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>"Biological," too, is well defined. It relates to living things and their processes.

And biological clearly exceeds the definition of “machine”. So once again, what the hell does “just a biological machine” mean?

> Evolution.

Not just any evolution. Evolution in biology follows a specific set of rules driven by structural and functional properties of its component molecules. Those rules do not hold for machines. Yet another reason calling life “just” biological machines is bizarre. The rulesets for change over time do not overlap between machines and biology.

> A gear cog was purpose built for that purpose, but you will find that people often recycle parts into other systems, often in completely different roles.

That’s the thing, you need people. And even with people intervening, our manufactured machines show nothing like the flexibility of function of biological molecules, showing again how these are different classes of things in the real world.

> Protein synthesis.

Lack of knowledge showing. Where do nucleotides and lipids come from then? But the deeper question is: why is there protein synthesis, lipid synthesis and nucleotide synthesis, but no natural silicon synthesis or chip assembly? Why does one arise naturally and sustain itself whereas the other is very reliant on human intervention?

> The way that a machine is built has no bearing on how the machine functions. I could build the same machine using a 3d printer or a CNC router.

Yeah this doesn’t hold for biology.

> Evolution selected for organisms that survive long enough to reproduce. Different biological systems handle this differently.

This isn’t an explanation. All of biology reproduces. All of biology doesn’t share an inner drive and agentic behavior. Once again, you show a 6th grade level understanding of biology while making sweeping claims about it.

> If you give an agent a goal, it will perform actions to achieve that goal. This is just as true for artificial agents as it is for biological agents.

Yes IF you give it a goal. This isn’t true for biology. You don’t need to give bacteria a goal. A newly formed bacterial cell interacts with its environment and then sets its goals.

I did specifically say not LLM has been found that works unprompted. You just moved the prompts to an agents goal document. It still needs a human prompt up the chain. Even if you had an LLM give the goal to another LLM, the first one still needed human prompting. This causal chain can’t be wished away just for you to ignore how biology is different.

> Many do. Even robotic vacuum cleaners will charge themselves without human prompting.

Seriously? Do you not understand that the robot vacuum runs on deterministic code?



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