Planet of the Apes and Philosophy (8 page)

As with the fake alarm calls, the results of this experiment could possibly be explained without assuming that the subordinate chimp is a mindreader. The chimpanzee might have learned that it's safe to go after food whenever there is something solid between the food and any dominant chimpanzees in the area. However, this is just one of several experiments that have yielded essentially the same results. For instance, if apes have a choice between openly reaching for a piece of food and reaching for it though an opaque tunnel that hides their action, they consistently choose the covert option. In addition, many of these experiments presented the apes with situations, such as transparent barriers and experimenters with buckets on their heads, that neither they nor their ancestors would have experienced in the wild.

According to Occam's Razor, we should prefer the
simplest
possible explanation of these results. The hypothesis that these apes have an ability to read minds which they deploy in all sorts of novel circumstances provides a simple, unified explanation of the results of all of these experiments. In order to explain their behavior without this hypothesis, we have to assume that these apes have learned a whole bunch of varied associations that it is unlikely that they had any opportunity to learn. Thus, if someone wants to deny that apes are mindreaders, she quickly starts to look like a conspiracy theorist who keeps having to make her theory more and more convoluted in order to account for the available data. (I said more about the irrationality of believing in conspiracy theories in my chapter in
Philip K. Dick and Philosophy
.) In other words, this is a case where Occam's Razor trumps Lloyd Morgan's canon.

While it looks as if real apes are mindreaders, it also looks as if their mindreading capabilities are somewhat limited compared with the mindreading capabilities of humans. In particular, the scientific evidence suggests that apes are not able to attribute
false
beliefs to others. And if they cannot attribute false beliefs to others, then they cannot intend others to acquire false beliefs.

Hare, Call, and Tomasello devised a variation on their food competition experiment. In this variation, there were two opaque barriers rather than one, and there was one piece of food rather than two. At the beginning of the experiment, the experimenter placed the food behind one of the two barriers so that it was only visible to the subordinate chimp. Then the chimps were released (with the subordinate given a slight head start).

The primatologists ran three versions of this experiment. In the first (
informed
) version, although the dominant chimp could not see the food once it was behind the barrier, he was allowed to see where the food was placed (and the subordinate chimp saw that he saw this). In the second (
uninformed
) version, the dominant chimp was not allowed to see where the food was placed (and the subordinate chimp saw that he did not see
this). In the third (
misinformed
) version, the dominant chimp was allowed to see where the food was placed, but then his view was blocked and the food was moved behind the other barrier (and the subordinate chimp saw what he did and did not see).

When the chimps were released, the subordinate was more likely to go for the food if the dominant chimp did not know where the food was located. However, if the subordinate had been able to attribute
false beliefs
to the dominant chimp, he should have been even more likely to go for the food when the dominant chimp incorrectly thought that food was in one place when it was really in another place. (If the subordinate were able to understand that the dominant chimp was
misinformed
and not just uninformed, he would have been sure that the dominant chimp would head off in the wrong direction.) But the experimenters found that the subordinate chimp performed the same in both the uninformed and misinformed versions of the experiment. Unlike even very young human children, apes consistently fail to pass such
false belief tests
.

There's clearly a difference between deceiving someone and merely withholding information from someone. As Dr. Milo explains to Zira (after she unwisely reveals her ability to speak to Dr. Dixon), “There is a time for truth, and a time, not for lies, but for silence.” And it looks like real apes can only intentionally withhold information in order to keep others in the dark about something. Unlike General Thade, they cannot intend others to acquire false beliefs. And so, real apes may not be sneaky enough to be people.
¹

________

¹
I would like to thank Kristin Andrews, Tony Doyle, John Huss, James Mahon, Kay Mathiesen, Bill Taylor, and Dan Zelinski for helpful suggestions on this chapter.

B
ERNARD
E. R
OLLIN WITH
J
OHN
H
USS

I
n 1968, the year that
Planet of the Apes
was released, I was insufferable. Halfway through my doctorate in philosophy at Columbia University, with a couple of trivial publications gracing my resume, and a Fulbright Fellowship at the University of Edinburgh behind me, I was so cool and aloof that I appreciated virtually nothing. If movies were not grainy and incomprehensible, I sneered at them. As for
Planet of the Apes
, I regretted spending a dollar to see it, advised anyone who would listen not to see it, and dismissed it as incoherent, pretentious, hokey, pseudo-intellectual Hollywood drivel.

Yet today, after working on the ethics of scientific research—especially animal research—for more than thirty-five years, and then viewing the movie again, I find it to be an astute, telling, and devastating depiction and critique of what I have called “scientific ideology” or the “common sense” of science. Few movies better illustrate the ubiquitous psychological effects of absurd ideology than
Planet of the Apes
.

It's easy to underestimate the power of ideology to be a source of great evil. Consider the Holocaust: The German government estimates that it took at least fifty thousand full-time workers to carry out the Holocaust smoothly. Is it possible to believe, asks historian Daniel Goldhagen, that there were in fact fifty thousand psychopaths roaming around in Germany waiting to be tapped for such killing?

Not likely, says Goldhagen. So how can we explain such plainly immoral acts as panels of physicians judging that thousands of physically and mentally “defective” children had lives “not worth living” and thereby authorizing their death by lethal injection? Similarly, Goldhagen writes about auxiliary policemen from Germany who were brought to the Eastern front to kill women, children, and “undesirables”—Jews, Gypsies, and many others. Not only were those unwilling to do so not punished, they were rewarded and sent home. Nonetheless, most of them served voluntarily and eagerly.

