On the one interpretation, does she actually get younger, or does she just age much more slowly while he continues aging much more quickly, resulting in him catching up to her age similarly to if she had gotten younger? Like how passing a car on the road looks similar to that other car backing up past you even though you’re both still moving forward.

MR is not itself a theory of mind, it’s just a feature of functionalism. Functionalism says that mental states correspond to functional states of (particular kinds of) state machines, which in general are multiply realizable: you can run the same program on a computer made of transistors, vacuum tubes, or pipes and valves, in principle, as it’s not about the hardware per se but about the functionality that it can implement. Functionalism is not itself even inherently reductionist: in principle the function of the mind could be realized in some kind of immaterial substance, if such things can even exist. Functionalism just doesn’t require that such a thing exist.

The question in the OP isn’t whether God exists, but if people would still have mystical experiences if he didn’t. Since we have examples of mystical experiences attributable to things other than God, the answer is yes, whether or not God exists and might be behind other such experiences.

I think the intended application to history is something like the question of whether WWII would have still happened had Hitler died in infancy. If a strong attractor is involved in the human cultural system of the time, then the answer is probably yes. If Hitler was a butterfly, then no.

You know in the original Greek “the Word” is “logos”, which does literally mean “word” but in the context of the time meant more like “logic”, a cosmic ordering principle of rationally. (Strictly speaking “logic” was the study of the logos).

As I see it, pleasure is identical to the alleviation of pain, broadly construed. Pleasure is the feeling of getting something you want — not just of having it, but of getting it. Pain is the feeling of lacking something you want — not just losing it, but continually so long as you lack it (and still want it). If you never crave food, eating will not be enjoyable. But to crave food is to be hungry, and hunger is a kind of pain, broadly construed. If you could want nothing, like a Buddha, you would have no pain, but also no pleasure. Best, I think, to have what you want and what you can get coincide, either by wanting less or be getting more or some combination of the two. That way you want things and then get them and experience pleasure, but never want things and fail to get them and so experience pain.

Then your list is not a list of all the real numbers. There is no question that there are as many rationals as there are naturals. It’s only when you add in all the irrationals to make the reals that you get a larger infinity.

We can now order our numbers and put all these numbers in a list because each has a unique a/b coordinate. This would order all the reals — Umonsarmon

And then Cantor can read down your list and diagonally generate a real number that isn't already on it.

Cantor's proof begins with a supposition that you've somehow produced a supposedly complete list of all the reals, and then shows how from such a list you can always generate yet another one that wasn't already on it.

Giving someone a greater ability to discern good from evil and a greater strength to do what they think they should do instead of doing otherwise is not "forcing" them. The entire concept of free will used in arguments like this is just incoherently conceived; it's saying that creating people who will sometimes randomly (nondeterministically) do the wrong thing for no good reason (because if there was good reason to do it, it would be the right thing) is better for them (the created beings) and actually makes them more free somehow than creating beings who can think more clearly and act in accordance with what they think they should do.

It's like you didn't read past that first sentence.

As a "created" being myself, I want the ability to easily figure out what I should do instead of screwing up out of ignorance or inconsideration, and the resolve to end up doing what I think I should instead of something else I'll regret later. Difficulty figuring out what to do and difficulty making myself do it feels less free, and worse for me, and worse for the world. If my behavior is predictable as a consequence of me being more likely to always do the right thing (so if you know what the right thing is, you know what I'll do), that doesn't feel less free or worse in any other way.

If there was an all-loving (all-powerful and all-knowing) God, he wouldn't have made (or otherwise let there come to be) a hell to begin with, or people who would behave in ways that would lead them to end up there.

Free will is not lack of determinism, so God could build people who functioned in ways that would not lead them into hell without violating any freedom of will in any way that matters morally. He could, for example, make people really skilled from birth at figuring out what is right and wrong, so the right thing to do is just obvious to everyone, and made them strong of will so that when they decide that something is the right thing to do, they will follow through on that if it is at all possible to do so, instead of failing to do so out of weakness that they would later regret.

