Consul wrote: ↑May 4th, 2020, 5:55 pm
Greta wrote: ↑May 4th, 2020, 5:30 pm
No we don't. We routinely refer to other beings (not objects!) as "biological machines". Even dogs and other animals were thought of in that way until relatively recently. Even gorillas and chimps were dismissed as unconscious "machines" for a long time, thus giving us an excuse to slaughter them for convenience.
In the American Heritage Dictionary one meaning of "machine" is "intricate natural system or organism, such as the human body", and in Merriam-Webster's Dictionary one meaning is "living organism or one of its functional systems". So the word can be applied to natural objects as well.
In the pejorative sense, to call an agent a machine is to say that it acts without consciousness and without conscious control or free will, being nothing but a nonconsciously and involuntarily acting automaton or robot.
Greta wrote: ↑May 4th, 2020, 5:30 pmCan you think of a word other than "mechanism" to describe animal and plant behaviours?
The (causal) mechanisms of behaviour are complex (causal) processes.
There you go! :) Dictionary writers too have noticed our tendency to refer to organisms and their workings as machines.
Almost everything in the universe appears to act either automatically or largely so, rendering the machine metaphor limited in usefulness as regards biology (or geology, given that the boundary between those domains was not always as clear-cut as it appears today).
Our machines primitively reproduce some dynamics of life, and opportunities for analogies between nature and artificial machines are everywhere. The issue here is language, namely, the semantic of the word "machine". It leads us to treat many living things like machines, as if they lack all sense of experience. This attitude, as I have grumbled about many times, lies behind historical atrocities committed by humans to other species.
Perhaps a more respectful lexicon towards nature is part of the solution to so much of humanity's blind - and self-destructive - ruthlessness towards the natural world? It's one thing to accept that heterotrophic life needs to take energy from other organisms to sustain itself, it's another matter again to objectify the life forms we need to kill.
I appreciate that the gesture is ultimately futile. Machines will proliferate and most plants and animals will become extinct. My approach here is inherently conservative (in the true sense of the word before being muddied by politicking). The pace of change may yet be important, not to mention the basis on which we build our new, artificial man-made world of concrete, bricks, glass and steel. Will the new arcologies be hives of ruthlessness or something more "human"? That may depend on how we treat those who can't defend themselves now.
To that end, if we are to consider a plant's possible experiences, how about fungi? Mycofungus is a food of the future - a tasty, nutritious, versatile meat replacement that can be readily grown underground in compact "nurseries". What a fungus or plant may feel, or not, remains an open question, (despite what neurocentric thinkers may claim), but we can safely assume it's not at all like the experiences of familiar animals. It's clear that, even if central nervous systems are a means of concentrating consciousness rather than generating it, they are the only means by which an entity can suffer.
So, while the answer to the OP's question is "no", achieving the moral status of animals is not exactly a guarantee of kindly treatment anyway. Not while we think of our animals as "stock", "resources" and "biological machines". It's curious how the common use of metonymy can shape our attitudes.
klein-brein1-300x234.jpg (23.67 KiB) Viewed 2498 times
