research over the last several months into parts of a chapter that needs to get written and am discovering I have a linguistic problem I'll need to tackle.

What is natural?

In a common sense kind of way, we know what natural means. We know that "all-natural" cold medicines won't contain drugs that have had to go through strict testing (and thus are potent kinds of body altering substances). We know that "natural" childbirth as opposed to assisted also means no drugs are administered. We also know that "natural" on food ingredients is a signal that they have not been genetically modified, or had pesticides or herbicides applied to them (at least not ones that, again, require some kind of regulation for their production, sale and use).

But even that last paragraph starts to demonstrate the problem. We intuitively know what's natural and what's not, but when you start to actually define it, things get a bit fuzzier.

My dissertation is about emerging technologies that offer the possibility of altering humans. I usually don't finish that sentence, but I could certainly add "from their natural state." But what is that natural state?

If I take pseudoephedrine for a head cold, I feel like my brain doesn't function "naturally" and that I have a harder time recalling things or concentrating. So is the pseudoephedrine unnatural? But isn't the infection of my sinuses by a virus also unnatural? In the effort to restore my sinuses to 'normal' functioning, my brain feels like it's operating unnaturally. [I've had a cold this week, how can you tell?] Is the absense of infection or drugs to counter it the only natural state possible? A head cold is one thing, but what about a chronic condition?

Is disease natural?

Human disease is a part of the human condition. I'm not thinking individually here. From the individual's perspective, the development of a disease is unnatural. But from a species perspective, disease is a natural part of the human condition, just as is death. If I could engineer myself to never succumb to a disease, would that be natural or unnatural? What if everyone could be engineered to be immune to all diseases. Would that then be natural? Is it a case of the majority getting to define natural?

The question will be most pertinent when I come to the section on pharmacological visions of posthumanity. If I can take a memory-boosting drug, am I unnatural? If we had such a drug, would we have to test for it before exams like we do for steroids before athletic competitions? What about the argument that we should stop testing for steroids because it's just becoming the new norm? Would the same apply to drugs that alter our brains?

But there are things that affect our brains and how well they work. Vitamin deficiencies or malnutrition will result in stunted brain development. We can't really call that normal can we? But if we administered a drug that would counteract that retardation of development, would that then be normal? Can two unnatural acts equal to a natural state?

You see how confused I am getting?

Or perhaps I'm just making it a bigger problem than it really is.

Perhaps there's a way of writing an entire dissertation without using the word "normal"... but I doubt it. Even if I avoid the word itself, the concept is still a slippery one that I'll have to get a handle on.

Enhancements are another part of dissertation that run into the same kind of problems. In their most basic definition, cyborgs are a combination of flesh and machine. We know what the Terminator looks like, or the Borg, but what about things a little closer to home? Is a cochlear implant or a pacemaker a cyborg technology? They're both machine implanted in flesh. But neither are highly visible, so it's easy to "pass" as a natural human.

But Andy Clark makes the argument that our tools are enhancements of our natural abilities as well. So when I am wielding a tool, am I being unnatural? The common sense answer is no. What if that tool is implanted in my body like Kevin Warwick's implant? Is that still a natural? Or is the penetration of the body what makes it unnatural? You see where this is leading? What if I don't implant a mechanical device in my body but I use a drug that permanently changes my abilities. It's not unnatural like an implant, but common sense would say that a permanent change is unnatural. But I could also enact other permanent changes in my body, like weight gain for example. Is that natural or unnatural? What about a scar? Is it natural or unnatural? I might not have been born with it, but in the course of my body's natural repairing function, I might develop one.

One of the questions the dissertation asks is: how much change can the human body undergo until we begin to question whether it is a human body? The Terminator is easy to classify, but in the stages up until that point, a boundary has to be crossed at some point. I'm suspecting that what we define as a 'natural' human being might be the point at which we draw that boundary, which is why I'm trying to figure out what I might mean when I think of the 'natural' human being and an 'unnatural' one.