Planet of the Apes and Philosophy (4 page)

To try to find the same sort of evidence for mindreading abilities in other species, psychologists have invented nonverbal versions of the false belief task, with mixed results. In a review of all the mindreading experiments given to chimpanzees, the psychologists Josep Call and Michael Tomasello claim that there's no evidence that chimps understand that others have false beliefs. Chimps do seem to understand what others can see, what others know, and what others' goals and intentions are, according to Call and Tomasello. But if they don't understand that others can have beliefs that are false, then they cannot be full-blown folk psychologists. It follows that Anne and I aren't justified in interpreting Cecep's behavior as a communicative pantomime. And Zira, without recourse to controlled experimentation on Taylor using a nonverbal version of the false belief test, isn't justified in thinking Taylor is trying to communicate, either.

But this seems wrong. Remember how babies and their caregivers can come to understand one another, or how you and your dog understand each other? There is some sort of communication going on when your dog asks, in doggish, to go for a
walk. She communicates with a bark and a look. It is far too conservative to dictate that communication requires mindreading of the false belief sort. Consider the idea that belief is something that is expressed in a full sentence: “I believe that
the San Bruno Primate should be shut down
,” or “I believe that
Charlton Heston is a lousy actor
.” When children start to speak, like when baby Caesar starts to sign, we already know that they're trying to communicate, even though they can't communicate in sentences. The baby who reaches and says “cookie” is making her desires pretty well known, and we can translate her one word utterance into the sentence “I want a cookie.” We don't just communicate sentences, but also feelings and goals. A shared smile is communication. While Taylor and Nova can't use language together, they can communicate through touch and eye contact. Nova wants to be with Taylor; she willingly goes with him to live in the Forbidden Zone. They understand each other without exchanging words.

The narrow focus on belief reading ignores all the other ways we read minds. On a daily basis, we rarely think of the other people in our lives in terms of what they believe. When we do wonder about what someone believes, it's usually because we're trying to explain some strange thing they did. This points to a problem with the idea that we understand others by thinking about the contents of their heads. We do not, in fact, think of others as just the set of the sentences they are thinking. Rather than abstractly reading minds, we share minds and read people by doing things together and learning about one another's normal behaviors and personal idiosyncrasies. This understanding is built over time as we get used to doing things together and learn how to interact with one another.

In order to understand a new roommate or a new dog, you first have to get to know them. By cooking together, planning out how to pay the bills, going for walks, or playing fetch, we come to learn how to co-ordinate with the other person we're sharing our space with, and to judge the right time to introduce a kitten to the household, or suggest throwing a party. As I argue in my 2012 book
Do Apes Read Minds? Toward a New Folk Psychology
, we come to know others by interacting with them, and moving together. Like a dance, we share our minds through gestures, movements, facial expressions, gaze, and posture.

Anne and I don't need to withhold judgment about whether Cecep was communicating because we know him, and we consider his pantomiming behavior in the context of the other things we know about him. When we make an inference to the best explanation, we have to take all available evidence into account. So let me tell you another story about Cecep.

He was one of the leaders of the little group of forest school orangutans, and the babysitters nicknamed him The Policeman because he often broke up fights and seemed to want to keep the peace. Aldrin, one of the other orangutans in the group, wasn't doing very well. Aldrin didn't run around the forest with the other orangutans; instead he would sit and hug a babysitter, and whimper if no one would cuddle him. He only once climbed a tree when I was there, and the other orangutans usually ignored him. But one day things were very different: the babysitters found a turtle. Now, as a human reader, this might not sound terribly exciting, but orangutans are terrified of turtles—something even Darwin remarked on. When the orangutans, including Aldrin, saw the turtle they all fled into the trees in terror. Later that day when it was time to head back to camp, the babysitters realized that Aldrin wasn't with them. They never saw him come down from the tree. Then the babysitters noticed that Cecep wasn't around either. When they went back to where the turtle had been, they found Aldrin and Cecep perched in different trees. Cecep was up in a tree in front of Aldrin's, and he looked back at Aldrin, caught his eye, and then moved on to the next tree. Aldrin followed Cecep, who led Aldrin from tree to tree until they reached the path back to camp. Though Cecep had been looking back at Aldrin from time to time, when he got down to the ground he just scampered away, joining the rest of the group. And Aldrin followed. That's just the kind of guy Cecep is.

When we see only one incident of a behavior that looks as if it was done for a reason, a mentalistic explanation may not be very well justified. But as we gather observations of incident after incident that cries out for an explanation in terms of reasons for action, we become more and more justified in our interpretation. While the mentalistic hypothesis is only weakly supported by each individual incident, the
overhypothesis
that explains the large set of data is much stronger. As the philosopher Nelson Goodman defines it, an ‘overhypothesis' is a
hypothesis used to justify a set of more specific hypotheses, and it is a basic tool in human reasoning that allows us to form generalizations. It is one of the amazing features of human beings that we are able to learn so much starting from so little, and much of this ability is due to our powers of induction.

To justify the interpretation of a behavior via induction, we need more information than just the description of the behavior. We need to know what happened before the behavior, and what happened after. It also helps to know the idiosyncratic history of the behaving individual, as well as the normal behavior of the relevant species. No behavior occurs outside of a larger context. So we shouldn't interpret any behavior without taking its context into account.

