| | Mr. Parille,
Yes, to show the factor of vulnerability in human life as supporting the thesis that without the concept of human life the concept of human value would not be possible, one could try to imagine either an indestructible, immortal human-like robot or an indestructible, immortal living human.
Neither sort of immortal entity would be possible, strictly speaking, for the reason I gave in the article: such an entity would be a violation of the second law of thermodynamics.
My argument, in which I modified Rand's robot into an unattainable thermodynamic limit of a sequence of successively more durable robots, can be run not only for a plant robot (as I did), but for a snail-like robot or for a man-like robot. That is, the thought experiment in this general form can be run for the purpose of illuminating not only vegetative values, but appetitive values, and even intelligent values. (The life of a human being consists of all three, as Rand observed in her essay.)
In constructing the gedanken for a snail robot, there may appear new ways, not in play in the plant robot, that the concept (appetitive) value is not possible without the concept (animal) life. Still more new ways in which (intelligent) value is not possible without (human) life may appear, when one constructs the gedanken for a man robot.
I ran the gedanken, using my iterative method for it, for the case of a plant robot. Could I just as well run the gedanken using a sequence of ever more durable living plants instead of robot plants? I think so. Energy supplies, repair materials, and instrumentation-and-control systems are engineering aspects essential not only to machines, but to all living organisms.
Consider gravitropism in certain living plants. Recall that that is the ability to respond to being uprooted by redirecting growth of a plant's roots in the direction of gravity. This redirection occurs a half hour or so after the plant is uprooted. Redirection is not a passive response to gravity, unlike an arrow shot into the air.
Researchers have found that the initial detection of the new direction of gravity with respect to the root occurs in the core of the root cap, the terminal half-millimeter of the root. (In some gravitropic plants, there may be additional detection farther back along the root.) The cells composing the core, or collumella region, of the root cap are rich in dense amyloplasts, organelles which are filled with starch grains. In the normal, vertical root, the amyloplasts reside at the lower end of each collumella cell. When the plant is uprooted, within seconds, amyloplasts in the collumella fall and settle along the new lower wall of each cell. This detection step is evidently the only step of the gravitropic response in which gravity directly pulls down a component (amyloplasts) of the root system.
I will stop the story of the gravitropic response there. I will not go on to describe how the new residence of amyloplasts on the lower sides of the collumella cells leads to a differential growth rate on the upper and lower sides of the non-vertical root near its tip, which results in the root growing in a curved way, downward, in the direction of gravity. What concerns us just now is the instrumentation in the instrumentation-and-control system that gives the root its gravitropic capability.
Zooming in on the instrumentation for this response in the living plant, we look for its failure modes. That is, we look for the ways in which the amyloplast triggering system can be made ever more durable against failure. Sensitivity of the instrument will decline with ever greater increase in durability. Or so I expect. At complete insensitivity, this instrument system of the living plant is no longer functioning. Here again, we find support for the thesis that without the concept plant life---vulnerable life---the concept vegetative value is not possible.
|
|
