Comment by calepayson
7 hours ago
> 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.