Even if hell were just separation from God, if God is all-powerful then he can reach out to everywhere and ensure that nothing is ever separated from him. This dovetails closely to the common theistic view that God is the source of morality, and that knowing God is how to know what is right or wrong. An all-powerful all-loving God could and would just "shine his light into the heart of everyone" so that the way to him was obvious and obviously desirable and everyone was naturally drawn to him for their own good. They would be able to turn away if they wanted to, but why would anybody ever want to?

The Objects of Morality
What are the criteria by which to judge prescriptive claims, or what makes something moral? — Pfhorrest

The short answer is hedonism. The long answer requires an analogy to empiricism. When we're appealing empirical experience to judge what is real, we don't just poll people on their beliefs, or even on their perceptions, but rather we ourselves stand in the same circumstances that they report having sensed or observed something, and then see if we also experience those same senses there. Then, rather than taking those sensations to justify whatever perceptions or beliefs the first person who reported them had, we come up with some model that accounts for those sensations we've confirmed and also all of the other sensations that we've confirmed, which will probably not be what anybody initially perceived or believed, as the increasingly weirder and weirder (less intuitive) models science has produced shows.

Likewise, when we're appealing to hedonic experience to judge what is moral, we shouldn't just poll people on what they think ought to be, what I term their "intentions", or even on their desires, but rather we ourselves should stand in the same circumstances that they report having had those hedonic experiences, like pain, hunger, etc, that I term "appetites". Then, rather than taking those appetites to justify whatever desires or intentions the first person who reported them had, we should come up with some model that accounts for those appetites we've confirmed and also all of the other appetites that we've confirmed, which will probably not be what anybody initially desired or intended. This is very similar to the methodology called principled negotiation, which says to "focus on interests, not positions" (appetites not intentions, in my terminology) and most importantly "invent options for mutual gain".

But as they say: the exception proves the rule. — ovdtogt

The meaning of "prove" in that idiom is the older sense of "test", not the modern sense of "show to be true".

Coincidentally(?), the educational YouTube channel Veritasium just put out a short (12min) video describing the butterfly effect and strong attractors in terms of phrase spaces with some very edifying visualizations:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDek6cYijxI

I think maybe you're confusing me with the people I'm arguing against? I didn't say the A and not-A thing you're quoting, that was leo, in response to me. I did assent to that later, and dismissed it as beside the point, but since that's the point you're talking about here: neither of us is saying anything against conditional truths. "A" can be a conditional statement like "water is a liquid between the temperatures of 0C and 100C", and that's either true or not. Even that conditional statement might be true in some conditions and false in others... like, for example, if the pressure is not 1atm. That just means that only the broadest more well-conditioned statement is always true, and any less-conditioned statement is sometimes true, sometimes false, but in any particular context it's either true then or not.

Bonus question: What do aesthetic claims, about beauty and comedy and tragedy and such, mean, and how do they relate to prescriptive claims about morality? — Pfhorrest

To claim that something is beautiful is in essence to claim that it "feels right", where "right" might mean either "good" or "true". Comedy and tragedy are both different ways of framing something that is in one of those ways "wrong", either bad or false. Comedy treats the wrongness with levity, playing it off as frivolous, not a big deal, while tragedy treats the wrongness with gravity, playing it as a serious big deal. Each of these can in its own way contain a kind of beauty, as when comedy makes something bad not feel so bad anymore, making it feel more right, i.e. making it beautiful in a way; or when tragedy tells some painful truth about something that is bad, but the telling of that is still right inasmuch as it is true, and so beautiful in that way. Beauty can just stumbled upon in nature, or it can be presented specifically for an audience to provoke some kind of reaction to them, where it is called art.

