Lecture to the No-Y-ian Association

7 June 2001

Aristotelian Ape Mind versus Humean Human Mind

by

Dennis K. Chong and Jennifer K. Smith Chong ©

(In this paper, the male pronoun will to apply either gender. Where the plural pronoun is used, it will apply to both authors. Where the nominal pronoun is used, it will apply to the first author.)

We dedicate this paper to our friend and caring man of minds:

Professor Don Ranney

and

Professor Robert Malone

our friend and man of minding minds.

In the fields of Psychiatry, Psychology, Psychotherapy and Counseling are cases that witness the most vicious forms and manners of interrelating between human beings. It is sometimes a staggering mystery how one party can pursue the fixed outcome to utterly dominate or destroy the other. One is compelled to wonder where it is coming from? This is something that is alien to us, but it is seemingly not so for the other. The question is what is the epistemological driver for this state of affairs.

It is insufficient to say that things are so because, “He is bad” or “She is rotten” or “It is her abused childhood” or “He knows no better.” Even if these conclusions are true-to-fact, we are still left with the question, “So, how does it follow if he/she is X . . . then this happens.”

In a very real sense we have never been able to find a completely satisfactory answer to this conundrum until now. For us, today, it is to be found in a work by Radu J. Bogdan called, Minding Minds published by the MIT Press. What he proposes is found in our roots. These roots are described in the vernacular that say that we are descended from the apes! It is to be found in our pre-human ancestry.

If this is true, it would seem plausible that we will inevitably have some traces of thinking and being from our evolutionary predecessors. These traces are known as phylogenetic engrams. In apes today, they do not have semantic phylogenetic engrams to determine their thinking and being. What they have are the original thinking and behavioural semantic blueprints. In the line of their genealogy their semantic paradigms were inherited in toto intacta. In the vernacular, we would say, they have the real McCoy.

What then are the features of this mind, a.k.a. Aristotelian ape mind? These features are reflected in these two quotes:

The social imaginings and plans contemplated by apes would be linear, forward-looking, limited and probably coarse-grained permutations from current situations.

The ape mind is situated, reflex, confined to present perception and motivation (the fixed point), yet able to imagine on-line forward-looking but partial alternative to current states of affairs. The imagining is probably cued by genetic priming as well as past experiences and expectations about standard multilateral arrangements of the zero-sum sort (kinship, reciprocation, alliances, dominance).

Radu J. Bogdan: Minding Minds MIT Press page 62.

The models coming from conflict and game theory, suggest that the zero-sum nature of rough politics practiced by non-human primates (I win, you lose and vice versa) raises representation and computation problems that are different from and simpler than those faced in the non-zero-sum forms of epistemic and communal coordination, which are uniquely human.⁷ The idea is that non-human primates do not appear to evolve specialized interpretive skills dedicated to the non-zero-sum epistemic and communal activities (such as learning or co-operation) whereas humans do evolve such skills.⁸ This is the mighty difference anticipated earlier, because it is such skills of non-zero-sum coordination which most in driving the evolutionary complicity between interpretation and mental rehearsal toward metamentation.

Ibidem page 62.

From what has been cited in these two quotes, one thing is clear. If such a blueprint of thinking is still in us as semantic phylogenetic engrams, it will mean that it is in us to think and act like apes!

Is there any evidence to support this assertion? There is. It is not only in these mental cases that come to the doctor’s office. We only have to scan across the history of nations of the world and see the men who have come to power and have behaved like alpha dominant apes to their people. These men have stripped the wealth of their people, looted their riches, despoiled all their capital and plundered their national revenue and subjected their people to all manner of human rights violations. In this ape list we have Hitler of Germany, Mussolini of Italy, Stalin of Russia, Mao of China, Doc. Duvalier of Haiti, Fulgencio Batista of Cuba, Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, Samoza of Nicaragua, Suharto of Indonesia, Moise Tshombe of Katanga, Idi Amin of Uganda, Bokasa of the Central African Republic, Pinochet of Chile etc.

This phenomenon does not apply to rulers of nations. These are people who can be found everywhere in our lives whose only game is a “ zero-sum nature of rough politics practiced by non-human primates (I win, you lose and vice versa).” This stance is practically universal.

A friend of mine invited me to see the DVD of Gladiator with his magnificent surround sound system. I only had time to view the opening passages of the film. It was awesome to see the German tribes massing up again the Roman Legions. And up on the hill was Marcus Aurelius. The entire battle scene that then erupted was nothing but an unfolding expression of his ape mind. And, in turn, the thought flashed into my mind, “What an ape you are?” I was quite surprised at myself thinking such a thought of this man who was is a historically famed and respected Stoic philosopher.

