Planet of the Apes and Philosophy

by Huss, John

  But, as Zira quips in Escape from the Planet of the Apes, “Primitive? . . . These tests are prehistoric! They couldn’t test the intelligence of a newt.” Cognitive ethologists argue that laboratory tests such as these show us little of animal intelligence, and that we must measure the intelligence of all creatures through observation of their behaviors in a natural environment. They argue that the lab is too artificial, and too biased toward human values to really help us understand what animals are thinking, and how smart they might be.

  Astronaut Behavior 101

  Measures of intelligence from cognitive ethology—the kind of research that observes animals in their natural environment—are based on things the animal does to preserve itself and plan for its future. The original crash landing of Taylor and his colleagues reveals many of the operative principles in cognitive ethological observation. The first thing they do is attempt to establish where they are in space and time: “It’s not so much where we are, it’s when we are,” quips Taylor. They ponder the accuracy of their instruments, contemplating the tools they used to get to the planet, and wonder just how off course they may be. Notions of location and time are important measures of intelligence for ethologists. Birds such as bluejays that can remember not only where their favorite food is, but how old it is (as it gets less tasty as it ages) put bird brains on the map of animal intelligence research because they demonstrate a sense of time as well as an excellent memory.

  The crash-landed humans proceed to try to figure out what went wrong. Why did Stewart die? Is the theory of relativity accurate, or was there a miscalculation in trajectory? Problem solving is a well-respected measure of intelligence, and understanding cause and effect relationships is an important part of problem solving. Soon, however, as their ship sinks into the lake and they realize that the problem cannot be solved because they are “here to stay,” they turn to more practical matters of locating ammunition, food, and shelter. Determining that they have enough food for three days, much like bluejays, they decide that they need to search for future supplies. From their actions, they exhibit intelligence, for they can remember, plan, and problem-solve. In a habitat that is not so natural, the team passes several cognitive ethological milestones in the measure of intelligence.

  Once we see that they can take care of themselves, another, more sophisticated cognitive function enters the arena. The dialogue shifts from survival to emotion. The astronauts discuss their grief for the lost colleague Stewart. Mourning behavior is seen as an indicator of not only memory, but emotional attachment, which in turn is taken by cognitive ethologists to be an important precursor to moral behavior. No wonder we’re so fascinated by elephants, who travel for miles to visit the boneyards of their ancestors, and spend hours fondling the skeletons of their relatives. They seem to remember, and feel, in just the way human beings do as we visit gravesides and perform ceremonies. Recently it has been reported by researcher Marc Bekoff that magpies also perform ceremonies for their dead, carefully placing grass and baubles near the deceased before flying away.

  And from grief at the loss of Stewart, the conversation turns to the more abstract grief at the loss of their civilization, of everyone they have ever known, and of their once-important ambitions, now so meaningless as they traverse the desert. Emotions run high as the astronauts contemplate the fate of the Earth as well as their own futures. With the range of emotion and abstract thought the astronauts display, we can imagine that the apes are thankful for their scarecrows up on the hills, for by cognitive ethological measures, these astronauts do seem to be intelligent—and intelligence is often dangerous. (But of course, the most frightening thing about them is still that they can speak.)

  At the end of Planet of the Apes one of the best accepted measures of intelligence in the world of ethological research is found—evidence of play. That talking doll, a toy, is of great significance, for play suggests counterfactual reasoning—imagining the world as it is not, and interacting with things that aren’t real.

  Social play is even more important as a measure of intelligence, because beings that play together must somehow agree with each other about an imaginary universe in which they will both participate. When children play cowboys and Indians or war, they do not kill each other because they understand that the scenario they co-create is not real. That takes tremendous cognitive ability: to imagine, to remember, to treat one’s friends as friends, as well as to create a narrative about something in an imaginative plane that is shared. The doll at the end of the film speaks volumes about cognition well beyond language—cognition that includes co-operation, imagination, and the envisioning of how things could be different.