Anything thus presented to an audience to provoke an emotional reaction is art, whether or not the intention is to convey beauty. Something is good art when it is successful at evoking the intended reaction, where "intended reaction" can vary between the artist, the audience, the surrounding society, or some broader moral standard. This all relates to prescriptive claims about morality in that this notion of "good as success" is a kind of prototypical morality in the same way that the abstract existence of mathematical objects is a kind of prototypical reality: most of the things we consider good, we consider good for their proficiency at bringing about something else that we consider good, and we rarely directly contemplate those ultimate ends in the same way that we rarely contemplate the most concrete elements of reality, the occasions of our experience, but instead deal in abstractions that are still nevertheless grounded in them. Just as mathematical "existence" is what you get when you deal in such abstractions completely ungrounded in concrete empirical reality, so too aesthetic "value" is what you get when you deal in pure proficiency completely ungrounded in those ultimate ends.

I'm not sure what a configuration space is — John Gill

It's also called a phase space. It's an abstract space wherein each dimension represents one variable feature of some system, and so every point in the space represents some complete configuration of the system. So if you had a two-variable system, say a ball that can change size and color but that's it, then you could represent every possible state of that system in a two-dimensional space. A complete universe, of course, has way more variables in its configuration space, but that's hard to visualize.

In my conception of time, every moment in time is a point in the configuration space of the universe, and because more-entropic configurations are definitionally more plentiful than less-entropic ones, a random walk through the configuration space (making random smallest-possible changes to the state of the universe) will necessarily lead you into more and more entropic parts of the configuration space, so time inevitably marches in the direction of more entropy, wandering away from points of low entropy in diverging paths, so futures diverge while pasts converge. The "start of time" is the local entropic minimum in the configuration space of the universe, away from which all directions are "forward" into more entropy.

I recommend you actually read what he has to say instead of assuming he hadn't answered those questions. — username

I have read him, extensively. But it was over a decade ago and I'm just posting here for fun, not work, so don't ask me to cite pages or anything.

Plantinga's response involves no maybe's. — username

"Maybes" are essential to his argument, but I can see how that's as easy to overlook as the fact that Plato's Republic is not actually about political philosophy but about justice as a personal virtue: it's the problem that frames the rest of the work, but most of the work is not talking directly about it. In the case of the Republic, all the talk about how to organize society is just a big analogy for how the human soul should be organized.

Meanwhile what Plantinga is setting out to do is to prove that the existence of evil does not logically contradict the existence of an all-good, all-knowing, all-powerful God, by making the case that it is plausible that such a God would have a reason to permit evil to exist. All the subsequent talk about free will is just building an example of a plausible case: Plantinga's main point isn't supposed to hinge on his particular free will theodicy being absolutely correct, just on it demonstrating that it's at least arguable, and so conceivable, and possible, that God could have some reason to allow evil to exist. Plantinga allows that maybe his free will theodicy is not absolutely correct, but argues that the possibility of it being correct proves that there's not a strict logical contradiction between the existence of God and the existence of evil.

The soundness of his free will theodicy aside, I think that that main argument is weak in and of itself, and that's what I was attacking in my original post. Plantinga is saying "here is a plausible argument; it might not be perfect, but the fact that it's arguable means that God and Evil aren't straight up logically contradictory". But I think that if he wants to show that they are not logically contradictory, he has to show a conclusively sound reason for why God and Evil can co-exist. Just showing that it's arguable that there might such a reason only demonstrates that the logical relationship between God and Evil can be made less obvious than it might be on the surface, that it's not necessarily completely clear whether or not God and Evil are logically contradictory. But that's like saying that because a math problem is hard to solve, it doesn't have an answer, when all the hardness of the problem shows is that the answer is unclear.

So if Plantinga wants to show that God and Evil are logically compatible, then he's got to actually conclusively show a sound reason why God would allow evil to exist. And I think he fails at that too, but that's secondary to the problem that he doesn't even think he needs to conclusively succeed at it, only to make a plausible case for it.

But sure, let's get into why his case is not so plausible after all:

there are things that an omnipotent God cannot do, such as force people to freely do something — username

That would be logically impossible, sure, and so cannot be expected of God any more than square circles can be expected. But the problem here hinges on what we mean by "force" and "freely", and the subsequent moral values attached to either side of that dichotomy, depending on which dichotomy we mean by it. You can be free in lots of different ways. You can be free from chains and imprisonment. You can be free from political or social retribution. You can be free from your own psychological compulsions or phobias. You can be free from metaphysical determination. You can probably be free in other important ways I'm not thinking of right now. If by "forced" we just mean "not free", then what it means to "force" someone to do something depends on what sense of "free" we mean.

