The Probability Broach, chapter 9
Win Bear keeps getting attacked by unknown assailants, and he’s narrowly escaped death twice. In the anarcho-capitalist North American Confederacy, there are no police. If you’re in danger, you have to pay for private security to protect yourself. Win’s counterpart, Ed Bear, has done just that:
Captain Forsyth, head of the security contingent, was an old friend of Ed’s, a grizzled, wiry customer in a gray herringbone lava-lava and long black cutaway coat—right in style for Confederate rent-a-cops, and not the least bit funny once you took in the wide leather gunbelt and heavy automatic strapped around his waist.
…Oh yes. He’s also a chimpanzee.
On the day he arrived in the NAC, Win remembers seeing funny-looking strangers on the street. He thought they were mutants, but actually, they were apes. Now that he’s met Captain Forsyth, he learns how this came to pass:
I remembered the discovery in my own world that simians can’t talk only because their vocal apparatus isn’t up to it. We’d only just begun teaching them sign language. It had started here a hundred years earlier, maybe because Darwin’s opinions were more graciously received, or maybe because Confederates view innovation as a blessing instead of a threat. Or maybe because they haven’t wasted so much time and effort, so many useful lives, on war and economic disaster. Anyway, science and philosophy have never been separate departments here. Any critter who can handle more than a few hundred words is human.
We saw how, in Smith’s alternate history, racism just melted away when government was abolished. Now it appears the same is true of religious fundamentalism.
We’re never told if religion still exists in this world. Are most citizens of the NAC Christian, Muslim, or something else entirely? Are there still churches, and if so, what do they look like? Smith is uninterested in that subject; he never addresses it in any meaningful way.
But whatever their beliefs, everyone in the North American Confederacy welcomes science. There’s no ideological resistance to new discoveries. Smith says evolution was “more graciously received” than in the real world, where it faced (and still faces) stubborn opposition from religious literalists who believe their book of myths is absolute truth.
(This is a contrast to Ayn Rand, who got the heebie-jeebies about evolution. She didn’t outright deny it, but she refused to say if she thought it was true. She was an atheist, but she found it icky that humans might be related to other animals.)
I can’t deny it’s an attractive idea, but again, the causality cries out for an explanation. In the absence of government, it seems likely that religion would get stronger, since churches would claim to offer a source of stability in a world otherwise lacking it. That’s what happened in Europe during the Dark Ages.
With no public schools, religious schools would be some of the main providers of education, and they’d be free to teach children anything without oversight or standards. And while some denominations don’t deny science, many do. Why wouldn’t biblical literalism, young-earth creationism, and every other kind of pseudoscience and superstition run amok in this world?
As soon as they understood the setup, chimps, gorillas, a couple of other species waded right in and began exercising their rights.
…Lacking vocal speech, simians wear a device which translates tiny muscular movements—subliminal sign-talk—into sound. As with individual handwriting and telegraphy, each “voice” has its own personality: natural variations in bone-structure, muscular development, perhaps even character.
…Gallatin and Spooner believed it: any creature who can think is, Q.E.D., “people.” It’s calmly anticipated here that someday there’ll be computers with rights—and they’ll be welcome too.
There’s something missing from this chapter. The more sci-fi you’ve read, the more likely you are to overlook it—because it’s such a familiar and expected element, it’s easy to assume its presence and not notice that it’s never mentioned.
In many sci-fi works, advanced civilizations use genetic engineering to uplift other species to intelligence. If you read this part quickly, you might think that’s what Smith is saying, too.
But no. There’s no genetic engineering. What he’s saying is that chimps, gorillas and other apes were always intelligent, and the only reason we didn’t notice is because they lacked the capacity for spoken language.
The only thing they were waiting for was a political system to their liking. When they saw Smith’s version of anarchy and approved of it (were chimps reading the newspaper?), they came forward.
Once technology gave them the ability to speak, it immediately became obvious that they were equal in every other respect to human beings: written language, tool making and tool use, economic understanding, political participation, and scientific reasoning. As commenter andrewnotwerdna jokingly summed up Smith’s view: “Did you know that gorillas would be able to speak if it weren’t for taxes?”
(This does, ironically, echo the Indonesian mythology which claims that orangutans can speak but choose not to, fearing that humans would enslave them and put them to work if they knew.)
It’s true that great apes, our closest relatives on the tree of life, share some of our intellectual talents. They can learn language, to an extent, and use tools, to an extent. They can pass the mirror self-recognition test. They’re capable of feats of multi-step reasoning, like figuring out that they need to stack boxes on top of each other to reach a reward.
However, I mean no disrespect to our ape cousins when I say that they’re not intelligent in the same sense or to the same degree as humans.
Chimps use sticks to fish for tasty termites and rocks as hammers to crack nuts. But you’ll never see a chimpanzee constructing a fire drill or a rudimentary lathe – or even knapping stones into spearheads.