  Is Language the Last Word on Intelligence?

  We’re reminded of just how important language is as a measure of intelligence when we learn early in Rise of the Planet of the Apes that by eighteen months Caesar was signing up to twenty-four words, when in Planet of the Apes we see that Landon has been subject to some sort of language-erasing lobotomy, and when in Escape from the Planet of the Apes, the apes caution each other with “Our safety is in our silence.”

  There is no threat from the apes in Conquest of the Planet of the Apes—no matter how many intelligent “tricks” they perform—until Caesar mutters “Lousy human bastards.” Amidst the chaos at the chimp facility in Rise of the Planet of the Apes the stupefied human population asks “What happened?” The answer given in the film is not that the chimps broke free, nor is it that they organized, planned, and co-ordinated an attack on human civilization. Rather, says Rodney, “He spoke.”

  But should language be such a threat, and such an important measure of intelligence? One philosopher, Quine, just says ‘No.’

  Quine developed a thought experiment to illustrate a concept called the inscrutability of reference, by which he meant that we don’t really ever know for sure what anyone else is referring to, even if that person is speaking the same language that we are. Take, for example, the case of an anthropologist who has been assigned to decipher a newly discovered foreign language that is solely spoken by an isolated tribe. There are no natural translators for the language. In his example, Quine suggests that the smart anthropologist will go out and observe the tribe’s speech behaviors just as any cognitive ethologist would, taking notes in a notebook every time a certain word is spoken. On day one, a member of the tribe walks out of her hut, points at a rabbit, and utters the sound “Gavagai.” The anthropologist makes note of this, guessing that perhaps ‘gavagai’ means rabbit. On day two, a man walks out of the brush, points in the direction of a rabbit, and also says ‘gavagai.’ Our anthropologist again makes a note of this, and is pleased with herself for having figured out what some words in this language might mean.

  But Quine suggests that our anthropologist is overly confident, because there is ultimately no way to know exactly what these natives are pointing to when they speak. Perhaps, in their minds, they are pointing to undetached rabbit parts or temporal slices of rabbitness or something that we have not even conceived of yet. Since there is no way to tell the difference between our ordinary conception of rabbit and undetached rabbit parts, there is no way for us to know exactly what the tribe members mean when they say ‘gavagai.’ Indeed, Quine concludes, there really is no way for us to be sure that we know what anyone is referring to at any given time, because we cannot see inside the mind of another person. While uttering ‘gavagai’ might still get us the result of a rabbit, we don’t know how the other person conceives of the rabbitty-like-thing she hands to us in our discussion.

  Since we can’t be sure exactly what anyone means when he or she uses a word, there seems to be a real worry regarding using language as the ultimate measure of intelligence. There is a real-world example that helps to reveal just how prejudiced we are toward language. People with Williams-Beuren syndrome often have strong speaking ability and tend to be very cheerful, friendly, trusting, and talkative. In other words, on first meeting, they can be completely charming. Howe
ver, the down side of the condition is moderate mental retardation. No matter how verbal they are, they often have difficulty doing many of the other tasks we associate with intelligence, such as problem-solving, planning, learning, and memory. As biased as we are toward language, there are still cases that show that language is not the last word on intelligence.

  Be Clever—Be Quiet

  Perhaps remaining silent is more intelligent than using language. Is this why Nova continuously tried to stop Taylor from speaking? She put her hand over his mouth, smeared out his word written in the dirt, and persisted in refusing to say her name. Perhaps she knew something about speech that Taylor didn’t—that it can be used against the orator, that it can be misinterpreted, that it can create prejudice, bias, injustice, and bombs.

