Medical Human Phenomena in the 4<SUP>th</SUP> Industrial Revolution and Later Heideggerian Being-Thought’s Reflections on It: Focusing on Transhumanism and the Problem of the Production of Artificial Substitutes from Inside and Outside Living Things

Humanized Environments

Humans and the Environment ◽

10.1093/oso/9780199590292.003.0029 ◽

2013 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Chris Gosden

Keyword(s):

Industrial Revolution ◽

Physical World ◽

Energy Budgets ◽

Energy Capture ◽

Social Sciences And Humanities ◽

Nature And Culture ◽

Living Things ◽

Human World ◽

Cost Efficient ◽

The One

It is now well known that there is a spectrum of views about humans and the world they live in, ranging from the concept of the environment as an external force to the idea that people exist through a series of relations which it makes little sense to divide up as culture on the one hand and nature on the other. It is worth thinking through the implications of these varied views briefly (although I do not want to duplicate Davies’s detailed introduction in Chapter 1), so that we can think about what is lost and gained when trying to combine nature and culture, my main aim in current work. Let us start with views in which there is a radical separation of people and the physical world. In such views, which are in themselves varied, the physical world is seen as a series of energy budgets and nutrients that people have to extract in the most cost-efficient way possible in order to maintain life. Leslie White (1949) made a three-fold division between the physical, the biological, and the cultural. Academic study, in which physicists, chemists, or earth scientists probe the physical state of the universe, biologists investigate living things, and the social sciences and humanities focus on the human world, was not constructed around a series of heuristic divisions, but instead mirrored reality, White argued. Culture was also divided into three levels, of which the first, technology determined social organization and ideology. The primary function of culture for White was the harnessing of energy and the more efficiently this was done, the more it allowed for organizational complexity and multiple ideologies. Human history moved by revolutions in energy capture from early periods in which human muscles were key, to the agricultural revolution where plants and animals were domesticated to increase food supplies and animals could be used for traction, through to the industrial revolution (and the possibility of a future nuclear revolution) (see also Armstrong Oma, Chapter 11 this volume).

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Energy, transport, and consumption in the Industrial Revolution

Behavioral and Brain Sciences ◽

10.1017/s0140525x19000153 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 42 ◽

Author(s):

Joseph A. Tainter ◽

Temis G. Taylor

Keyword(s):

Mass Production ◽

Industrial Revolution ◽

Energy Transport ◽

Underlying Assumption

Abstract We question Baumard's underlying assumption that humans have a propensity to innovate. Affordable transportation and energy underpinned the Industrial Revolution, making mass production/consumption possible. Although we cannot accept Baumard's thesis on the Industrial Revolution, it may help explain why complexity and innovation increase rapidly in the context of abundant energy.

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