Usually when we talk about "forcing" people to do things, and "freedom", in a morally evaluative sense, we're talking about something like those first two things. It's bad to be chained up and imprisoned so you physically cannot move your body in such a way as needed to do what you want, or threatened with punishment and suffering if you do something; and it's good, conversely, to be free of that kind of stuff. So it's plausible that an all-good God would place enormous value on people being free in those ways, and possibly even refrain from restraining or punishing people to prevent them from doing bad things. (Although it's still highly questionable whether that really would be the most good thing of God to do; we humans don't normally think it's morally better for us to stand by and let people do atrocious things to each other, so why would be it morally better for God to do so?)

But when we're talking about free will, "forcing" people to do things, i.e. making them unfree, isn't that kind of violence that's so clearly wrong; and most to the point, it's not clear what kind of freedom we're even talking about when we normally say "free will". Plantinga takes freedom of will to be the freedom from metaphysical determination. This is a view called incompatibilism, and though it's bizarrely popular on and off across history, it's far from uncontroversial. People who disagree with it are called compatibilists, and contemporary compatibilists like Harry Frankfurt or Susan Wolff argue that freedom of will is instead more like freedom from compusions or phobias, or other psychological hindrances: it is the ability to think clearly and rationally about something and come to a reasoned conclusion about what the best course of action is, and for such a reasoned conclusion to then be effective on what actions you actually do, in contrast to, say, not thinking clearly at all and just acting thoughtlessly, or coming to a clear conclusion about what you ought to do and then finding yourself unable to follow through with that decision. Such an ability can be completely deterministic, and does not depend on causal indetermination at all; in fact indetermination can actually interfere with such a process, and make someone less free in that way.

My biggest problem with Plantinga's free will theodicy is just that he takes incompatibilism for granted, and I think that's just the wrong picture of what free will even is. But even if that is what we want to mean by free will, it's not clear why it's morally better to be free in that sense than to be "forced" i.e. determined. God "forcing" people to be good in that sense would just mean building people in the first place to be more inclined to do good than bad, and that doesn't have to mean programming people like robots to always do specific things. It can mean giving people a better ability to figure out what is good and bad, and making that the part of the mind that controls people's actions. In other words, "forcing" people in this incompatibilist sense would be the same as giving them more free will in the compatibilist sense.

Even ignoring the possibility of God making human minds work better than they do, he could have left us exactly the same and simple raised us better. Is a parent successfully instilling good morals in their child (just teaching them how and why to be a good person, how and why to make moral decisions) "forcing" the child in any morally relevant way, or depriving them of free will? It's certainly influencing their behavior, removing some freedom from their development, stopping them from becoming a bad person that they otherwise might have become had other influences prevailed over their development instead. But I don't think anyone would really consider that "force" of a bad kind, otherwise we'd just let all children run feral. God could have raised humanity in that way, sent an army of angels to live among humans and act as saints and heroes, teachers and protectors, guiding humanity's moral development, keeping us on course, hoping eventually to make the process self-sustaining so that such intervention is no longer necessary and each generation of humans raises the next generation with the same good morals across all time. But he didn't.


Some nitpicks:

He also doesn't assert that the world would have more evil in it if we didn't have free will but rather that the ability to choose to do right is of greater value than being forced to do it. — username

"More evil" and "less value" are the same thing in this context. Plantinga thinks (that it's plausible to argue that) a world with less murder etc but no free will is morally worse (not as good, less valuable, more "evil") than a world where people are free to murder etc, and so an all-good God would have to prefer the latter over the former.

I think we can agree that if someone did what was good or virtuous because they were forced to, it would be less good then someone who did it on there own accord. — username

That depends heavily on what sense of "good" you mean. It reflects less positively on the character of the people in question, they are less virtuous, sure. But the consequences are the same either way. And while I think virtue, justice, and goodness of consequences are all important in their own ways, the good of allowing for the virtue of someone choosing not to murder when they could have does not outweigh the bad of allowing someone to murder if they want to. If it did, then we oughtn't have punishments for murder, because that then leads to people having less-virtuous, selfish, self-preservation reasons for avoiding doing murders, and erases from the world the good that might have existed had they selflessly chosen not to murder, just to spare some people's lives.