Context plays an especially important role in the interpretation of behavior insofar as minds have evolved in—and are naturally designed to work within—particular contexts. If our environment affects our minds, then in order to know the natural ape mind, scientists need to gather inductive data about ape behavior in natural ape environments. Most cognition research is done with caged animals. Think about how unimpressive Taylor is in his cage, or how well the scientists understand Caesar's mother Bright Eyes in hers.

Now think about how much mental work you offload onto your environment, and imagine trying to get by without the information in your phone. Try doing your taxes without a computer or even a pencil and paper. We have good memories because we write things down in our calendars. We are organized because we have to-do lists. We know how to do many things, from getting to work to buying dinner, because we live in the same kind of environment in which we learned these skills. Elderly people with dementia can often live surprising well in their own homes, because they let the house serve as part of their mind. Take this person out of her home, and she often deteriorates quite quickly. We all need our environments to help us think, and we all need familiar tools to show off our skills. A tailor is useless without thread and needle, just as an orangutan may be useless without trees to climb and build nests in.

Experiments on great apes can help us find out what apes can do, but we can't count on them to tell us what apes can't do. We especially can't let them tell us that apes can't do something when we have access to a body of observations that together force us toward an explanation in terms of that very ability. Imagine trying to understand what great apes can do while only studying the apes at the San Bruno Primate Shelter, or the apes at Gen Sys. Or imagine the intelligent simians of
Planet of the Apes
trying to learn about all the things twentieth-century humans can do by studying Taylor alone in a cage without clothes or a voice. When you're in a cage, you act caged, and a tame animal is a compromised one. Since caging and taming changes the individual, we need to study uncaged wild animals if we really want to know what they're thinking.

S
ARA
W
ALLER

I
n the beginning, there was the word of Taylor. Our hero's loneliness in space is captured in language, a soliloquy spoken to an empty galaxy. He asks, “Does man, that marvel of the universe, that glorious paradox who sent me to the stars, still make war against his brother? Keep his neighbor's children starving?”

Taylor's language in the opening scene of
Planet of the Apes
(1968) conveys not only intelligence, but empathy and hope that future humanity is better than the humanity he left hundreds of years in the past. He wants to speak, and to be heard, which is precisely what he cannot do alone in space, or after being shot in the throat. Language—wielded by humans or by apes—seems to endow its possessors with superiority and moral worth, allows space travel, religion, and science, and lets us confess: “I am lonely.”

And with language, we have made ourselves lonely, as we often seem to have empathy only for other creatures that speak. Language becomes a weapon in its ability to indicate thought, and its absence is easily construed as an absence of intelligence. For creatures without language, we have a great variety of measures that can be used to bestow, or reject, their intelligence. Once intelligence has been dismissed, it seems that rights, personhood, and respect are gone as well; our empathy is reserved for our intellectual equals.

The word ‘barbarian' is a clear example of how language can be used to prop up prejudice and oppression. To the ancient Greeks, other languages such as Persian sounded so much like ‘bar bar bar bar' that ‘barbarian' came to mean ‘one who is brutish' and ‘one who does not speak the language of the civilized' (that being Greek, of course). The word served to diminish anyone who spoke differently, both in intellect and in moral character, and so, in our moral concern for such a person as well. After all, who would go to great lengths to protect or care for a strange foreigner who is crude, hostile, threatening, and babbling? And the barbarians cannot defend themselves from this charge, for all they can do in return is say ‘bar bar bar bar' thus proving their inferiority. We see this prejudice play out across the
Planet of the Apes
films. Dodge Landon, the cruel chimp keeper in
Rise of the Planet of the Apes
mocks the intelligent and imprisoned chimps mercilessly, imitating the sounds Caesar makes and calling him “stupid monkey.” And in the original film, Dr. Zaius remarks of Taylor how amusing it is that a man would act like an ape, mimicking speech.

We know the
Planet of the Apes
films present us with metaphors for racism as well—and racism is often reinforced through linguistic oppression. America's voting restriction laws of 1894 present us with another good example of the tyranny of language as the measure of minds. These laws prohibited anyone who could not read or write in English from approaching the polls. A wonderful device for those who were wealthy and educated, the law effectively kept the lower classes from casting votes and thereby gaining advantages such as education and literacy. These laws were in many cases abused by whites in power telling potential black voters that they had failed the test—not because they had really failed to answer the questions, but because it was in the interests of racists to implement any effective method of oppression.

Tell a potential minority voter he has failed the test, and not only has his vote been blocked, but he might also believe that he is illiterate and uneducated, and so unworthy of protesting or fighting back against the majority and their elegant language skills. Giggling at animals such as Taylor and saying
‘human see, human do' is also effectively demoralizing, not to mention hosing them down and subjecting them to ridicule.

Standard IQ tests in use today may be accused of similar bias. The two most accepted tests are the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Test, and the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Test. If you know your IQ, it is because you took one of these tests (probably while you were in middle school). The basic format of these tests is a conversation between an examiner and the person being ‘measured,' and the examiner asks questions focusing on vocabulary, mathematics, and ability to recall information. The results of the test depend on the ability of the examinee to understand instructions and respond clearly. But the structure of the test itself seems to double the importance of language skill in taking the test. The most crucial part of the test—the part that most reliably determines one's overall IQ—is the vocabulary section. Indeed, IQ tests have been criticized for bias precisely because those who speak a dialect of English may receive a lower IQ score simply due to a difference in response to certain words that appear on the test. Speakers of creoles, and people who have learned English as a second language, all risk being assigned a lower IQ because their responses are non-standard. We measure your mind in a test made of the language, by the language, and for the language.