A human being is born inestimably adaptable, a mental sponge of receptiveness
on the way to being whatever. It doesn’t intend to learn. It just is learnability individuating itself relative to whatever’s around: trilingual household? Three languages learn themselves; the child doesn’t intend that: Selfality is a mental thing in its own, several million years in the making.

Smartphones and laptops around? Elder adults marvel. Whatever is, is regarded as natural, supposed to be there. Eat it with one’s curiosity, enhance oneself with whatever’s in reach.

We grow up to realize we’re the culminative presence on Earth because it’s natural that we are. But, if that makes natural that humanity can dominate amid all forms of life, it’s not natural that We are to do so unintelligently. Foresight is superior to opportunism. Appreciation of sustainability is superior to predatory business. Enjoying diversity of life and facilitating that is superior to ravenous consumption.

We are Of second nature as and that We’re evolving, less and less minds in nature as more the “nature” of mindfulness—more wholly Earthan intelligence as better being.

[I was delighted years back that the Chair of the Anthropology Dept., UCBerkeley, capped his career with Incomplete Nature: how mind emerged from matter, such a creative, speculative venture from a scientist!—scientific artistry, exemplary proteanity, wanting to advance conceivability.]

Superior beings “find the nature of art in the emergent intelligence of natural design” (Survival of the Beautiful).

For all a child realizes, it’s natural that they’re to be shepherds of all life, just because superior parenting (“concerted cultivation” of individuation) says so. Our children imagine that We are guardians of the future planet, designers of future being, babies Ourselves of one galaxy witnessed by The Great Silence (esp. ch. 9; see “Index” for where chapter rerferences to named options are concisely defined in earlier chapters) awaiting our evolution to Contact competence.

We are Homo prospectus adventuring into ways of Creating Consilience. We are Edge culture, prospecting high humanity that is not to be dissolved by Our envisioned post-biological being.

So, easy it is, then—or should be—to realize We’re in early evolution, thanks to the luck of enabling futures that couldn’t imagine where We’d wind by trusting in the good they endowed through their “pay it forward” ethos of working to leave the world better for one’s heirs.

We are the futural species that can design better trusts going forward.

In appeals of awing futures that we can’t imagine, Our being on Earth listens for other stars about what may become of self-designing intelligence. “Hear, We
Have A Story.

Yet, yet. Our biogenic historiology of Earthanity is retrojective
relative to conceivability as primordially futural.

Concepts of ‘nature’ and bioevolutionarity of intelligence are now as wedded to astrobiology as to paleogenomics, as anticipatory of S.E.T.I. results as anticipatory of post-humanness.

Given that it’s naturally superior to preserve the Earth for who’s to come, We will have spawned gods, relatively speaking (relative to this century), if only we instill monumentally through our spongy spawn the “Vision” that We are to last.