Hmmm, well let’s take it one step lower. What do you think of organelles such as ribosomes? Do you disagree with the assumption that those are machines? They seem directly analogous to the jacquard loom or a CNC machine to me.

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gyomu 11 days ago | parent [-]

Yes again, ribosomes have nothing in common with machines, that are built and designed by humans.

The ball is in your camp to provide solid reasons to believe why they should be grouped together, when one is a deeply complex interrelated dynamic system (in fact, arguably the most complex system we know of) evolved bottom up over billions of years that we only very partially understand and cannot fully explain or document, and the other something entirely planned, designed, and produced by humans in which every component is finite and accounted for.

The argument boils down to “well the vibes kind of match to my taste, and it’s the best analogy I have in my analogy toolkit”, which is just not serious reasoning.

	▲	derektank 11 days ago \| parent [-]
		I think ribosomes have a lot in common with machines. They use energy to accomplish a task (assembles proteins). This would seem to put them in the same category as artificial molecular machines like rotaxanes. I don’t think there’s a huge gap in our understanding of how either systems identically functions independently. Yes, ribosomes exist as part of a larger context, but they can be removed from that context pretty easily and understood as individual molecules quite extensively. In your view, can machines even exist that haven’t been created by people, definitionally? I, personally, don’t see the relevance of intent but that seems to be the only distinguishing factor here.