Planet of the Apes and Philosophy (7 page)

Admittedly, the apes in the series are not always very good at carrying out their deception. In
Conquest of the Planet of the Apes
, Caesar basically just needs to keep his mouth shut in order to look like a normal ape. But he can't stop himself from shouting, “Lousy human bastards!” at some guards that are roughly subduing a gorilla. Also, in
Rise of the Planet of the Apes
, even though the circus orangutan warns him that humans don't like smart apes, Caesar does not do much to hide his intelligence. For instance, when the apes are holding a meeting in the large enclosure at the San Bruno Primate Shelter and the keeper unexpectedly arrives, the rest of the apes start milling about as if nothing is going on. But Caesar just turns and gives the keeper a defiant look. (Fortunately for Caesar, the keeper can't believe what he's seeing and decides to ignore it.)

Some of the apes in the series don't like to engage in deception. In
Escape from the Planet of the Apes
, Dr. Lewis Dixon performs some tests on Zira and Cornelius at the zoo. In one test, Zira builds a staircase out of blocks that will allow her to reach a banana hanging from the ceiling, but then she doesn't grab the banana. Dr. Stephanie Branton wonders out loud, “Why doesn't she take it?” to which Zira unexpectedly replies,
“Because I loathe bananas.” When Cornelius and Dr. Milo criticize her for revealing her ability to speak, she says, “I hate deceit.”

Nevertheless, like the other talking apes, Caesar and Zira certainly have the ability to deceive. In fact, they even advise others to do it, as when Zira tells Brent how to appear to be a normal, non-talking, human. Also, in
Conquest of the Planet of the Apes
, it's clear that Caesar must have explained to his troops how to outsmart the armed riot police.

Now, these highly intelligent apes may not be quite as intelligent as humans. Although they are clearly the masters of a fairly civilized world, this is only possible because there was a pre-existing
human
civilization to copy. For instance, as Mérou notes, most of what it takes to sustain such a civilization is

           
a question of conditioned reflexes. At the still higher level of administration, it seemed even easier to concede the quality of aping. To continue our system, the gorillas would merely have to imitate certain attitudes and deliver a few harangues, all based on the same model. (
p. 101
)

It's not clear that the apes could have created such a civilization on their own. After all, the technology of the Planet of the Apes has not advanced very much since the apes took over. Even so, these apes are pretty clearly sneaky enough to be people.

It's not at all surprising that creatures who are smart enough to talk would also be smart enough to deceive. The really interesting question is whether or not
real
apes have the ability to deceive and, thus, whether or not they should count as persons.

While the question of whether apes
in our own world
can deceive is intrinsically interesting, you might wonder what relevance it has for the
Planet of the Apes
. It's actually quite relevant. Because the roles of humans and apes have been reversed, asking whether real apes have the ability to deceive is equivalent to asking whether the
humans
on the Planet of the Apes have the ability to deceive and, thus, should count as persons.

Apes are the masters of the Planet of the Apes and humans are the primitive animals. Thus, these apes are legitimately shocked when they run into a human that can speak. In fact, given how primitive the humans are, it's a little weird how attached Taylor gets to Nova. It would arguably be more appropriate for him to treat her as a pet than as a scantily-clad love interest. In Boulle's novel, Mérou is at least embarrassed about his relationship with Nova: “Is she not an animal? . . . I blush at the thought of our former intimacy” (
p. 92
).

Now, in Burton's film, all of the humans—not just Marky Mark—on the Planet of the Apes can speak. But this is inconsistent with the novel and the other movies. Admittedly, Nova finally does manage to utter the single word “Taylor” in
Beneath the Planet of the Apes
(“With great effort, she stammers out the syllables of my name, which I have taught her to articulate,”
p. 109
.) Also, in the novel, the genius chimpanzee Helius is able to get a few primitive humans to speak by directing electrical impulses at certain spots in their brains. This procedure allows the humans to tap into “atavistic memories” of their ancestors who could speak, “reviving a past several thousands of years old” (
p. 115
). But these are clearly exceptional cases. In general, the primitive humans on the Planet of the Apes do not use language. But are they able to deceive?

