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Great Apes As Rational Agents

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In Chapter 5 of The Evolution Of Agency, Michael Tomasello discusses the nature of the agency displayed by the great apes. This group consists of five species, chimpanzees, bonoboes, orangutans, gorillas and humans. The first four of these are the subject of this chapter. African great apes seem to have emerged about 14 million years ago following millions of years of evolution of mammals. The changes were far-reaching.

There are three relevant threads in this chapter:

  1. evidence of the rationality of great apes
  2. evidence that they recognize that others of their species act intentionally, possibly including humans
  3. the evolutionary pressures that might have contributed to the development of these two mental capacities

Tomasello offers an explanation of this rationality as dependent on a second tier of executive control.

Rationality of Great Apes

Tomasello gives a number of examples of evidence from field observations and experiments that shows the great apes are capable of observing their environment and acting on it it rational ways. One is their understanding of tools. For example, they use sticks to fish for ants and termites to eat. If there is no stick nearby they will tear off a twig from a tree, and strip the leaves if there are too many. They will drop stones on above-ground termite nests to flush out the bugs. Here’s how Tomasello ascribes rationality to this practice:

… [W]hen faced with a novel physical problem, great apes can also take control of the causal process and make new tools that will work in the new context. In this case, they are first imagining an effect that is needed to solve the problem, and then going back to create a cause. For example, in the wild, chimpanzees routinely modify too-leafy branches by stripping leaves from them so that they will fit into termite holes. P. 72, cite omitted.

Here’s another example. The experimenter shows a piece of food to a chimpanzee and then puts it into one of two cups. The experimenter shakes the empty cup. The chimpanzee is allowed to pick a cup, and chooses the unshaken cup. This shows a reasoning chain: no noise means no food; therefore the food is in the other cup. Tomasello says that these are forms of logical organization that we should consider as rational.

Great apes understand some cause and effects created by others

Great apes understand cause and effects created by their own actions, as do other mammals. Unlike other mammals, they also understand indirect causes of results, as with the use of tools. They also recognize that other creatures can themselves cause effects through their actions. Tomasello cites a paper reporting

… that three human-raised chimpanzees selectively reproduced actions that a human demonstrator intended to perform over actions she performed only accidentally; the chimpanzees also performed actions that a human intended to perform but did not actually succeed in performing. P. 75.

A two-part experiment tests whether chimpanzees can “use self-experience to infer what another sees”. (Abstract here). Great apes will took at what another is looking at, which is referred to as gaze-following. The subjects are taught the visual properties of two screens, one opaque, one see-through. The first experiment tests gaze-following when the experimenter is using each screen. The subjects don’t seem to distinguish between the two types of mask in the gaze-following experiment.

The second experiment uses a competition model, where the chimpanzee and the experimenter are dealing with food in two boxes. One has an opaque lid and the other a screen or a transparent lid. The subject is taught the effects of the three lids. Then food is placed in both boxes. If the chimpanzee tries to get food when the experimenter can see it (transparent or screen lid), the experimenter takes it away. To get the food, the chimpanzee must know from its own experience whether the experimenter can see the food. In this setting the chimpanzees get the food significantly more often, leading the experimenters to “conclude that chimpanzees successfully used their self-experience to infer what the competitor sees.”

Tomasello also cites some evidence of social learning in great apes. He says they can learn by noticing the results of the actions of other great apes, and then doing the same thing or something similar.

Evolutionary pressures

Tomasello suggests two types of environmental pressures that might have led to the evolution of these skills. First, fruit is an important part of the diet of chimpanzeees. Fruit trees grow in small clumps, and don’t put out fruit at the same time. Chimpanzees tend to sleep in large groups at night, and split into small groups for foraging. The smaller groups somewhat reduce the competition for food.

Great apes do not usually share these finds. The dominant member of the small group takes all it wants. Even so, predicting the behavior of competitors makes it more likely that subordinate individuals will obtain sufficient food.