If A is false then non-A is true, so to disprove is to prove something... — leo

Technically correct, but beside the point. If you have a model of the world that says it works exactly some way, observations can prove that it works some other way or another, but cannot prove that it works any particular specific way. It can rule out some segment of the possibility space, and prove that the correct model is somewhere in the remaining part, but never pin it down to one particular possibility.

Falsifying a theory doesn’t mean proving it is false, almost any theory can be saved from falsification by invoking new phenomena when observations do not match the theory (dark matter, dark energy, ...). — leo

That depends on what you mean by "the theory" I guess. You're basically invoking confirmation holism, and I'm totally on board with that, but "invoking new phenomena" is still changing your model of the world. If you think planets orbit the Earth in circles, observation will prove you wrong, and you can either abandon that for heliocentric ellipses, or save geocentrism by invoking epicycles, but you've still made a change to your model either way.

They do prove him right. His hypothesis/theory was that time sped up in a lower gravitational field. The fact that we have to compensate for that aberration shows his hypothesis was correct. He also predicted gravitational waves. This year we have detected them proving that his hypothesis was correct. — ovdtogt

Ask any working physicist and they will tell you that both GR and QM are incomplete, and will some day be supplanted by a better theory. When such a better theory comes along, you can't point at a GPS and say that that proves GR right after all (and the new theory wrong). The new theory also has to explain why your GPS works, of course, but the fact that the GPS works doesn’t decide between the infinitely many theories that are compatible with that observation. Just like, as I said, cannons don’t prove that Newton was right and anyone who disagrees, like Einstein, is wrong; it just puts a constraint on which theories are still possible, by ruling out those that are inconsistent with cannons working.

Absolute knowledge does not exist (for us). We always work with relative knowledge. — ovdtogt

That’s the same as what I said earlier: you cannot prove anything, only disprove. The fact that you can aim a cannon using Newton’s laws doesn’t prove them correct. You can’t point at cannons to show that Einstein was wrong and Newton was right instead, because both theories are consistent with that phenomenon. But Newton is inconsistent with other phenomena, so he’s technically wrong in an absolute sense. Einstein is compatible with GPSs, but GPSs don’t prove him right, because other possibilities are also compatible with GPSs (and the rest of Einstein’s successful predictions) and we don’t know if or when an observation will be made that favors one over the other. And that is perpetually true. Nothing is ever proven, just not yet disproven.

Correct enough.

For aiming a cannon Newton's laws are correct enough but that doesn't make them correct simpliciter.

Interesting read. I was going to bring up mathematical chaos and strong attractors but then you already did, so I have nothing more to add now.

I can ask a question you might be able to elaborate upon though. I like to think of time in terms of paths through the configuration space of the universe, visualizing for simplicity a 2D configuration plane with points in it extruded downward in proportion to their entropy, so that "forward in time" = "downhill" in this metaphor. I'm not as versed on strong attractors and chaos as I'd like to be, so I'm not sure what relationship they have to something like the slope of entropy in such a configuration space, and so if they would have any kind of visible effect on such a metaphorical representation of time.

I would like to guess that chaos would be rendered as "roughness" in that configuration plane (such that otherwise similar paths through it can easily be deflected in many radically different possible directions) while strong attractors would be something like a single well-defined groove in the configuration plane (so that even radically different paths are all inevitably diverted into it), but I don't know enough to justify that guess.

I have had similar thoughts before, and even pictured these different facets of myself as different "characters" with their own unique outfits etc to distinguish them in my mind. I tried developing some philosophy around that idea, drawing a parallel between those different "personas" (as I termed them) and the individual persons in a society, where just as social peace and well-being consists in the individuals that make it up getting along well, so too I thought that mental health could consist of these "personas" getting along well. I never got far on that idea though and eventually dropped it from my philosophical work.

