David Deutsch: evaluation

Transcript context

…I feel I can predict humans better than cats often. But do chimpanzees understand, in your view? No one knows. They show virtually no sign of understanding anything. There are some really nice experiments on wild gorillas by Richard Byrne, who’s both a theoretical and very practical animal behavior expert. He was wondering how gorillas transmit their memes — that is, their culturally inherited behaviors — from one gorilla to another. One thing is, the first answer is very slowly. It takes absolutely ages, months and months, for a gorilla to be able to copy another gorilla’s behavior well enough to do something complicated. They can copy “wave hand” and that sort of thing, but to copy a complex behavior like required to open a difficult kind of nut which no other animal can open (this is why they have memes, because that’s a very useful ability), it takes them a long time. Then he did some ingenious experiments, or rather observations. (He didn’t interfere with the gorillas.) He did some observations to try to determine whether they understand why they are doing each particular action. It involves — I don’t know what it involves — grabbing with both hands and twisting in one way and then pulling another way, and so on. Apparently, these gorillas are prone to a certain injury which disables their thumb. They can’t move their thumb, which is quite disabling for them, just as it is for us. The thing is, when you’ve disabled your thumb, one of these motions becomes irrelevant and the others become less effective. But the gorillas which have learnt how to do the thing will make the motion, the ineffective motion, again and again, every single time. (He explains this better than I do.) That’s like human beings borrowing at high interest rates, right? They’ll do that many, many times in a row.…

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