RADHIKA'S CATS ⁽¹⁾

Radhika⁽²⁾ has two extremely intelligent cats, Peri and Samir. Samir is the A-cat, and is clearly dominant -- a behavior common not only to mammals, and clearly instinct-driven. (Hierarchy ensures discipline and order, and is therefore an adaptive trait.) As A-cat, however, Samir tends to monopolize the food supply, and his humans were concerned that B-cat Peri was not getting his fair share of the food they set out. The solution to this dilemma: put one of the food bowls on top of the refrigerator -- a spot reachable by Peri in a single bound, something that Samir could not achieve.

Samir, however, learned to jump first to the kitchen table, and then to the refrigerator top. In their next counter-move, the humans placed the kitchen door ajar, into a position blocking the space between table and refrigerator. But Samir tackled this challenge as well: he learned to push the door closed with his paw (a task requiring a fair amount of sustained effort), after which the path from floor to table to refrigerator top was again clear. So the humans then did what humans are good at: escalate. They propped the door open with a door-stop. And Samir again rose to the challenge: he worked at the door-stop until it fell away; then worked at the door; and finally used the table to access refrigerator top and food. Our amateur ethologists thus witnessed a sustained sequence of actions, linking cause to effect repeatedly in pursuit of a goal. The proximate moral of the story: never underestimate the intelligence and creativity of animals.

The episode's deeper message, of course, is to question the claim, defended by this writer in "'Twixt Creationism and Reductionism," Editorial Perspectives, Winter 1997-98, that human consciousness and action have a distinctive quality not shared with other living species. This quality has been termed "symbolic reactivity," "symboling," and (more recently) "symbolic reference" (Terrence W. Deacon, The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain, Norton, 1997). The idea that human symbolic and cultural functioning creates a crucial watershed, effectively transcending and (in a sense to be carefully stated) replacing biological determination of behavior and biological evolution, was also challenged in a thoughtful response by Janet McIntosh ("Symbolism, Cognition, and Political Orders," Winter 1998-99).

After due consideration -- and with apologiees for the long silence -- I would like to defend the claim, and explore its properties a bit further. I regard the distinction itself as the central issue; human uniqueness in its possession is a distinctly secondary matter. But this is all the more reason to examine Samir's behavior with care, to see if human consciousness (including problem-solving ability) is indeed unique, in a way that has implications for directionality in social evolution and prospects for advancement toward, in McIntosh's words, "more egalitarian and progressive social orders."

At issue are the pathways that build upon the simplest form of an organism's interaction with its environment -- the unconditioned reflex, or built-in (instinct-driven) response to a stimulus (in the case of Samir, the striving for food). The unconditioned reflex is genetically encoded, and therefore the result of natural selection of an adaptive behavior, a selection that takes place in biological time. Behavior and survival-chances are enriched, as is well known, by the elaboration of this mechanism into the conditioned reflex: new behaviors not present in the genome can be created, and other behaviors extinguished, by associating an intrinsic stimulus with an external one. The external stimulus is arbitrary, as in the well-known behaviorist experiments inducing responses in animals to light or sound events, by associating these events with intrinsically pleasurable or painful stimuli (food; electric shock). The secondary stimulus is arbitrary, but the association must be imposed on the organism from outside.

In the next stage of this evolution, the last two properties are reversed: the organism itself makes the association, but between stimuli that are inherently connected in the environment. This is learning. Unlike the conditioned reflex, which can be observed or induced in many animal orders, learning appears to emerge only in mammals.⁽³⁾ It involves the (usually sudden) occurrence of insight: the moment at which a connection is established, between a simple tool and an outcome (chimpanzees inserting a stick into an anthill), or between a table and a refrigerator top. Learning greatly improves organismic reactivity: the organism makes the connection directly, rather than waiting for natural occurrences (or laboratory researchers) to impose it. With the underlying hunger (and, perhaps, dominance) drive in place, Samir learns one connection (table--refrigerator top); builds that connection into a conditioned response; then learns a new connection (move door--table) and builds the new connection into the conditioned chain; and finally learns a third connection (move doorstop--door), adding that one to the chain. In the absence of symbols -- the exhaustive grid of meanings that enables the organism to do all this abstractly, independently of the sensory field, and prior to acting -- this is an impressive intellectual achievement.⁽⁴⁾

