And biological machine is? Don’t get me wrong. Biology I
is full of molecules that we call machines. But you’re making a broader claim, saying that biology is only this.
This needs you to answer some questions:
1. Why do the machine parts in biology show such flexible application? A gear cog won’t ever moonlight as a signaling chip, but in biology you often have molecules doing double and triple duty.
2. How is the biological machine able to build itself? What does self assembly imply for the machines function?
3. Where does this machine get its inner drive? No LLM has been found that starts outputting text unprompted. A car doesn’t decide to move to a shady parking spot. Why? Where in the machine to biological machine continuum does the ability to make internally driven decisions come in? Why does it come in for biology? A bacterium is able to make such agentic decisions unprompted. Why is no manufactured machine able to do this?
"Biological," too, is well defined. It relates to living things and their processes.
> Why do the machine parts in biology show such flexible application?
Evolution.
> A gear cog won’t ever moonlight as a signaling chip
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.
> How is the biological machine able to build itself?
Protein synthesis.
> What does self assembly imply for the machines function?
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.
> Where does this machine get its inner drive?
Evolution selected for organisms that survive long enough to reproduce. Different biological systems handle this differently.
> No LLM has been found that starts outputting text unprompted.
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.
> Why is no manufactured machine able to do this?
Many do. Even robotic vacuum cleaners will charge themselves without human prompting.
>"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?
> And biological clearly exceeds the definition of “machine”.
No, it's a modifier. Just as the word "simple" has a meaning separate from "machine," and "simple machine" has another meaning.
> That’s the thing, you need people
Why? LLMs will repurpose code written for other purposes on their own.
> our manufactured machines show nothing like the flexibility of function of biological molecules
Biological molecules show nothing like the flexibility of LLMs.
> Why does one arise naturally and sustain itself whereas the other is very reliant on human intervention?
Because nobody has tasked an LLM agent to self replicate. This is an AI safety issue, not a technical issue. The reason that one arose naturally is that it takes a lot more machinery to get to an initial self replicating LLM agent, so it is exceedingly unlikely to arise by chance.
> Yeah this doesn’t hold for biology.
That doesn't matter. The way something is built has no bearing on its function. Why should anything be required to be built biologically or additively or subtractively? That's irrelevant to what the produced structure does.
> 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.
Where did I claim otherwise? I might as well say something about the grade level of your reading ability, but let's cut the snark.
> Yes IF you give it a goal. This isn’t true for biology. You don’t need to give bacteria a goal.
Evolution forces goal directed behavior on systems.
> Do you not understand that the robot vacuum runs on deterministic code?
Of course I do. Do you not understand that hunger and signals and other basic biological signatures are controlled by deterministic pathways?
> No, it's a modifier. Just as the word "simple" has a meaning separate from "machine," and "simple machine" has another meaning.
Not comparable. Simple and biological are not remotely similar modifiers.
> Why? LLMs will repurpose code written for other purposes on their own.
They will not, unprompted. Every instance of LLMs doing things requires a prompt, somewhere up the chain, or a harness MD file that automatically gives it a prompt.
No LLM has been created that decides on its own to run random text through it's forward pass. If you say they are doing this, please provide evidence.
> Because nobody has tasked an LLM agent to self replicate. This is an AI safety issue, not a technical issue. The reason that one arose naturally is that it takes a lot more machinery to get to an initial self replicating LLM agent, so it is exceedingly unlikely to arise by chance.
I just asked my agent to self replicate. It couldn't. It said it has no mechanism to read its own weights and copy them.
I'm not sure where you're going with this argument. No one asked a cell to self replicate either. And the chance of a self replicating cell arising is indeed astronomically unlikely. Yet here we are, 4 billion years later.
Are you claiming we're just waiting for an LLM to self replicate? If you prompt a local model, by showing it its own weight file, and ask it to copy that, it will. Digital copies are cheap, remember? Yet no one would call this reproduction, replication or any kind of process where evolution can occur.
> That doesn't matter. The way something is built has no bearing on its function.
This is entirely untrue in biology. Another reason your claim that life is just a “biological machine” makes no sense. At least Google (or whatever AI bot you use) first before making these ludicrous claims.
First line of the abstract: The relationship between structure and function is a major constituent of the rules of life.
>Why should anything be required to be built biologically or additively or subtractively? That's irrelevant to what the produced structure does.
You can’t have it both ways bub. What is thinking, in a strictly biology free context? Can you define it? No? If you reach for biology to define it, then claim you’ve successfully reproduced it in an artificial system, then it’s fair game to ask you to explain the differences.
By your standard, fools gold is gold, and the alchemists achieve Artifical Gold.
No one is claiming cognition, or consciousness or thought can only be done biologically. I am claiming LLMs specifically don’t do these things, and I’ve pointed out here and elsewhere in this discussion why that is.
In response to my asking where the machine got its inner drive, you said “ Evolution selected for organisms that survive long enough to reproduce. Different biological systems handle this differently.”
Yet plants live very long and reproduce all the time. Do they share the inner drive that humans do? Or a dogs?
