The Fully Conscious Ape

Abstract

Every student of animal behavior or comparative psychology quickly learns that any tendency to explain the behavior of animals from a human perspective must be avoided. The error of anthropomorphism is made especially clear for students of primate behavior in the relatively new discipline called “primate cognition.” Previously, work on this topic was done within the field of comparative psychology, or primate behavior. However, with the rise of computer programs and the ability to test primate skills through the use joysticks (Hopkins, Washburn, & Rumbaugh, 1989; Rumbaugh, Richardson, Washburn, Savage-Rumbaugh, & Hopkins, 1989), it became increasingly acceptable to refer to what nonhuman primates do as “thinking,” or “cognating.” The complexity of computer programs themselves went far beyond the stimulus-response framework of animal behavior and with the rise of AI programs that made real-time decisions and offered real-time answers to questions. They made it reasonable to attribute thinking and high-level cognition to animals. However, the question of whether or not either AI programs, or monkeys, are actually engaging in more than high-level correlational analytic processes remains open. On the other hand, the case for humans is clear. We can identify stop lights, motor bikes, and store fronts in a series of photos – a skill that, oddly enough, separates us from our computers.1