Highly implied but not outright stated, principally because the barrier between technological and biological is pretty fuzzy, and gets fuzzier and fuzzier the further our understanding of biology goes, let alone when you start delving into sci-fi universes where their understanding is way beyond ours.
Here's a quick example.
I make a little device to turn a wheel. It's a simple piston with a fuelling system. I gather you would unequivocally state that that is a device.
I make a second device to turn the same wheel. This time, it is a simple biological arm, plumbed up to a rudimentary blood supply to provide nutrients. Is that not a device? I've made it to do precisely the same thing. It still works on mechanical principles. The only thing that differs is which mechanical principles and the material it's made of (neither of which are stated as exclusion criteria in any definition I've found of device or mechanism that I've come across searching for it).
Here's another example that is within our current technological reach.
For a lot of applications of drugs in medicine, their effectiveness is increased by delivering them to targeted areas. Previous attempts have constructed little metal nanomachines to try and deliver the drugs to a prescribed location, which hasn't proven to be fantastically effective. More recent attempts have constructed devices (and they are devices) from biological components (amino acids and peptides primarily), and utilising mechanisms gleaned from how viruses function, to deliver the drugs. Both of these are devices, irrespective of what they are made from (or the fact that some examples of the latter is largely indistinguishable from a virus).
Everything is chemicals, everything is mechanics. Once you understand how to manipulate biology sufficiently well to create it (as we know the Old Ones were able to), biology simply becomes an extension of mechanics (which it already is at its most fundamental processes). The same thing holds for intelligence and understanding of creating it.
I'm not inventing new definitions of the word. I'm working within the letter and spirit of the definition of 'device', but without the misguided cultural blinker that a device has to be made of metal or wood (which itself is a biological substance).
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ProwlerPC wrote:I think your interpretation is quite provincial, no doubt due to the limitations of our current modern day era. We lack the capability of creating intelligent biological devices such as a manufactured race with a goal and purpose. The Old Ones, based on fluff, clearly are capable. I've not seen any part of the definition limit itself to the inanimate nor any implications. Instead I see some real world examples of devices. Which again are limited to what we currently do but they are merely examples. Adding examples doesn't change the definition nor does extrapolating unrelated qualities from the example add to the definition. The examples are there to be viewed in direct relation to the definition in the entry.
Man you said that much more succinctly than I did!