Similarly, apes can be taught some sign language (some have learned several hundred signs). However, they’ll never compose a sonnet or write an autobiography. They don’t have the capacity for complex syntax that human children learn intuitively.
Once again, I think Smith was trying to make a generous gesture toward inclusivity, but he went about it in one of the weirdest ways possible. Also, by asserting that these species were intelligent all along and didn’t need any help from us, it allows him to sidestep a different problem: Are there animal rights in the North American Confederacy?
If a creature can’t speak or advocate for itself, does it have any legal protections? Against cruel treatment, or abuse, or being hunted to extinction? Can NAC citizens bring back bear-baiting or dogfighting, or perform cruel medical experiments on them without oversight, or raise animals in cramped and filthy cages for food or furs?
Given that this is an anarchy where the only rights you have are what you can defend for yourself, the answer would seemingly have to be no. No hands means no firearms, which means no rights. That leads to some very ugly scenarios which, no surprise, go unmentioned in this book.
Image credit: Clément Bardot, via Wikimedia Commons; released under CC BY-SA 4.0 license
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Sadly for Smith, those experiments about teaching gorillas sign language were premature. They cannot actually speak, and even with sign language cannot communicate the way we can. (Worse, apparently there was systemic animal abuse going on to even get the gorillas to sign as much as they did.)
How accurate is the Wikipedia article claiming that the apes learned how to talk because a text-to-speech device (or something similar) was developed earlier and researchers found out they were intelligent and then apes were included as citizens? That would seem to be a little different from “apes concealed their intelligence from humans for millennia until the state was abolished.” Don’t the indigenous Africans who live next to chimps live in a stateless society anyway? Your interpretation cannot possibly be the correct one; the cause this must be technological advance, even if no changes are made to the apes’ genetic makeup. Smith’s folly was in assuming that apes are already fully sapient right now, and this whole thing is a clumsy way of giving the story advanced technology. (Though the mental image of Smith being the capitalist answer to Fourier is, nonetheless, a hilarious one.)
Yes, religious extremism should be much more common in Smith’s world than it already is in ours. After all, Donald Trump would be considered a moderate centrist in the NAC’s Overton Window. It’s absurd to think there is anything “Hamiltonian” about him, which is another reason why I think Smith is intellectually dishonest to state that only capitalism is freedom, all anticapitalist beliefs are interchangeable, and all anti-liberty ideologies are anticapitalist. If Smith approved of Trump, then the NAC should be like the USA but worse. If he disapproved of Trump, then Smith must have considered him a Hamiltonian, which is absurd since Trump is as pro-capitalist as it gets. (Again, did Smith consider Thiel and Hoppe to be “Hamiltonians”, or good libertarians? They are literally monarchists!) Smith is, of course, dead now, but he did live long enough to see Trump’s first term. Did he say anything about him? This just shows that society needs mutual aid to function and cannot trust the market for anything. (I think the major disagreement between us is that you think that if the market can’t provide something, then only the state can, so without the state people would have to do without. Contrariwise, I think that bottom-up, autonomous organization can provide everything necessary better than the current top-down and authoritarian way of doing things. This is fundamentally different from Smith’s “let the market sort it out and fuck the poor,” so it is not valid to lump the failures of Smithism with systems that have nothing in common with it except no state. Doing so is the same error as when Smith considers all forms of anticapitalist thought an interchangeable despotic mass of Hamiltonianism. Unfortunately, I’m bad at summarizing these ideas in a way that makes it clear what I’m talking about and explaining how it is different from the alternatives, so that is why I spammed those links earlier, since others had already explained it.)
Holy crap, thanks for that update. So you’re saying the people who wanted to show that apes could communicate like humans, ended up dehumanizing them in the process? That’s practically a whole new dimension of hypocrisy and doublethink.
As commenter andrewnotwerdna jokingly summed up Smith’s view: “Did you know that gorillas would be able to speak if it weren’t for taxes?”
I was about to compose a detailed rebuttal of all this nonsense, but yeah, that comment as quoted sums up how utterly ridiculous and clueless Smith’s libertarian fantasy is, at almost all levels. Some people just aren’t worth the time or effort of debunking.
I take exception to Smith’s idea that any create that can think is human. Anyone who has owned a cat, a dog, a talking bird like a parrot or cockatoo, and other pets knows that they think. Some of them can even do some planning. They are not human.
Yeah. Some animals can be damn smart: prairie dogs have a fairly simple ‘language’ (lots of words but little real grammar), including per-warren dialects; crows can learn how to use a simple form of vending machine to grab coins from all over town to get food; dogs and cats have both been known to fake injury and pains to get sympathy. And while that all makes them deserving of compassion and support, that doesn’t make them equal in intellect to humans.
