Rand on consciousness

Rand, Ayn (1964-11-01). The Virtue of Selfishness (Signet) (p. 7).
Penguin Group. Kindle Edition.

> A plant has no choice 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.

So plant software is 100% hardcoded. At the moment of birth, their
ways of reacting to sensations exist. As they live, those ways of
reacting do not change. These are instincts.


> 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 consiousness can neither seek nor evade. An organism that possesses only 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.

So ants and worms fit that description. Again 100% hardcoded. These
ways of reacting to sensations are instincts -- with them upon birth.

Consider spiders. They react to their sensations using hardcoded
knowledge -- they spin webs.


> The higher organisms possess a much more potent form of consciousness: they possess the faculty of retaining sensations, which is the faculty of perception. A “perception” is a group of sensations automatically retained and integrated by the brain of a living organism, which gives it the ability to be aware, not of single stimuli, but of entities, of things. An animal is guided, not merely by immediate sensations, but by percepts. Its actions are not single, discrete responses to single, separate stimuli, but are directed by an integrated awareness of the perceptual reality confronting it. It is able to grasp the perceptual concretes immediately present and it is able to form automatic perceptual associations, but it can go no further. It is able to learn certain skills to deal with specific situations, such as hunting or hiding, which the parents of the higher animals teach their young.

So perception is a level of universality above that of sensation.
Perception emerges from sensation.

For animals like this, parents teach their young how to do stuff --
how to react to perceptions.

For these animals, their software is somewhat hardcoded. The way they
form perceptions is hardcoded. But the way they react to perceptions
is softcoded -- they learn them from their parents.

The ways they form perceptions are instincts -- they are born with
them and stay with them until death. The ways they react to
perceptions are learned -- they didn't exist in them upon birth.


> But an animal has no choice in the knowledge and the skills that it acquires; it can only repeat them generation after generation. And an animal has no choice in the standard of value directing its actions: its senses provide it with an automatic code of values, an automatic knowledge of what is good for it or evil, what benefits or endangers its life. An animal has no power to extend its knowledge or to evade it. In situations for which its knowledge is inadequate, it perishes—as, for instance, an animal that stands paralyzed on the track of a railroad in the path of a speeding train. But so long as it lives, an animal acts on its knowledge, with automatic safety and no power of choice: it cannot suspend its own consciousness—it cannot choose not to perceive—it cannot evade its own perceptions—it cannot ignore its own good, it cannot decide to choose the evil and act as its own destroyer.

An animal does not have the mental capacity to judge that his parent's
teachings are flawed.

An animal's only goal is to preserve its own life by responding to
percepts and stimuli.


> Man has no automatic code of survival. He has no automatic course of action, no automatic set of values. His senses do not tell him automatically what is good for him or evil, what will benefit his life or endanger it, what goals he should pursue and what means will achieve them, what values his life depends on, what course of action it requires. His own consciousness has to discover the answers to all these questions—but his consciousness will not function automatically. Man, the highest living species on this earth—the being whose consciousness has a limitless capacity for gaining knowledge—man is the only living entity born without any guarantee of remaining conscious at all. Man’s particular distinction from all other living species is the fact that his consciousness is volitional. Just as the automatic values directing the functions of a plant’s body are sufficient for its survival, but are not sufficient for an animal’s—so the automatic values provided by the sensory-perceptual mechanism of its consciousness are sufficient to guide an animal, but are not sufficient for man. Man’s actions and survival require the guidance of conceptual values derived from conceptual knowledge. But conceptual knowledge cannot be acquired automatically.

So conceptualization is a level of universality above perception.

The lowest form of animal is conscious of sensations (I'll call them
0th order animals). The next level of animal is conscious of
sensations and perceptions (I'll call them 1st order animals). The
next and final level of animal is conscious of sensations, percepts,
and concepts (I'll call us 2nd order animals).

0th order animals respond to their environment by automatically
reacting to their sensations. These automatic reactions are instincts.

1st order animals respond to their environment using automatic
percepts, automatic reactions, and learned reactions. And they learn
these reactions by rote memory from their parents without judgment.
And they also create new reactions by random trial and error. This is
void of reasoning.

2nd order animals respond to their environment using automatic
percepts, automatic reactions, and learned reactions. And they learn
these reactions by judging ideas that they encounter in their lives
and that they create on their own. Judging ideas is reasoning.


What is a second-handed thinker? Its a person who chooses to let other
people judge ideas for him. He is turning off his 2nd order conscious
capacity and living a life void of 2nd order thinking -- i.e. void of
reasoning.

-- Rami Rustom
http://ramirustom.blogspot.com


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