Well, I'm not saying they are - but let's for a moment assume, for the sake of discussion, that they are. Humans and machines can both take action in the world - are what point do we ascribe moral agency to the human but deny such moral agency to a machine? What differentiates they two, even if the actions they take are identical in effect? At what point does that distinction stop making sense? What about when machines can independently evolve their form and programming in accordance with natural selection? How many generations does it take to stop being a mere puppet? Do you suppose an "original sin" of the mechanical prevents any such machine from being considered a person, even if it indistinguishable in any obvious way from a human being to a human being? Why?
Given that a person is composed of proteins, enzymes and other such relatively simple parts which function in a mechanistic fashion, at what level of abstraction do those simple organic parts stop being just another complex machine assembly - albiet one shaped by natural selection? Why can't an assembly of relatively simple non-organic components, designed and inspired by humans, undergo the same transformation over time? What is the missing element which makes such a consideration impossible to you?
Using my Apple and Orange analogy, I would note that your first paragraph can be summarized as follows:
“But what if the Apple someday turned into an Orange? Wouldn’t you then concede it is an Orange?”
That’s not a helpful question as it glosses over the crux of the matter; namely, there is no mechanisms described or suggested whereby an Apple is ever capable of becoming an Orange.
Your second paragraph states the converse: “An Orange, after all, is really just a sophisticate Apple... they’re basically the same.”
Once again, it is obvious and not fairly deniable that they are not. No machine is alive.
>Given that a person is composed of proteins, enzymes and other such relatively simple parts which function in a mechanistic fashion...
Here you are equating living creatures to machines to support your notion that machines are equivalent to living creatures. You’re not getting anywhwhere. Moreover, an honest rereading of the comment, particularly the bit about “relatively simple parts”, should be a red-flag. Transistors and dioses and resistors are “relatively simple parts.” There is nothing simple about the components of living creatures... the scale of complexity of a protein is so far beyond any machine ever made that the analogy is just, well, laughable.
That being said, how would I personally define the categories between animate and inanimate? Like this: living systems are characetriZed by becoming MORE complex at lower scales. The opposite is true of inanimate systems.
Example: The behavior of an ant is easy to model. The behavior of one of the systems that make up the ant — say his brain — is more difficult to model. And, a single cell? far more complex than the ant en toto. And the molecular machinery in the cell? Even more complex. The deeper down you go, the more complicated.
Inanimate objects are different. A computer is complex. An IC less so. A single transistor even less so. Etc. It gets simpler as you take it apart.
> living systems are characetriZed by becoming MORE complex at lower scales. The opposite is true of inanimate systems.
Support your assertion, please. The behaviour of ants is actually quite complex and has yet to be entirely modelled and characteriSed in full detail. In fact, it's still an area of active study.