Also, the whole bit with making apes citizens reminds me of comments from way back in the days of the original Star Trek, of how people could accept Kirk making out with a green-skinned alien space babe more easily than they could accept him kissing the actual black human on his own crew. It’s not just Star Trek, there is a long history in science fiction, particularly but not solely in the Campbellian sort, of being perfectly fine with strange aliens but then not accepting humans as anything other than the ‘great white saviour’. I know Smith has said that racism magically doesn’t exist in his society, but I have a hard time believing that the non-human ‘races’ aren’t going to end up in some similar situations. Particularly since humans and apes are separate species and can’t interbreed, so having multiple separate species in the Confederacy suddenly means ‘miscegenation’ is biologically impossible, and thus not something that anybody has to worry about anymore.
A lot of racists over the last few centuries already believe that humans of different races should be separate species and unable to interbreed, and get very upset when anybody proves them wrong.
Thanks for the shout-outs guys.
If I recall correctly, I think at a later point in the book, there’s an implication that _guns_ may be on the way to sentience.
* eyeroll * Why does that not surprise me?
Actually, now that I think of it (and remember the recent “Planet of the Apes” movies), it seems guns would be among the first (if not THE first) tools any sentient species of primates would learn to use. They wouldn’t be “the way to sentience,” but they would sure as hell incentivize humans to at least treat them as sentient, for better or worse.
I thought Andrew was saying that the book says guns themselves are becoming sapient.
It’s been a very long time since I’ve read anything about non-human animals learning humanlike language, so disclaimer that this might not be up-to-date.
Outside of *maybe* some cetaceans, which use more alien communications which haven’t been deciphered as far as I’ve heard, non-humans don’t really “get” the concept of grammar. At best they can string together 2-3 words which make sense together in context, or determine what a short string of words mean in context, but there’s no grammatical structure to it.
With one possible exception: apparently some individual dogs and chimps (and presumably, individuals of some other species) can grasp that word order can matter in two-word action phrases if they’re exposed to the idea consistently – [noun/name] [action] and [action] [noun/name] are different in that one of them is a command/suggestion to perform [action] or a signal that [noun/name] is performing [action] (or about to be)… but the other is either a command to do [action] *to* [noun/name] or a signal that [action] is about to be done to [noun/name]. In other words, whether the verb comes first or last determines whether the other word is the subject or the object. But even then, some individuals struggle to understand even that much, if they can at all, instead relying purely on contextual cues rather than word order to guess what exactly is being communicated.
Vocabulary is pretty limited; even among species which are capable of being trained to understand language and/or communicate in a humanlike fashion, knowing 60 words is exceptional to the point of being a linguistic genius. 30-40 words plus a handful of personal names being a more typical limit for most individuals. For comparison, even the crudest, simplest human pidgins have around 200 words. (I’m counting commonly-used noun phrases and verb phrases which functionally act as if they are individual words as if they are indeed individual words for vocabulary purposes, so something like Toki Pona doesn’t count as having “a lot fewer than 200 words”.)
In addition, no non-human animal appears to understand the concept of asking questions, that we know of (last I heard about it, which is again, possibly very out of date). At most they can be commanded to provide certain limited forms of information, but even if they can be made to understand that, it doesn’t seem to ever occur to them that they can do similar.
As for tool use, apparently some apes can learn to craft certain kinds of crude tools by observing humans or other apes doing the same (though not flint knapping, unless they can somehow be made to understand that flint is not like most other rocks, and even then, it’s hard work and they’re usually lazy), but they don’t bother to make tools for future use, only when needed (likely because in their natural state they move around a lot and can’t really carry anything with them). And they rarely if ever bother to teach it to the next generation, instead “relying” on their offspring to imitate them on the occasions when they really need to make something. So outside of something like doing simple but useful tricks with slightly modified sticks, or finding rocks which already have the right shape, tool technology gets lost easily.
I’m not sure how feasible it would be to give other species better language comprehension and communication abilities via either genetic engineering and/or breeding, but the differences are likely large enough that after a certain point they’d be an entirely new species; they’d no longer be dogs or chimps or horses or ravens or whatever any more than humans are ardipithecus, even if their physical appearance didn’t change much.
…Lacking vocal speech, simians wear a device which translates tiny muscular movements—subliminal sign-talk—into sound.
This one sentence contains an absolutely awe-inspiring amount of hand-waving and question-begging. Just for starters, how would the developers of this “device” be able to know which “tiny muscular movements” translate to which words or phrases? And then how would they train their simians to understand how their “device” is going to be interpreting their “tiny muscular movements” from now on? How would the developers be able to verify, with sufficient certainty, that their “device” is, in fact, accurately translating what the simians intend to say? (And how would unconscious or unacknowledged human bias affect all this?) And if it’s translating “tiny muscular movements,” how can anyone guarantee that those movements are caused by conscious choices, as opposed to fleeting thoughtless reactions or subconscious brain-body interactions?