Determining whether real apes, or the primitive humans on the Planet of the Apes, can deceive is a good way of determining whether they are second-order intentional systems. Or, as most contemporary philosophers would put it, it is a good way of determining whether they are
mindreaders
. And by mindreading, these philosophers do not mean an extra-sensory psychic ability of the sort possessed by the Keepers of the Divine Bomb. They just mean the ability to attribute beliefs and desires to others. It's the sort of mindreading that we all use every day to explain and predict the behavior of other humans. It's the sort of mindreading that Mérou claims that Zira is capable of when he tells us that “My eyes met Zira's and I saw that the clever she-ape had read my thoughts” (
p. 86
).

You can only intentionally deceive someone if you can conceive of her having false beliefs. So the ability to deceive would
suggest that real apes are mindreaders. And it looks as though real apes do have this ability. Like many other species, apes give alarm calls in order to warn other apes about predators in the vicinity. However, apes sometimes give
fake
alarm calls in order to frighten other apes away from food. In other words, they essentially cry “Wolf!” when there is no wolf so that they can grab up the abandoned food for themselves.

In fact, there is some anecdotal evidence that real apes can actually
lie
. For instance, Koko the gorilla, who was trained to use American Sign Language, had a pet kitten. When her keepers asked her about a large steel sink that Koko had ripped from the wall, she signed, “Cat did it.”

At least a few of the primitive humans on the Planet of the Apes also exhibit such deceptive abilities. In the novel, the gorillas hunt humans by driving them toward a clearing and then shooting them down with rifles. As in the films, most of these primitive humans rush into the open space and are easily slaughtered. But as Mérou reports:

           
others gave evidence of more cunning, like old boars who have been hunted several times and have learned a number of tricks. These crept forward on all fours, paused for a moment on the edge of the clearing, studied the nearest hunter through the leaves, and waited for the moment when his attention was drawn in another direction. Then, in one bound and at full speed, they crossed the deadly alley. Several of them thus succeeded in reaching the opposite side unhurt, and disappeared into the forest. (
pp. 32–33
)

But not everybody is going to be convinced by this sort of evidence. For instance, in his
Discourse on Method
, René Descartes (1596–1650) claimed that nonhuman animals are not conscious at all. They do not have beliefs or desires, much less the ability to attribute beliefs and desires to others. They are simply unthinking and unfeeling “beast machines” who have essentially been programmed by God (or for the modern Cartesian, by evolution) to behave in these apparently deceptive ways.

However, if we're going to worry that nonhuman animals are essentially robots, we might as well worry that other
humans are robots. In fact, we might also worry that everything is an illusion created by the Keepers of the Divine Bomb. That's exactly the sort of thing that Descartes was famously concerned about in his
Meditations on First Philosophy
. But most philosophers are not quite that skeptical. Most philosophers think that apes
are
conscious and that they are “intentional systems” as defined by Dennett.

Even so, many philosophers are not sure that apes are
second-order
intentional systems. Although apes sometimes give fake alarm calls in order to steal food, it does not necessarily mean that these “sneaky” apes have any intentions with respect to the beliefs of other apes. They may just have learned to associate a. making a certain noise and b. other apes running away and leaving food behind. In other words, these apes may be engaging in what scientists call
functional
deception rather than
intentional
deception.

There's another reason why it can be difficult to be sure how smart non-human primates are on the basis of laboratory studies. In addition to primatologists being accused of
unconsciously biasing
the results of experiments, Marc Hauser, formerly of Harvard University, has been accused of scientific misconduct, much like Cornelius and Zira in the original film. However, in his case, the issue is not simply that his results contradict the Sacred Scrolls. It is alleged that he
intentionally fabricated
some of his results about rhesus monkeys and cotton-top tamarins. So, even if we can't be sure that apes are sneaky enough to be people, we do have a pretty good idea that some of these scientists are.