Symbolic reference completes the sequence. Symbols are arbitrary elements (constructed out of signs, largely but not exclu-sively linguistic) associated with objects or elements of experience by the organisms themselves. Here a shift in point of reference occurs: symbols emerge as elements of communication among individuals, and have an inherently relational quality. But with that understanding, they represent an alternative framework of meaning -- a set of abstractions -- that intervenes between external stimuli and behavior. Symbol processing thus precedes action; moreover, action takes place -- and can only take place -- on the basis of symbolic representations. "External" in this formulation refers to elements in the objective environment outside the organism (and cooperating organisms), but also, and crucially, to impulses coming from the genetic "interior." The inclusiveness and exhaustiveness of the symbolic field assures that no behavior of the organism, other than the most elementary reflexes and the functions of the autonomic nervous system, can result from an automatic triggering source. This "freeing of [from] instinct" is the central reproductive strategy along the chain of evolution leading through the primates to homo sapiens. We are driven by, e.g., hunger, or sexual desire, but we cannot avoid translating these feelings into the superorganic realm of symbols before we act on them. We cannot grasp them purely emotionally, or in terms of picture-thinking; the symbolic reference field cannot be turned off.

The following schematic may help in nailing down the stages in the development of organismic reactivity, or reference. (This is my own construction, but it is based on Becker's conceptualization.)

		Connection between stimuli
		Intrinsic	Arbitrary
Response of organism	Other-initiated	Unconditioned Reflex	Conditioned Reflex
	Self-initiated	Learning	Symbolic Reference

What presumably distinguishes the dullest of human beings from the brightest of cats (Samir) is the distinction, often missed in casual discussions, between learning and symbolic reference along the bottom row of this table.⁽⁵⁾

Deacon (work cited, ch. 3) develops a different conceptual hierarchy, in which the transitions are from iconic reference, to indexical reference, and finally to symbolic reference. Refer to this work for massive amounts of information about both human and animal behavior, and the crucial concept of co-evolution. The upshot is the defining insight that comes down to us in many forms, from Adam eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge in Genesis, to Marx's 1844 elaborations on human species being. This is the cultural universal -- the missing link between biological universals and the cultural particularities so beloved of the "new creationists" targeted by Barbara Ehrenreich and Janet McIntosh. The universe of symbols imposes the ability (and need): to posit and manipulate contrary-to-fact situations; to be aware of space and time and their negations, i.e., to know of non-existence and death; to possess the acute self-consciousness that we call the Self, or the Ego, a symbolic abstraction that thus has language and culture as an unavoidable premise⁽⁶⁾; to elaborate frameworks of meaning, cosmology, ideology; and much else.

McIntosh finds my assertion that "culture . . . has effectively replaced nature, insofar as behavior and consciousness are concerned" too sweeping. I am inclined to agree, and now prefer a revised formulation: the natural influences on consciousness and behavior can only take place symbolically, and therefore culturally (in the sense of the cultural universal). McIntosh wants to argue against what she calls the "sponge theory" of consciousness -- that the human mind simply absorbs (soaks up) anything that culture imposes on it. The transcendent-culture view that I am defending should be clearly distinguishable from any version of what we used to call Watsonian behaviorism, a position staked out at the "nurture" end of the "nature-nurture" spectrum. Like McIntosh, I believe that the spectrum itself should be transcended. She refers to studies that "suggest" the existence of certain universal psychological characteristics, such as a tendency (observed even in small children) to posit the existence of "insides" and "outsides" in other sentient beings (a form of "essentialism"), and a tendency to posit the existence of "unseen contaminative forces," presumably common to all or many cultures. These may be called "innate cognitive predispositions," as McIntosh does, but much turns on the interpretation of "innate." Essentialism is clearly impossible without symbols, as is the positing of unseen forces, contaminative or otherwise. Essentialism, in turn, is thought to be a basis for extra-group hostility, prejudice, etc.; McIntosh is concerned to extract the implications of innate predispositions for the existence and exercise of power in social life. This is a complex subject; I will simply note here that even if we assume that there is an innate tendency for all human beings to produce essentialist (inner/outer) conceptions, there is no reason to link this to an inherent trope toward "racial or gendered thinking": witness the counter-claim of universal human goodness and worth, an essence posited by some religious philosophies, which would work against multiple "essences" that divide. The "innate" turns out once again to be symbolic, and to be "recruitable" for a full spectrum of ideologies buttressing different systems of definition and power, including ones that transcend domination and exploitation.

