On: Let’s avoid talk of ‘chemical imbalance’: it’s people in distress

[nathan_compton]

This is either very specific and thus not all that applicable to biological systems (that is, the current state is typically much much much more dominant a determinant of future time evolution in biological systems than in machines) or so general as to characterize literally any physical phenomenon whatsoever, and thus hardly useful to think about how biological systems work specifically. Indeed, one element emphasized by Deacon is that the notion of "current state" is ambiguous or at least non-trivial for biological systems and exists for machines only because they represent a major simplification of the relations characterized by your metaphor.

Machines are in some sense constituted by an enormous, intentional, simplification of the possible dynamics of a clump of matter and its relations to the outside world. Their design is profoundly impacted by both our own cognitive limitations and the contexts in which they are manufactured and used. Biological systems simply don't have these constraints and they operate in what are often totally different ways from machines.

My point is that there is considerable scientific and philosophical scholarship on this issue which casts this metaphor into doubt at least with regard to base utility.

[realharo → nathan_compton]

I see. Do you think a machine that physically alters its own silicon, or software that rewrites its code instead of storing data, would be closer to biological systems? Or is that part irrelevant?

[nathan_compton → realharo]

My personal opinion is that that would be true in more or less the same way that colder gases are more like solids.