I think it is well-established in psychology that people automatically behave in different ways ("wear different faces" or "hats") around different people or in different contexts, and become more acutely aware of that when context collide (if for example a young person is both around their rebellious friends and in the presence of a respected elder authority... behaving how they'd behave around the friends feels wrong in the presence of the authority, but behaving how they'd behave around the authority feels wrong around the friends).

Alright, you're obviously not here for a productive conversation but to try scoring some kind of imaginary internet points, so I'm out.

No, if my GPS failed to work it would disprove "it" (assuming you mean GR here). Important distinction.

Whatever the absolute truth is, it has to be consistent with my GPS working, but there's always wiggle room for multiple alternatives consistent with that.

Nothing can be proven (only disproven). All of science is educated guesswork (which is still much better than uneducated guesswork).

Look at what it says under 'etymology', footnote 2 — Wayfarer

Where it says “on” means “to be”, or “I am”? Yeah, the Greek first-person form of “to be” is the same as its infinitive, unlike English. That doesn’t mean that ontology is about being in the first person, which is somehow different from existing (which can also be in the first person: “I exist”). I’m going to need to see something more substantial than that to suggest that being and existence are somehow profoundly different philosophical concepts. So far this just sound like those people who make a big deal about the difference between unalienable rights and inalienable rights.

The first sentence of Wikipedia on Ontology and the source for that both mention existence as a part of the subject matter.

The Meaning of Morality
What do prescriptive claims, that attempt to say what is moral, even mean? — Pfhorrest

Prescriptive claims are non-descriptive, but cognitive; that is to say, they are not trying to assert anything about the way the world is, any facts about reality, but they are nevertheless capable of being correct or incorrect and therefore are truth-apt in their own sense. They are most akin to imperatives, or commands, that are capable of being objectively good or bad (in ways to be elaborated later); but whereas commands are always have the person being addressed as the subject of them ("you do this"), prescriptive claims can have anything as the subject ("[anything] do this", including "[anything] be this way"), making them in a sense more like optatives (a la "Saints be praised!, which is not a command to the saints, or to anyone in particular to praise them, but an exhortation for anyone and everyone to praise the saints). In technically language, I would say that they impress intentions, rather than express desires as expressivism would have it; in more common philosophical language that's roughly equivalent to saying the "assert moral beliefs", except that I don't think morality (being non-descriptive in character) is something you can rightly have a belief about, but rather that there is a moral analogue of belief, intention, that bears the same relationship to desire as belief bears to perception: perceptions and desires are feelings, while beliefs and intentions are thoughts, and each differs from the other in the direction of fit of their respective attitudes toward the same kind of ideas. And impression, or assertion, attempts to get someone else to hold the same opinion as you do, while expression merely demonstrates the opinion that you have.

Oxidation is not life. Crystals are not life. — ovdtogt

Yeah, that's the point. Those are things we don't want to include under the definition of life. But your definition does include fire, and excludes mules. Not on purpose, I know, but the fact that that accidentally happens as a consequence of your definition is a problem with your definition. Other definitions have unintentionally included crystals, and that's a problem with them.

If you want to revise your definition to be something about carbon specifically, go ahead, but that wasn't your original definition in the OP.

Everything we consider to be alive has been created through replication even though they themselves may be unable to sexually reproduce. Even your mule. — ovdtogt

That's basically what I said. We needed replication to create life, but it doesn't have to replicate to be alive.

No living cell (with or without an ability to reproduce) has been created 'artificially'. — ovdtogt

Yet. That's not a matter of principle but a matter of technology.

And oxidation (fire) is not replication. — ovdtogt

It's a chemical reaction that initiates more of the same chemical reaction. Consumes fuel, produces waste, spreads. But it's not alive. Why not? On my account, because that reaction is just increasing entropy, not even decreasing it locally anywhere. But why not on your account?

You know this is not a new topic in philosophy. Coming up with a definition of life that includes things like mules, and excludes things like fire, or crystals (which are a local reduction in entropy, but still don't count as life by my definition), is a big problem and no popular definition has seemed to have solved it yet. (I'm not aware of anyone well-known putting forward my definition for widespread discussion).