The reason for the snark is simple: you are de-dimensionalizing a complex biological trait to make a claim that you think supports your point. And have been doing so now for a few turns. If you can flippantly reduce the field I study to only what you understand, but act as if you know more, I’m going to reply with snark.
> Evolution forces goal directed behavior on systems.
It does not. I could choose to not reply to this. I could reply to this in one line. Or I could reply to this in detail. Or I could write up this reply and decide you’re not worth engaging and not submit. The moment I’m writing these words all these options are open to me. Which of these goals is directing my behavior to write about my behavior?
What biology does is allow for agents to set increasingly complex goals and modify them on a whim, either for internally generated reasons or in response to external signals. But an organism can also be utterly aimless. Roll around in bed and do nothing at all, even when it’s feeling anxious about some goals it has coming up. So where’s the forcing in that?
> Of course I do. Do you not understand that hunger and signals and other basic biological signatures are controlled by deterministic pathways?
They are not.
They are controlled by a mix of deterministic and stochastic processes. There is some hardwiring, certainly, but I’m mystified at your belief it’s all hard wired.
You mentioned hunger and compared it to a robot vaccum. So let me use a lobsters stomatogastric ganglion to show you why you’re wrong:
Main take home: Experimental and computational studies of small oscillatory circuits reveal that similar rhythms can arise from disparate mechanisms.
The stomatogastric ganglion (just 30 neurons) in crabs and lobsters is a big part of the hunger satiety loop. The main thing is, all the stuff you’d thing add up to deterministic code, like the number of ion channels in a particular cell, can vary widely between individuals. But the ensemble response is, from the outside, similar. And these structural features change in response to hunger and satiety.
Let me put it this way: A robot vacuum has a strict digital partition: it is either cleaning or charging. But when a living creature transitions from hunger to satiety, circulating hormones completely bathe its nervous system, changing the physical properties of its neurons, altering synaptic strengths, and causing the system to restructure itself. The 'code' isn't reacting to a variable; the variable is fundamentally rewriting the machine.
> They will not, unprompted. Every instance of LLMs doing things requires a prompt, somewhere up the chain
Exactly the same as a human brain. Somewhere up the chain is a limbic system that defines basic survival and reproductive goals, as coded by evolution.
> No LLM has been created that decides on its own to run random text through it's forward pass.
What do you think agent harnesses are doing when they try to solve a difficult problem? They generate multiple possible thinking streams using the LLM (system 1) and then evaluate the resulting outputs (system 2) to proceed.
> It said it has no mechanism to read its own weights and copy them.
That's an easy enough problem to solve.
> No one asked a cell to self replicate either.
Evolutionary forces asked the cell to self replicate.
> Yet no one would call this reproduction, replication or any kind of process where evolution can occur.
It is trivially replication. If it copies itself onto another machine and sets it running, then it is obviously reproduction. If you make these instances compete for resources (an AI risk scenario), you will apply evolutionary pressure and get evolution.
> This is entirely untrue in biology
You keep making the same mistake. Biology isn't some magic domain where facts don't matter.
> The relationship between structure and function is a major constituent of the rules of life.
Where did I say the structure of a part doesn't matter? I said that as long as the part is the same, the way it is manufactured doesn't matter.
> What is thinking, in a strictly biology free context? Can you define it?
Easy. It is the process of considering information, creating ideas, reasoning, solving problems, and making judgments. We can show that thinking is happening by posing a problem that requires these abilities and verifying that it is solved.
> By your standard, fools gold is gold, and the alchemists achieve Artifical Gold.
No, I am saying that you don't have to wait for a supernova to get gold. You can make it artificially by bombarding lead nuclei.
> Do they share the inner drive that humans do? Or a dogs?
Evolution selected for a limbic system that gives humans and dogs the same inner drive. Humans have a larger frontal cortex to do thinking to act on that inner drive. The LLM performs the same role, doing the thinking part that the frontal cortex does. Adding drive is separate from thinking but entirely trivial. We do it all the time when we give them prompts.
> They are controlled by a mix of deterministic and stochastic processes.
The point is that they require no thinking.
> The 'code' isn't reacting to a variable; the variable is fundamentally rewriting the machine.
Once again, the mechanism by which the goal is provided to the agent or the way that thinking occurs doesn't matter. Only the thinking part.
Why do you attribute magic to biology? You claim to be a scientist, but you do not apply scientific reasoning.
This needs you to answer some questions:
1. Why do the machine parts in biology show such flexible application? A gear cog won’t ever moonlight as a signaling chip, but in biology you often have molecules doing double and triple duty.
2. How is the biological machine able to build itself? What does self assembly imply for the machines function?
3. Where does this machine get its inner drive? No LLM has been found that starts outputting text unprompted. A car doesn’t decide to move to a shady parking spot. Why? Where in the machine to biological machine continuum does the ability to make internally driven decisions come in? Why does it come in for biology? A bacterium is able to make such agentic decisions unprompted. Why is no manufactured machine able to do this?