  Nova may well be protecting him from the consequences of his speech, which may be seen as a threat in their religious setting—analogous to the pre-Darwinian era—in which the simian brain alone is believed to have the spark of the divine. Zira and Cornelius urge Taylor to “be clever . . . be quiet” at his trial. Indeed, the films of Planet of the Apes as a body of work suggest repeatedly that the smart are the silent, perhaps obliquely suggesting that the animals do not speak to us because of their intellectual superiority. Zira and Cornelius themselves attempt to seem speechless as they arrive on earth in Escape. As Milo says, in Escape from the Planet of the Apes— this is “a time not for lies, but for silence.”

  In Beneath the Planet of the Apes, Brent looks at the eroded subway station and wonders about the nature of the mute: “Are you what we were before we learned to talk and made fools of ourselves?” Language has led to the destruction and devastation he sees around him. Is this why the native humans do not speak in the early movies? None of the brain surgery and psychological testing that take place in simian psychological research of the early films answers the question of the mute humans. All we know from the first film is that the key to human muteness is not to be found in human physiology. Could it lie instead in a decision the humans made?

  Beyond annihilating the planet, language has led us to destroying each other, simian or human. In Escape from the Planet of the Apes, we’re warned “If you are caught by the gorillas you must remember never to speak . . . If they catch you speaking they will dissect you and kill you in that order.” Even the Caesar of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes must pretend he is silent like the other pet chimpanzees, for his own safety. And the Caesar of Rise of the Planet of the Apes finds himself a circus-trained orangutan companion who tells him, “Man no like smart ape.” In an oppressive society, it may well be smarter to follow the methods of American slaves, who developed a linguistic vernacular like “black English” that seemed stupid and halting to their captors but was actually sophisticated and as rule-bound as any language is. To be smarter than your oppressors, play stupid. And a great method for appearing stupid is to behave as if you don’t comprehend language, or enact it poorly. As MacDonald says in Battle for the Planet of the Apes, “Brightness has never been encouraged among slaves.”

  Cornelius’s advice to a morally outraged Zira in Escape from the Planet of the Apes was “Have a grape, dear, and look the other way,” but this urge to refuse to re-think our judgments of intelligence and what they so often seem to allow in terms of “sub-human” treatment is exactly what these films help us to overcome. By watching the Planet of the Apes movies, we look right at our own prejudices, tendencies toward unfairness, and biases about intelligence. The series helps us do better than drink more “grape juice” and lapse into our denial about the treatment of others who do not speak (or who fail to speak our language). Through art such as movies, we have the ability to go beyond our prejudices regarding intelligence and re-think our treatment of non-human animals. We just say no to our bias toward language as the most important measure of intelligence and moral worth.

  3

  Are Apes Sneaky Enough to Be People?

  DON FALLIS

  Pierre Boulle’s novel Planet of the Apes is clearly an allegory about how we should and should not treat other people. In Planet of the Apes as American Myth, Eric Greene suggests that, taken as a whole, the Planet of the Apes movies present a case against the enslavement and oppression of people who seem to us to be more primitive or less than fully human.

  But also, Boulle’s novel and the subsequent movie series directly raise the question of what it takes to be a person. Are any nonhuman animals, such as apes, smart enough to count as persons? In his recent review of the documentary Project Nim, Princeton philosopher Peter Singer suggests that the answer is Yes.

  One obvious indicator of superior intelligence and cognitive development, and the one that Singer focuses on, is the ability to use language. But while several researchers have tried to teach primates (such as Koko and Nim Chimpsky) to use sign language, the results have been inconclusive. For instance, it has been suggested that these researchers were (much like the trainers of Clever Hans, the horse that could allegedly do arithmetic) unconsciously giving the apes cues about what to sign and that the apes were just imitating them.

  Maybe the apes were just aping the humans. In the original 1968 movie, the apes are at first quite skeptical of Taylor’s ability to use language. The keeper thinks that his attempts to speak (which he is unable to do because he has been shot in the throat) are a case of “human-see-human-do.” Cornelius is sure that even Taylor’s written notes are just a “stunt.”