Also, how many contact-points would such a device need? Would it be one sensor attached (how?) to one easily-protected body-part, or many sensors that have to be laboriously stuck onto multiple parts every time the wearer gets dressed for a day’s work?
And if the wearer gets into a fight — which “Confederate rent-a-cops” would surely do on a regular basis — an opponent could simply yank that device off them, rendering them not helpless, but mute. If it consists of lots of wires, I could easily see an opponent just using them to tie up or strangle the wearer.
Seriously, how much actual thought, or even just idle speculation, did Smith put into any of this? David Brin’s Uplift novels were a lot more thoughtful and realistic than this lazy horseypoop.
Yeah, there’s a whole set of weeds involved in ‘facilitated communication’, and it can get pretty deep.
In particular there’s a whole group of people who claim to be able to speak for people in comas or with serious brain damage, claiming that the person lying in the bed isn’t actually unconscious/brain-damaged/etc., but is in fact aware and trying to call for help or tell their story. What these people do is essentially use a ouija board with the hospitalized person’s hand, and claim that they’re just letting the person in the bed guide the marker to the right answers. Some of them may even believe it, too; like with the ‘normal’ usage of ouija boards, ideomotor responses can become self-reinforcing, and the ‘communicator’s’ own subconscious motions can be interpreted as coming from elsewhere.
So, not only is Smith’s description hand-wavey as all get out, the parts that he does wave his hands towards are already associated with disreputable people preying on the families of people with irreparable brain damage.
Oh yeah, I remember the big scandal about “facilitated communication” with autistic kids. (And when the “facilitator” business was exposed in all its bogosity, there was (IIRC) a lot of resentment and hate from parents who had been deprived of their illusion of being able to deal with their autistic kids. Not resentment against the “facilitators” mind you — but against those who had exposed the scam.)
@Brendan:
Yes. Here’s the quote:
“‘Lucy, are there really any sapient machines that you know of?’
‘Well, no. But some sure have their own personalities. My two old Thornies have consecutive numbers, but each one handles differently. You’ve probably noticed the same thing with guns.”
Not quite what I was thinking – but you can see why I misremembered it.
… everyone in the North American Confederacy welcomes science. There’s no ideological resistance to new discoveries.
Funny, in this universe “conservatives” tend to feel more averse to cultural and conceptual changes.
Except, of course, when some demagogue has convinced them gigantic social transformations will somehow return them to an imaginary better status quo ante.
Don’t the indigenous Africans who live next to chimps live in a stateless society anyway?
Short answer, no.
Long answer, it depends.
The graphic-novel illustration seems to show a human-proportioned ape. That seems like something out of the Planet of the Apes movies where it is obvious that its apes were played by human actors. Notice the limb proportions and the taste for walking upright. Chimps’ and gorillas’ arms are longer than their their legs, and they prefer to walk on all fours.
We got our limb proportions and our taste for walking upright long before we got our big brains, so our ancestors of some 2 – 3 million years ago were something like that illustration, adapted to walking upright but with a head much like a chimp head.
There’s also the question of cognitive capacity. Efforts to teach apes human languages have had very limited results, even when using something suited for their capabilities: sign language.
They can learn lots of individual signs, but they can’t string them together very well. They can come up with phrases like “drink fruit” for watermelon, but not much more.
BTW, here is my favorite anecdote from ape-language experiments. A certain Roger Fouts was trying to train a chimp named Lucy to use sign language, and one day, he came across a pile of dirty dirty on the floor. So he confronted her about that.
Roger: WHAT THAT?
Lucy: WHAT THAT?
Roger: YOU KNOW. WHAT THAT?
Lucy: DIRTY DIRTY.
Roger: WHOSE DIRTY DIRTY?
Lucy: SUE (a reference to Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, a graduate student of Fouts).
Roger: IT NOT SUE. WHOSE THAT?
Lucy: ROGER!
Roger: NO! NOT MINE. WHOSE?
Lucy: LUCY DIRTY DIRTY. SORRY LUCY.
There is also the problem of cognitive capacity. We can see the emergence of it in the evolution of our species.
Around 2.9 million years ago in eastern Africa, the Oldowan style of tools emerged, rocks with one or two flakes knocked off by hitting those rocks with other rocks. Which species made them is uncertain, but Oldowan tools were made until around 1.7 million years ago.
Then around 1.95 million years ago in eastern Africa, the Acheulean style emerged, with more flakes knocked off, making “hand axes”. It is associated with Homo erectus and some related species. They were made until some 130 thousand years ago.
Some 300 thousand years ago we start seeing fancier stone tools and more variation in them. Anatomically modern members of our species appear in Africa around 200 thousand years ago, and behavioral modernity some 100 thousand years ago.