Comment by f_klem
9 hours ago
I agree, we can miss the forest for the trees.
1) This definition could actually be expanded (for example, with definitions from Mumford or Reuleaux). But still this definition cannot be applied directly to living organisms. 2) This is in my opinion one of the sources of misunderstanding. We mainly operate on analogies and metaphors, so we have build this 'analogy space' around the idea that living organisms are machines. But it is only when we say 'alike' that we can truly gather some meaning out of it all, going beyond the 'behaves like' or 'is conceptualized as' when it gets messy.
> With regard to AI, there's a lot of people extrapolating "There is no magical animating spirit, the brain is just a pile of stochastic molecules following the laws of physics" into "The brain is an inert pile of matter, computers are an inert pile of matter, ergo AI/LLMs are like the brain!"
This is exactly my point. There is a fallacy operating from "A is not B" to "A is C". And this fallacy is pervasive in the AI research field, the book from Dreyfus (What Computers can't still do) explains that in much detail.
> 1) This definition could actually be expanded (for example, with definitions from Mumford or Reuleaux). But still this definition cannot be applied directly to living organisms.
I'm not sure I understand this. Why not?
It has to do with words and how we evolve words throughout history and across geographic boundaries. The term 'machine' comes, after some modifications, from the greek word mekhanos, which was used to describe something ingenious or a device made in some clever way or operating in a clever way. From there it went on to describe things like devices, to end up being the actual definition of what we might call 'a device' (a machine). The idea of 'mechanistic' is also related.
Traditionally, things that are alive were described with different words and assigned a different set of properties and characteristics. Machine can break, living things die. And we still have those two semantic frames separated: A living thing: can be harmed, it breathes, it nourishes, it reproduces, etc A machine: can break, can be fixed, can be repurposed, etc.
But because of a specific tradition in western philosophy, we started applying and analogy between 'inner mechanism (clever thing), that moves or provides a function, and seems to work in a causal way' and living things.
So when we say 'a living cell is a wonderful, complex machine', we are not actually saying it is a machine, we are operating through an analogy. That's how far we can go.