And then I was reminded of our augmentation of the Meta Programs in our work Power and Elegance in Communication (1993) that we renamed the Enriched Meta Programs. In this expansion was the sort for POWER. It is clear to us that this sort is nothing but a metaphor of the phylogenetic engram of the Aristotelian ape mind. Like Aurelius, it was a “ zero-sum nature of rough politics practiced by non-human primates (I win, you lose and vice versa).”

What we have also come to realize is that if this philosophy is embedded within the larger meta philosophy of Cause and Effect, a.k.a. the Blame Frame, it will be powered to extreme and unbelievable exponentials. This kind of neuro-semantics is to be found in the lion prides and wolf packs. When the resident dominant males is expelled, the new “kings”pursue them even to the point of killing them. If we dismiss this as something that only animals do then we need to remind ourselves what Michaevilli wrote in his work The Prince. In this work, he (a human being, a thinker and social politician) commended that the prince who takes over a house must completely exterminate all members of the family of the previous ruler. This recommendation is nothing but a metaphor of the ape mind of Michaevilli.

We have in our clinical work encountered husbands who sought and succeeded to rule their wives and their family like some alpha dominant ape. In one case, in the divorce suit, the man’s lawyer was able to strip the entire asset base of his wife, even though he had done nothing to help to earn it. The wife was left destitute. We have known of people who were in work situations in which they had to submit to a person whose ways would have been a credit to Gestapo commandant in a WW II prisoner of war camp. In school, a bully is nothing but an ape. In our social relationships we have encountered persons who seek to be the alpha of the group. There is no need to struggle or to effort to search for people with Aristotelian ape minds. They are everywhere.

If it is true that we did evolve from pre-human forms, then what have we evolved into? This brings us to the Christian axiom that God created man to his image. This figure of speech cannot be taken literally. I am a Chinaman. I do not believe that God looks like a Chinese man. We hold the view that the image that is referred to is the grammar, syntax and semantics of God. Evolution is, therefore, about the evolution of our grammar, syntax and semantics. This is reflected in this quote:

Metamentation builds on formats of interpretation and imagination which are unsituated, explicit, fine-grained . off-line, meta-ascending, and backlooping.

This apparently unique development (documented in later chapters) allows human minds to engage each other in open-ended and non-zero-sum or contractual forms of coordination in which what an agent would plan or choose to do and do, depends on what other agents would plan and choose to do and do. In this sort of coordination, agents succeed if and only if each does what others expect each to do. This is to say that the gambit works only if each agent shares with others the recognition of such expectations and of the contexts in which they work. Sharing recognitions is an absolute novelty in primate mentation. It is an ability that totally redesigns the human mind. Suppose that these patterns of mutual engagement, based on such mental sharing, displays regularities that the participants recognize and conform to, and recognize that others recognize and conform to them, also recognize that such mutual recognition and conformity ensures the success of their collaborative efforts. The conformity in question is to rules and norms mostly cultural, of which social and linguistic conventions are a distinguished subclass.

Radu J. Bogdan: Minding Minds MIT Press page 63.

When we compare the two evaluations of the Aristotelian ape mind and the Humean human mind we can immediately grasp the evolutionary quantum difference between the two. It is by this evolutionary step that the following is possible:

Reflective metathinking operates in communication, education, indoctrination, scientific theorizing or argumentation, and often takes the form of sequential metamentation whereby a metathinker deploys thoughts about other thoughts and still other thoughts. These deployments are run by generative routines.

Ibidem page 89.

This is what apes are not capable of. They do not have the same faculty of grammar, syntax and semantics of Humean human dimensions..

Human relationships are fragile at the best of times because of our competing and differing beliefs and sorts. When the relationship:

1 has the shadow of an Aristotelian ape mind over it

2. it is within the frame of Cause and Effect

there is nothing but disaster for all involved. There is no hope for dialogue, decalogue or any logue. From this state of affairs flows the anger of homicidal proportions whether we elect to call them jealousy, road rage, home rage, air rage or office rage. The alpha mind drives itself to dominate, not even if, but especially if it will entail the life of the other.

How to undo or salvage such a state of affairs is not the task of this paper. It will take us into the domain of the inversions of semantic analogical ill-formedness to well-formedness. However, we can assure you that the technology to do this is here. It can be done. This will be the subject of a paper at another time.

References:

Dennis K. Chong & Jennifer K. Smith Chong: Power and Elegance in Communication C-Jade Publications Inc. 1993

Radu J. Bogdan: Minding Minds MIT Press 1999