Goldhagen and others have explained this unexpected behavior by appeal to ideological conditioning. For example, Robert Jay Lifton has demonstrated that German doctors were trained not only in the treatment of individual human beings, but also in removing “pathogens” from the body politic—mentally and physically “defective” people who consumed resources but contributed nothing to society. Similarly, Goldhagen recounts long-standing German ideology that characterizes “outsiders” like the Jews as parasites. Ideologies create predictable, unreflective, automatic, and thoughtless responses to difficult questions. They allow us to act without thinking, and eclipse common sense, common decency, and even basic logic (witness Catholic ideology declaring that something can be both three and one at the same time). It is characteristic of ideology that once we've been trained to embrace it, it seems obvious and unquestionable to us.

In the 1968 movie, the reigning ideology is the superiority of apes to any and all other life forms. There are scenes where Taylor tries to communicate with his captors, at first through gestures, and eventually using words. He protests, “I can speak. . . . I can talk, can't you see?” Still, the apes reject these self-verifying utterances with formulaic responses: “He keeps pretending he can talk.” “He has a gift for mimicry.” “Human see, human do.”

These responses violate both facts and logic. In frustration, Taylor declares “You are a scientist—don't you believe your own eyes?” Indeed, the very fact the apes are able to converse
with Taylor shows conclusively that he is communicating. Were he simply engaging in “mimicry” or “pretending” there could be no flow and give and take of argument—Taylor's responses would not be appropriate, nor could the apes answer him in kind. In short, despite the fact that their dialogue with Taylor belies the content of their own argument, the apes hold fast to their claims, a classic ideological strategy.

Indeed, this is precisely the strategy employed by scientific ideology to dismiss both empirical and conceptual evidence of animal thought and animal communication. Some propositions are so deeply embedded in the background beliefs of scientists that they become almost irrefutable. They are held, dogmatically, in the face of all evidence and argument to the contrary. When science hardens into ideology in this way the result is a near-religion known as “scientism.” When you're in the grip of a scientistic worldview, “facts” that are evident to both sense experience and common sense are ruled out as irrelevant.

Perhaps surprisingly, in the character of Zaius, science and religion are conflated. Zaius is both Minister of Science
and
Chief Defender of the Faith, and his reaction to Taylor's behavior is consonant with that dual role. As Taylor rightly remarks, “Are they afraid of me? I can't hurt them . . . but I threaten them somehow. Threaten their faith in simian superiority. They have to kill me.” Faith and science converge in contemporary science's unwillingness to consider the morality of harming and killing animals for the sake of advancing scientific knowledge. The failure of science to acknowledge the obvious fact that non-human animals can be hurt and harmed and the correlative failure to apply ethical categories to patently hurtful animal use is very much a matter of scientific
faith
, not reason, and thus looks very much like religiously based
dogma
, rather than rational ethics.

Ideologies operate in many different areas—religious, political, sociological, economic, ethnic. So it's not surprising that a scientific ideology has emerged. After all, science has been the dominant way of knowing about the world in Western societies since the Renaissance. In order to fully explain how
Planet of the Apes
is relevant to contemporary ideologically-based moral
abuses, I have to summarize what I have studied and taught for nearly forty years. I call it
scientific ideology
or
the common sense of science
. It is to scientific life what common sense is to daily life.

Ask a typical working scientist what separates science from religion, speculative metaphysics, or shamanistic worldviews. Most would immediately say that science tests all claims through observation and experiment. This aspect of scientific ideology dates to Sir Isaac Newton, who proclaimed that he did not “feign hypotheses” (“
hypotheses non fingo
”) but operated directly from experience. The fact that Newton in fact
did
use such non-observable (and therefore
hypothetical
) notions as gravity, action at a distance, and absolute space and time did not stop him from explicitly ruling out hypotheses. Members of the Royal Society, arguably the first association of scientists, apparently took him literally, gathered data for their ‘commonplace books', and fully expected major scientific breakthroughs to emerge. For the most part, those breakthroughs never came.

The insistence on experience as the bedrock for science continues from Newton to the twentieth century, where it led to
logical positivism
, a movement that was designed to eliminate from science anything that could not be verified by the senses. At its most extreme, it aimed to reduce all of science to a set of general truths logically derivable from observations. Anything not based on sensory experience or logic was to be cast aside as meaningless. A classic example can be found in Einstein's rejection of Newton's concepts of absolute space and time, on the grounds that such talk was untestable.

But the logical positivist program was only partly eliminative, of course. Logical positivism's “positive” program was to encourage the formulation of views in such a way that their predictions could be tested by experience. In a sense, this requirement may very well have bequeathed us the
Planet of the Apes
franchise. On January 14th, 1972, when astronauts Taylor, Landon, Dodge, and Stewart took flight aboard the Icarus, their mission was to test the Hasslein Curve theory of Dr. Otto Hasslein, which predicted that over the course of eighteen months (ship time) that the crew would spend in flight,
most of it in suspended animation, they would be propelled over two thousand years forward in Earth time, a prediction that was confirmed as the ship's clock reads November 25th, 3978 at the time it crashes.

Although logical positivism took many forms, the message to scientists and their students (like me), was that proper science shouldn't allow unverifiable statements. This left scientists free to dismiss religious claims, metaphysical claims, or other speculative assertions not merely as false, and irrelevant to science, but also as meaningless. Only what could be verified (or falsified) empirically was meaningful. A looser requirement was that a claim should be verifiable in principle. “In principle” meant “someday,” given technological progress.