Another factor might be that the great apes depend on social learning to maintain their groups, and to understand whether a specific behavior is or is not tolerated. Great apes have longer juvenile periods than other mammals, and much of their time is spent in groups where they learn to align their behavior with that of others. This requires them to be able to attribute their own experience to others of their groups.

This attribution seems to extend to their own mental states. As an example, juvenile chimpanzees use a specific arm gesture to indicate a desire to play with another. The juveniles know that the other must be looking at them in order to see the signal just as they do, and they wait until the other is looking at them to make it.

The psychological processes of great apes

Recall that Tomasello proposes a modes in which small mammals have an executive tier that supervises and controls the operational tier of mental processes. He suggests that great apes have a second level of control which he calls the reflective tier. Its function is to “… to monitor, troubleshoot, and intervene in processes of executive decision-making and cognitive control….” P. 82. In effect, Tomasello says it gives the great apes access to their own mental processes. This fits with the evidence he cites. For example, it explains how great apes can attribute their mental processes to other.

It also explains the results of this experiment cited by Tomasello. The subjects were rewarded for setting a group of blocks on end. Then a block was added that wouldn’t stand on end because of an internal weight. The subjects frequently inspected that block carefully trying to figure out why it wouldn’t stand up. The subjects are trying to reach a goal but failing. Tomasello says in this case the reflective tier in intervening in the intentional action to try to figure out why what works for most blocks doesn’t work for this specific block.

Discussion

1. Of course great apes can’t explain why they make these choices, so perhaps we humans don’t immediately think of them as rational. But think of the number of decisions we make without using strict logical constructions. In many of these cases rationality is buried so deep in our brains that we don’t really need to use language to work out the solution. This is similar to what Kahneman describes in Thinking Fast And Slow, which Tomasello cites in an earlier chapter for a similar proposition.

2. So far we’ve looked at three categories of agency, goal-directed agency as in lizards, intentional agency as in squirrels and cats, and rational agency as in the great apes. Tomasello’s thesis is that the psychological processes of human agency evolved through these groups.

Next he takes up humans. And so will I.

Power And Rationality

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Index And Introduction To The Subject And Power By Michel Foucault

Foucault begins his essay The Subject and Power by telling us that his project is understanding how human beings are made subjects. By this he means both a) objects for others to study, and b) objects for domination and exploitation. We generally study things, including human beings, through methods which “try to give themselves the status of science”; or by dividing things into groups and studying the groups; or by dividing ourselves into parts and studying those parts in ourselves or others.

Foucault describes three of the ways in which people are enmeshed in relations with each other: relations of production, relations of signification (communication), and power relations. He says that economics gives us tools to consider the first, and linguistics and semiotics give us tools to understand the second, but he couldn’t find any similar academic-type disciplines useful in considering power relations. Legal models point us to the proper uses of power, and other considerations point to the role of the state, but these are only small parts of power relations. That awareness pointed him to study of power relations in a broader context.

So, Foucault’s overall project is to create a theory, a systematic way of thinking about power relations. To create a theory, we have to objectify the thing to be studied. That requires conceptualization, through critical thinking. He says he has to check his thinking constantly.

1. He says the conceptualization should not be founded on a theory of the object. That is, we don’t start with a theory of the object. Instead we start with a description of the object in the context in which it exists, and the history of how it came to be. We have to recognize that that history influences our thinking in a deep way. It can make it very hard to see the thing objectively. This ties back to the point I made in the first post in this series: the importance of Foucault’s methods.

2. We must examine the kind of reality we are considering. Power is a matter of lived experience, not of abstract theory. Its manifestations are a central problem of our time. Our recent history includes two “pathological forms” of power relations: fascism and Stalinism. Neither was new. They both used existing techniques of power, existing mechanisms and devices. Despite their internal madness there was a kind of rationality.