He says it's about access to his "data" and "research". I'm not sure what that means exactly; his posts? [Edit: he's clarified that he means his private correspondence and his OP for Pigliucci] (I'm in email contact with him BTW, if anyone wants to get in touch with him directly let me know).

I think this touches on an underdeveloped field of philosophy.

When it comes to prescriptive matters, we have basic ethical theories about what makes a state of affairs good and how to conduct our own behavior, but we also have the field of political philosophy which is all about the social arrangements of who if anyone gets to decide those things and what if any kind of authority they have over other people and so on.

But when it comes to descriptive matters, we have ontology and epistemology to tell us to do things empirically and critically, but there isn't a lot of philosophy, certainly not a whole field of it, about the social arrangements of who if anyone gets to make the decisions about what is real and true and what if any kind of authority they have over other people and so on. Bacon talked a bit about it, but for the most part it seems like it's just done, and not philosophized about. Not that I know of at least -- I'd love to hear if it has been.

I wrote my own essay On Academics, Education, and the Institutes of Knowledge entirely about this subject, and if there are more well-know philosophers who've written about it that I should read, I'd like to hear about them.

Sorry to see his presence here end that way. Best of luck elsewhere Mark, I enjoyed talking to you.

Wedges and ramps and wheels are not necessarily designed artifacts, they're just simple shapes than objects can easily take. Complex chemicals, not even living things yet, are already nanomachines: when we build our own nanomachines, we do so chemically, because we're building them out of tiny molecular parts, the molecular equivalents of those kinds of simple machines: a molecular bond that lets something swing like a hinge or rotate like a wheel and so on. Search YouTube for a CG visualization of the kind of molecular machinery that unzips DNA, for example; it's really amazing and fascinating to see these tiny mechanisms at work on the molecular level.

And you know from other threads already that I'm not denying that subjectivity and intentionality exist at this level too. I'm just not stuck in the Cartesian mindset you are of seeing mechanism and intention, physicality and phenomenality, as mutually exclusive categories. They're two sides of the same coin. You can start with the most basic physical mechanical description of things and build up to complex physical and mechanical descriptions of human brains without paying any attention to the phenomenal and intentional experience going on in the first-person of those brains, or you can start with a phenomenal and intentional first-person account of a mind and simplify and disassemble it down until you get the protoexperientiality that exists in the most basic elements of the universe. It's not one or the other.

Self-replication is necessary for evolution to happen, and evolution is necessary for life to come into being in the first place, but once there exist living things that can make other things, those other things don't have to be able to reproduce to count as alive. Mules can't reproduce, for example, but they're still alive. And in principle we could build a new thing that doesn't reproduce but is otherwise alive in the way we normally think of it.

Also, fire is a self-replicating chemical reaction. Is fire alive?

Replication is not a necessary feature of life, but since you asked: organic molecules are already very complex nanomachines that interact with each other to produce other molecules that interact to produce other molecules etc. With energy input into the system it’s possible for these reaction chains to form loops, that then fill their environment with their constituent molecules. Any change that allows for shorter more efficient loops will fill the environment with more of its constituents, and so on until you arrived at a self-replicating molecule, a nanomachine that builds copies if itself. Evolution as you hopefully understand it already can then take over from there.

I think you’re thinking of much more complicated systems than are necessary to count as machines. Simple machines include things as elementary as a wedge or an inclined plane that can easily be found all throughout nature with nobody having designed them (unless you want to beg the question about God).

Machines are assembled by external agent, namely , humans — Wayfarer

Not as the term is used in physics, which is the sense of which I mean it here. A physical machine is a system that transforms a flow of energy from one form to another, or a system that does work, again in the specific sense of that word used in physics.

Pretty much yeah. The physical is the empirical, as you say, and the empirical just is the experiential: even the etymologies of those two words are related.

I’m more saying that physicalism properly understood (as Strawson does) is instantiated within Whitehead’s system than the other way around. The physical is experiential.