  But another possible indicator of intelligence (and, thus, of personhood) is the ability to deceive. In fact, many years before Boulle’s novel, Robert Heinlein (1907–1988) wrote a science fiction story called “Jerry Is a Man,” in which genetically enhanced apes are able to perform menial tasks and have some ability to speak. When the human characters are deciding whether one of these apes is a person (and, thus, should not be euthanized when he is no longer able to work), a critical piece of evidence is that Jerry is able to lie.

  Such deception requires fairly sophisticated cognitive capacities that we usually only associate with humans. In order to deceive, you must be what Tufts philosopher Daniel Dennett calls, in his 1981 book Brainstorms, a “second-order intentional system.” Not only must you be capable of having beliefs, desires, and other intentions, you must be capable of having beliefs and desires about beliefs and desires. In particular, it must be possible for you to want someone else to have a false belief.

  General Thade, from Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes, is a good example of a mendacious second-order intentional system. In order to get permission to eliminate the humans, he lies to Senator Sandar. Thade tells the senator that his daughter Ari has been kidnapped by the humans. He does this because he wants the senator to have the false belief that they kidnapped her.

  We’ll Check This with the Authenticator

  In addition to deception requiring sophisticated cognitive capacities, many psychologists argue that deception is how we became humans in the first place. According to Andrew Whiten and Richard Byrne’s Machiavellian Intelligence hypothesis, the evolutionary advantage of being able to deceive other members of one’s social group is what led to the remarkable brain size and intelligence that separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom.

  As the philosopher David Livingstone Smith explains in a 2005 article in Scientific American Mind, “social complexity propelled our ancestors to become progressively more intelligent and increasingly adept at wheeling, dealing, bluffing and conniving.” Those individuals who had a greater ability to deceive (and a greater ability to detect deceivers) were more likely to pass on their genes.

  If it’s so advantageous to be able to detect deception, it’s a little bit strange that humans are so bad at it. Experimental studies suggest that most of us are able to detect liars at only slightly better than chance. We’re not at all like the subterranean mutant humans with telepathic capabilities (a.k.a. the Keepers of the Divine Bomb in Beneath the Planet of the Apes) who can simply tell that Brent is lying when he
says that “the Apes are a primitive, semi-articulate and underdeveloped race whose weapons have not progressed beyond the club and the sling!” In order to be sure that someone is not lying to us, we’ve had to develop assistive technologies, such as the sodium pentothal that Dr. Otto Hasslein uses on Zira in Escape from the Planet of the Apes or the “Authenticator” that Inspector Kolp uses on Armando in Conquest of the Planet of the Apes.

  In his book Telling Lies, Paul Ekman—the inspiration for Cal Lightman, the protagonist of the TV show Lie To Me— offers an explanation for why we need such technological assistance. He claims that “our ancestral environment did not prepare us to be astute lie catchers. . . . Serious lies probably did not occur often, because a lack of privacy would have made the chances of being caught high” (pp. 341–42). But Ekman’s suggestion here, which conflicts with the Machiavellian Intelligence hypothesis, can’t be right. Anybody who is part of a family knows that a lot of deception goes on even though privacy can be hard to come by. But does this apply to ape families or just human families?

  You Damn Dirty Apes!

  Just like humans, the highly intelligent apes in the Planet of the Apes series certainly have the ability to deceive. General Thade is a notable example, but he’s not the only untrustworthy ape in the series by a long shot. In Escape from the Planet of the Apes, after the “ape-nauts” land on present-day Earth and are taken to the Los Angeles Zoo, they pretend that they are unable to talk. And once Cornelius and Zira do start talking, they start lying. They tell the Presidential Commission that they do not know Taylor, and they conceal how apes treat humans in the time that they come from. In Conquest of the Planet of the Apes and in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Caesar also has to pretend to be just a normal, non-talking, ape. But not only that, in Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, Caesar feigns being electrocuted so that the humans will think that he’s dead. (Fortunately Mr. MacDonald had just turned off the power.)