We have to limit our rationality to the boundaries given by experience. One possibility is the use of reason. This was the goal of the Enlightenment, to use reason to solve problems, material problems, social problems, and even psychiatric problems. It might make sense to consider the rationality of various subparts of society, as Foucault has done, with sexuality, crime, madness and more.

But Foucault has a very specific idea for studying power:

//It consists of taking the forms of resistance against different forms of power as a starting point.//

This is a smart move, because we do not directly consider an unknown object called power, which we haven’t even defined yet. To do this Foucault will look at ways of identifying resistance, the history of that resistance, its motivations and its goals. The hope is that in the process of considering resistance, we can get a clearer picture of the thing resisted, as if we were defining it by its boundaries.

For example, to find out what our society means by sanity, perhaps we should investigate what is happening in the field of insanity.

And what we mean by legality in the field of illegality.

And, in order to understand what power relations are about, perhaps we should investigate the forms of resistance and attempts made to dissociate these relations.

Here’s my example. We have an enormous code of laws, regulations and procedures. We say we are a government of laws, not men, and that the rules and procedures define legality. But in the real world, we can understand legality better by looking at the parts of that legal structure that we actually enforce, the people we hold accountable and the way we enforce it against different people.

Discussion

1. We generally think of the Enlightenment as leading us to the scientific method, the foundation of all our sciences today. A key element of the scientific method is that we understand things in the context of a paradigm, as we saw in Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, for example here. The paradigm predicts an outcome so we check to see if that’s what happens. If not it’s possible we have reached the limits of validity of the paradigm.

Foucault is forced to start from the beginning with the theory of power because in his view there are no acceptable existing theoretical frameworks. He needs a method for studying things without a paradigm.

2. But his argument has a broader implication. He writes:

… [S]ince Kant, the role of philosophy is to prevent reason from going beyond the limits of what is given in experience; but from the same moment-that is, since the development of the modern state and the political management of society-the role of philosophy is also to keep watch over the excessive powers of political rationality ….

We saw this idea in Hannah Arendt’s The Origins Of Totalitarianism. Both the Nazis and the Communists carried their theories from their more or less empirical beginnings in Darwin and Marx to murderous extremes, but in an inexorably logical way. Here’s my discussion:

The last chapter of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism is devoted to discussion of the totalitarian regime, which comes when the totalitarian movement has taken power. Arendt says that totalitarian movements don’t offer a specific program for government. Instead, they propose to operate under a “scientific” program. For the Nazis, this was the law of nature with its eternal progress towards perfection, which Arendt thinks arises from a corrupted form of Darwinism. For the Communists it was the laws of history as supposedly discovered by Marx. Once in power, the totalitarian regime becomes an instrument for the will of the leader, who in turn is an instrument for imposing and acting out those laws.

Earlier in the book, Arendt discusses one of the reasons people found this irresistible. She points to their loneliness, their alienation, their rootlessness, their irrelevance, their impotence:

That thought processes characterized by strict self-evident logicality, from which apparently there is no escape, have some connection with loneliness was once noticed by [Martin] Luther …. A lonely man, says Luther, “always deduces one thing from the other and thinks everything to the worst.” The famous extremism of totalitarian movements, far from having anything to do with true radicalism, consists indeed in this “thinking everything to the worst,” in this deducing process which always arrives at the worst possible conclusions. P.477-8.

Foucault’s discussion of rationality is similar to the idea expressed by Oliver Wendell Holmes quoted and sourced here:

… the whole outline of the law is the resultant of a conflict at every point between logic and good sense — the one striving to work fiction out to consistent results, the other restraining and at last overcoming that effort when the results are too manifestly unjust.

I think this is a pretty good description of the political problem we face today. The Democrats at bottom are trying to work with reality, sometimes aware of the limits of theory and sometimes willing to learn from experience. The Republicans at bottom are only interested in their truth: a vile and corrupt form of neoliberal capitalism. They intend to follow this “truth” to the ends of rationality regardless of the consequences in the real world.

And it finds a receptive audience in the mass of alienated people who make up the Trumpian base,