I must reiterate the claim that we -- humans -- are not now evolving biologically. McIntosh writes that "in some communities" the role of natural selection has withered. I am not aware, however, of any communities in which cultural practices have not radically separated reproductive success from genetically inherited characteristics. Some private communications received from biologists have referred to changes in the gene pool brought about by the humanly transformed environment -- e.g., the effect of the huge increase in sugar consumption in the last century, or in the presence of industrial pollutants. These could induce a form of "Baldwinian evolution" (Deacon, ch. 11), in which environmental changes brought about by human beings serve as the framework for adaptive genetic innovations -- except for the fact that massive medical, technological and cultural intervention prevent these adaptations from becoming effective. The matter cannot be resolved by general pronouncements, such as: ". . . human phylogenesis has left its mark on the human genome" (McIntosh). I hope my correspondents will write for publication on this topic.

Finally, the question must have occurred to many readers: how do we (claim to) know any of this? And: why does it matter? On the first, I have no simple answer, except to say that profound truths about the human condition are neither innate, nor simply empirical! On the second: if we can (legitimately) secure the understanding that human consciousness and action are qualitatively and irreversibly symbolic, the surest foundation is laid for the most central claim of historical materialism: the conditional inevitability (see "Editorial Perspectives," Spring 2000) of progress toward a society of equality, solidarity and fulfillment. This is the (conditional) directionality of history: progress is inevitable -- because it is possible. We have also the insight that an intentional society is the fullest embodiment of symbolic reference; that social evolution consists essentially of growth in the ability of human beings to bring their own development under deliberative, and in that sense symbolic, control (see our special issue, "Building Socialism Theoretically," Spring 2002).

___________________
1. Not to be confused with the T. S. Eliot Practical variety, or with Schroedinger's (possibly unfortunate; we'll never know) Cat, or with the late unlamented Broadway musical.

2. Radhika Lal, a colleague living in New York, development economist, and housemate of our senior editor, Dr. Annette T. Rubinstein, to whom I am indebted for this story.

3. An important source for this discussion is Ernest Becker, The Birth and Death of Meaning. Becker draws heavily on Leslie White, The Science of Culture, and I share that influence. I should perhaps mention that I find White's attempted theory of cultural evolution to be less useful than his perceptive discussion of symbols and their implications, in the early chapters of the work cited.

4. In African Genesis, Robert Ardrey -- in total contradiction to his reductionist intentions! -- provides a magnificent illustration of the distinction between symbolic and non-symbolic reference. South African farmers, plagued by crop-stealing baboons, move into the planted fields and hide, while the baboons watch from the safety of the surrounding jungle. One farmer hides in the field, while the rest retreat. The baboons will return to the field (to their peril), if they are fooled into thinking that all of the farmers are gone; this rests on their ability to count. Experience revealed that the baboons could count up to four or five, but got confused trying to distinguish quantities above those numbers. Imagine trying to "count" items by sheer perception, burdened with the necessity of receiving all of the rich extraneous particulars in the sensory field, i.e., without numbers (symbols). A daunting task. By contrast, with symbols, they could, in principle, distinguish between 1,000,000 farmers and 999,999. Numbers clearly illustrate the exhaustive quality of symbols: n implies n + 1. There is no quantity for which there is not a number.

5. The conceptual lacuna is illustrated in recent reporting on research by Frans B. M. de Waal at the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center in Atlanta, Georgia. The findings consist of observations of behavioral variations among different communities of chimpanzees, as summarized in de Waal's most recent book, The Ape and the Sushi Master: Cultural Reflections by a Primatologist (Basic Books, 2001). Summarizing work reported in the journal Nature in 1999, a reporter writes: "The researchers came up with 39 behavior patterns that fit their definition of cultural variation, meaning they were customary in some communities and absent in others, for reasons that could only be explained by learning or imitation" (New York Times, June 17, 1999). De Waal, in a commentary on this report, finds the evidence "so impressive that it will be hard to keep these apes out of the cultural domain without once again moving the goal posts." I can assure him a) that, on my part at least, the goal posts will move no further than the distinction between learning and symbolic reference, a distinction that does not seem to have occurred to most members of the primatological community; and b) that -- as indicated above -- should symbolic reference indeed be found to exist among primates the "uniqueness" of human beings can readily be abandoned, so long as the qualitative singularity and dynamic inclusiveness of symbols as such are grasped.

6. Recall Marx's prescient anticipation of symbolic interactionist social psychology: "In a sort of way, it is with man as with commodities. Since he comes into the world neither with a looking glass in his hand, nor as a Fichtian philosopher, to whom 'I am I' is sufficient, man first sees and recognizes himself in other men. Peter only establishes his own identity as a man by first comparing himself with Paul as being of like kind. And thereby Paul, just as he stands in his Pauline personality, becomes to Peter the type of the genus homo" (Capital, I, ch. 1, sec. 3).

Continue to next Page