The Civic Platform - A Political Journal of Ideas and Analysis

Human sans Chimp In the beginning, there was ape-like ‘humans’. Later, there was human-like humans. What happened between? It is clear that there must be some model of consciousness or human cognitive capacity which is essentially human sans chimp. If you take an EEA human, remove every capacity which is shared with the chimp, what would be left over? Let’s take an example for illustrative purposes. Let’s say that humans have 3D vision and chimps do not. If we subtract the chimp from human then, in this example, we subtract all visual capabilities except the cognitive facilitation of 3D vision. Now we can imagine that if this left over bit were added to the chimp or subtracted from the human then chimp and human vision would be equal. We can approach this thought experiment in several ways - what do we add to the chimp to get a human; what do we subtract from the human to get a chimp; and what is left over if you subtract the chimp from human. Let’s now consider a real example ~ language. And this is where things really become interesting. What needs to be added to, say, Kanzi, for him to communicate like a human. Physical ability to speak is obviously lacking, but an ability to communicate symbolically is present and, when you think about it, no-one reading these words knows whether or not I can physically articulate these words. Clearly humans have bigger brains, so more of whatever the chimp is capable of would come if they also had a bigger brain. This is true of many domains but may well not include vision, olfaction and the acuity of other sensory domains. We now consider the shedding of capacity of a human. If the brain is made smaller, would the human be restricted to communicating on a level similar to Kanzi or would the form of the communication still be different? Humans learning a new language, where they only know a few words, are still likely to try to communicate abstract concepts beyond Kanzi. A simple restriction of vocabulary of a human or an increase in the chimp would not, in my opinion, be sufficient. I’m interested to hear what capacity members think is the most central one that is present in the human but absent in the chimp - what, apart from mere quantity, would be showing when we subtract chimp from human? What do we have to add to the chimp to get human-like communication? What do we have to take away from the human to arrive at a Kanzi? What is left over if you subtract a Kanzi from an average Jo?