On Pages 19 and 20 of her book, The Virtue of Selfishness, Ayn Rand compares and contrasts how the brain size of lower and higher level (bigger brains) consciousness-bearing creatures, does play out in the world as they seek to live and enjoy their lives in the world: “The simpler organisms, such as plants, can survive by means of their automatic physical functions. The higher organisms, such as animals and man, cannot: their needs are more complex and the range of their actions is wider. The physical functions of their bodies can perform automatically only the task of using fuel, but cannot obtain that fuel. To obtain it, the higher organisms need the faculty of consciousness. A plant can obtain its food from the soil in which it grows, An animal has to hunt for it. Man has to produce it.”
My response: her account here of different types of flora and fauna possessing different levels of consciousness, up through humans that must think and plan to produce the fuel they require, seems plausible to me.
Rand continues: “A plant has no course of action; the goals it pursues are automatic and innate, determined by its nature. Nourishment, water, sunlight are the values its nature has set it to seek. Its life is the standard of value directing its actions. There are alternatives in the conditions it encounters in its physical background—such as heat or frost, drought or flood—and there are certain actions which it is able to perform to combat adverse conditions, such as the ability of some plants to grow and crawl from under a rock to reach the sunlight. But whatever the conditions, there is no alternative in a plant’s function; it acts automatically to further its life, it cannot act for its own destruction.”
My response: her account of a plant’s goals and actions seem reasonable. She obviously is contrasting plants to animals, and especially to humans who possess free will, so we can dream up alternative functions and goals for ourselves, even planning our own destruction by direct, conscious determination to kill ourselves, or by self-destructive, maladaptive plans that could end our life, or ruin our living lives, and that is evil and a waste.
Rand continues: “The range of actions required for the survival of the higher organisms is wider: it is proportionate to the range of their consciousness. The lower of the conscious species possess only the faculty of sensation, which is sufficient to direct their actions and provide for their needs. A sensation is produced by the automatic reaction of a sense organ to a stimulus from the outside world; it lasts for the duration of the immediate moment, as long as the stimulus lasts and no longer. Sensations are an automatic response, an automatic form of knowledge, which a consciousness can neither seek nor evade. An organism that possesses on the faculty of sensation is guided by the pleasure-pain mechanism of its body, that is: by an automatic knowledge and an automatic code of values. Its life is the standard of value directing its actions. Within the range of action possible to it, it acts automatically to further its life and cannot act for its own destruction.”
My response: Rand is clearly suggesting that plants, animals, and humans are all seeking to live, an ethical goal, and the ultimate value. Pleasure is that feeling or sensation of happiness over the good action that perpetuates its life, minimizes its suffering, and meets its needs. Pain is felt or sensed by all three groups, and pain is a warning signal that they are suffering, sick, under threat or about to die. Humans can elect to destroy themselves, but plants and animals are prevented by their determining and deterministic natures from destroying themselves. I love her intuition here; it seems prophetic about human behavior: humans are intelligent animals with free will; concomitantly, they can choose to do evil, and often do. Humans can destroy themselves and very well may through nuclear Armageddon, a serious pandemic disease, or environmental disaster of some kind.
God has blessed us with real intelligence, free agency, and serious moral responsibility. Are we up to the task? I believe so, if we choose to work together and not destroy each other and our world.
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