If we refuse to conclude that apes are mindreaders despite their apparently deceptive behavior, we're following a fairly plausible scientific rule that Mérou discusses. When he's unable to convince Dr. Zaius and the other orangutans of his intelligence, he tells us that

           
they were only prepared to attribute my talents to a sort of instinct and a keen sense of mimicry. They had probably adopted the scientific rule that one of our learned men at home summarized as follows: “In no case may we interpret an action as the outcome of the exercise of a higher psychical faculty if it can be interpreted as the outcome of one that stands lower in the psychological scale.” (
p. 54
)

Although the orangutans were mistaken about Mérou, we would certainly want to follow this rule (a.k.a. Lloyd Morgan's canon) when explaining the apparently deceptive behavior of many other species. For instance, some species of birds will fake having a broken wing in order to draw predators away from their nests. In fact, just like apes, a few species of birds will give fake alarm calls in order to steal food from other birds. But birds are clearly not sneaky enough to be people. They just associate (via learning or instinct) performing a particular action (in a particular circumstance) with achieving a particular effect.

Dogs are admittedly closer to being people than birds. But it is pretty clear that they also lack the cognitive capabilities required to engage in intentional deception. Dennett does tell the story of a dog that “tricks” its master into getting out of the comfy chair by going to the door as if it needs to go out. But as Dennett points out, such behavior does not make the dog a mindreader. He has just learned that his master does
that
(gets up) whenever he does
this
(goes to the door). In his
Philosophical Investigations
, Ludwig Wittgenstein simply takes it for granted that dogs are not capable of intentional deception:

           
Why can't a dog simulate pain? Is he too honest? Could one teach a dog to simulate pain? Perhaps it is possible to teach him to howl on particular occasions as if he were in pain, even when he is not. But the surroundings which are necessary for this behaviour to be real simulation are missing. (
p. 90
)

Functional deception of the sort that birds and dogs engage in is not limited to non-linguistic creatures. Just as real apes systematically benefit from other apes being misled by fake alarm calls, the orangutans on the Planet of the Apes systematically benefit from “propagating grotesque errors among simian youth” (
p. 75
). Since they have traditionally held a very privileged position in ape society, these orangutans benefit from maintaining the status quo. Although the orangutans on the Planet of the Apes are capable of intentional deception, they may not be guilty of it here. Like many ideologues on our own planet, they may believe everything that they say.

Although they initially looked like pretty good evidence, the fake alarm calls do not prove that real apes can read minds. But apes might, nevertheless, be mindreaders. To find out, we'll need to perform some further tests.

In addition to the Wisconsin Multiphasic test conducted on Cornelius and Zira by Dr. Dixon in
Escape from the Planet of the Apes
, primatologists have devised many other ways to test the cognitive capacities of primates. Most notably, Brian Hare, Josep Call, and Michael Tomasello have performed some experiments that suggest that apes are indeed mindreaders.

In an experiment described in the journal
Animal Behaviour
, a dominant chimpanzee and a subordinate chimpanzee were placed in cages on opposite sides of a room that contained two pieces of food. But one of the two pieces of food was placed next to an opaque barrier so that, while the subordinate chimp could see it, the dominant chimp could not. The chimpanzees were then released from their cages, with the subordinate chimp given a slight head start. Now, dominant chimpanzees tend to punish subordinate chimpanzees who challenge them for food. So, unsurprisingly, the subordinate chimp preferred to go after the piece of food that was hidden from the dominant chimp. But we should only expect this sort of behavior if the subordinate chimp knew that the dominant chimp did not know that there was food behind the barrier. Thus, this behavior suggests that chimpanzees can attribute beliefs to other chimpanzees.