Pan-psychists might argue that your subjective consciousness is an aggregate of all the cells/molecules, etc in the system
"While each biological cell operates largely on its own chemical cues, they all coordinate through complex nervous and chemical networks to create your unified, subjective experience."
You might be a rigid materialist
> ... if the mind is an emergent phenomenon from machines (cells) then it seems quite likely that a mind could emerge from other, different machines. Since cells cannot be defined as machines, the argument about mind emerging from machines does not hold.
There's definitely research and scholarship that would beg to disagree with you there. At least in terms of completely writing off the notion of "agency" when it comes to cells.
Dr. Michael Levin's lab is doing some pretty cool work. https://drmichaellevin.org/
Yes? Literally no machine ever built by humans is capable of (or even hinting at beginnings of capability for) replication or novel synthesis like cells are, let alone autonomously, it’s quite unconceivable that anyone would take this to be a reasonable assumption in the first place.
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.
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.
autonomous replication: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_worm
nb that writing your own quine remains in general terms a fun and challenging exercise in many programming languages, but not python.
Otherwise you’re just arguing that Sims are totally alive because Sims can make baby Sims.
Anyway, seems like an argument over said definitions rather than the underlying characteristics. The relevant question is whether they're purely physical objects behaving according to rules, which is being described as "machine," or whether there is something beyond that. Current understanding is contradictory: all indications are that cells and bodies are purely physical objects, except that there is this phenomenon of subjective experience which doesn't fit with that at all.