I once belonged to a cult. Our big recruiting pitch was “man is a machine - but you don’t have to be”. Often we’d elaborate: man is a stimulus-response machine. What was so bad about being a stimulus-response machine? It meant one had no real will, no self, and no true consciousness. It meant we were nothing outside one thing triggering another thing, times infinity and folding back on itself. Nothing escapes the chain of events, except in the dreams of those who aspire to a higher state of being.
These days I often come across the idea that the brain is some kind of machine, e.g., prediction machine, simulation machine, meaning-making machine, decision-making machine, computation machine. But there’s still a lot of push-back against the idea of being a machine. The resistance often base their arguments on some outdated definition of what a machine is, as if Aristotle were an authority on the matter. But words are artifacts of meaning and meaning can’t be held down.
Machines don’t have to be designed, linear, efficient, or predictable. Machines can be self-organizing systems with fallible components that “modify their own structure on the fly”. Or not.
I’ll leave the last word to Bongard and Levin (2021) in their paper, Living Things Are Not (20th Century) Machines: Updating Mechanism Metaphors in Light of the Modern Science of Machine Behavior:
“Living cells and tissues are not really machines; but then again, nothing is really anything – all metaphors are wrong, but some are more useful than others.”
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Reference:
Bongard, J. and M. Levin (2021). "Living Things Are Not (20th Century) Machines: Updating Mechanism Metaphors in Light of the Modern Science of Machine Behavior." Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution 9(147). https://doi.org/10.3389/fevo.2021.650726