Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

A fish, a cat, a dog, or a bird catching sight of itself in the mirror apparently understands the image only as another member of the same species. If unhabituated to mirror images, male animals may attempt to intimidate the reflection; it must be sensed as a rival male. The image intimidates back and the animal may flee. Eventually, it accommodates to the silent, odorless, and harmless image and learns to ignore it. By mirror reflection criteria, these animals don’t seem very smart. It is said that human children must usually be about two years old before they grasp that their mirror image is not some other child with a talent for imitation. In recognizing what a reflection is, monkeys also are like fish, cats, dogs, birds, and human infants. They don’t get it. But some apes are like us.

In 1977 the psychologist Gordon Gallup published an article entitled “Self-Recognition in Primates.”⁴⁹ When chimpanzees born in the wild were confronted with a full-length mirror, at first—like other animals—they thought the reflection was someone else. But within a few days they had it figured out. Then, they’d use the mirror to preen, and to examine inaccessible parts of themselves, looking over their shoulders to view their backs, for example. Gallup then anesthetized the chimps and painted them red—in places that they could see only in the mirror. Upon regaining consciousness and resuming the pleasures of self-examination in the mirrors, they quickly discovered the red marks. Did they reach out to the ape in the glass? Instead, they groped their own bodies, touched the painted areas repeatedly, and then smelled their fingers. They trebled the time they spent each day examining their mirror images.*

Among the other great apes, Gallup found mirror self-awareness in orangs, but not in gorillas. Later, he may have found it in dolphins. We are conscious, he proposes, when we know that we exist, and have a mind when we monitor our own mental states. By these criteria, Gallup concludes, chimps and orangs, at least, are conscious and have minds.⁵⁰

“As to what concerns fidelity, there is no animal in the world so treacherous as man,” said Montaigne.⁵¹ But male fireflies skillfully interpose their own blinks so as to make the courting message of their rivals disagreeable to the females. Some chimp females vampirishly stalk young mothers of their group, waiting for the chance to steal and eat their newborns. Many primates seek surreptitious matings when the alpha’s attention is elsewhere. Few of the male alliances rippling through the dominance hierarchy persist beyond their utility. Deception in the social relations of animals, and even self-deception in animals, is an emerging and productive topic in biology; whole books are written about it.⁵²

Chimps sometimes lie. They also sometimes try to outwit others who are lying. This fact surely affords us a glimpse inside their minds:An especially telling example is the duplicity displayed by chimpanzees trying to keep the locality of cached food to themselves, and the cunning of others at beating the bluff … You cannot—logically cannot—tell lies unintentionally; even the idea of self-deception involves the intentional model, one part of the self trying to put it over on the rest. The dissembling chimpanzee appears to be acting on the understanding of what the signs he gives will mean to others, and hence intentionally.⁵³

And yet it is not so long ago that a modern philosopher, among many others, was saying,It would be senseless to attribute to an animal a memory that distinguished the order of events in the past, and it would be senseless to attribute to it an expectation of an order of events in the future. It does not have the concepts of order, or any concepts at all.⁵⁴

How could he know that?

The chimpanzee’s interior monologue is doubtless not up to the standard of the average philosopher’s, but that they have some notion of themselves, what they look like, what their needs are, their past experiences, future expectations, and how they relate to others—enough for the purposes of a “social order”—seems beyond doubt.

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