Chapter 7
The sciences must now pave the way for the future task of the philosopher; this task being understood to mean that the philosopher must solve the problem of value; that he has to determine the hierarchy of values.
—Nietzsche1
Eric Barcia had carefully calculated the height of the railroad trestle at Lake Accotink Park in Springfield, Virginia. It was seventy feet from the trestle’s edge to the concrete spillway below. An amateur bungee enthusiast who had been described by his grandmother as “very smart in school,”2 Barcia taped together a bunch of bungee cords until he had created a single cord that was about 70 feet long. In the early morning of July 12, 1997, Barcia fastened the makeshift cord to his ankles, tied the other end to the trestle, and leapt off the bridge.
His body was found by a jogger soon after. Since bungee cords stretch when pulled (a fact that Barcia had overlooked), he had overestimated the length of cord by some sixty feet.
The temptation here is to snicker at Barcia’s stupidity. But this is not a story of stupidity. Barcia’s cord-length miscalculation was but a sad footnote to a much larger tale of human cognitive prowess. To stand on the edge of that trellis and devise such an elaborate plan is a testament to everything amazing about the human mind. His death was the result of a simple mathematical error. Even hyper-intelligent rocket scientists make similar mistakes. Remember when the $125 million Mars Climate Orbiter burned up in the atmosphere of the red planet back in 1999? The engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory used the metric system to calculate the orbiter’s trajectory, but the engineers at Lockheed Martin Astronautics (who built the orbiter’s software) used inches, feet, and pounds. The result? As it entered orbit, the space probe was 170 kilometers too low. Like Barcia, it plunged unceremoniously to its death, a tragic end to an otherwise remarkable tale of human ingenuity.
The goal of this book has been to determine what stories like Barcia’s tell us about the value of human intelligence. Since the first chapter, I’ve been cataloging the cognitive skills that fall under the umbrella of intelligence to determine if the human mind is exceptional and/or a good thing. Alternatively, would we be better off (both as individuals and as a species) with the mind of some other animal?
Let’s take a closer look at our amateur bungee jumper. What exactly was happening in his mind that ultimately led to his death? Barcia had clearly been planning his jump for days—maybe even weeks—in advance. Which means that he, unlike most other animal species, was able to envision a version of himself in a future scenario wherein he would experience a positive feeling (e.g., joy, fear, excitement) as a result of jumping off the bridge. In other words, exactly what you would expect from an adrenaline junkie. The plan itself involved an intimate knowledge of cause and effect—a form of causal inference that is the hallmark of our species. Most animals understand that things fall down, but Barcia had a deeper knowledge of tension loads, trajectories, classical mechanics, and so forth. He knew, for example, that tying a cord around his ankles would prevent him from crashing into the ground. And, of course, Barcia was perfectly aware that jumping off a 70-foot-tall bridge—under any circumstances—is inherently dangerous and thus scary. But, as any thrill-seeker will tell you, overriding this fear is part of the fun. After all, he was bungee jumping, not trying to kill himself. Everything we’ve discussed throughout this book about the human mind’s uniqueness is apparent here.
Now imagine that Santino—the rock-throwing chimpanzee we met in Chapter 3—was standing next to Barcia on the trestle’s edge. What is the difference between Santino’s and Barcia’s thought processes in that moment? Since chimpanzees are our closest evolutionary relative, comparing how Santino and Barcia would approach this scenario will give us important clues about human exceptionalism and our minds compared to other animals. Santino, for the record, would never tie a rope around his ankles and fling himself off a railroad trestle in pursuit of an endorphin rush.
Let’s begin with the basics: Do nonhuman animals even engage in thrill-seeking behavior? Many species of animals engage in novelty-seeking behavior—a close cousin of thrill-seeking. Consider cats. YouTube is filled with examples of cats getting themselves into dangerous spots because of their love of exploring potentially dangerous scenarios (e.g., tall trees, tight spaces). But the clearest example of not just novelty-seeking but full on thrill-seeking in animals is found in the wild macaques of India seen in the 2017 BBC production Spy in the Wild.3 These monkeys climb a fifteen-foot pillar perched above an outdoor fountain, flinging themselves into the narrow pool where even a slight miscalculation could cause them serious injury or death if they fail to hit the water. Although far less dangerous than jumping off a seventy-foot bridge above a concrete road, there is no denying that these monkeys are engaging in a dangerous activity from which they derive pleasure despite (or because of) the risks involved.
So, what’s stopping Santino from bungee jumping? It’s possible—if not likely—that a chimpanzee would want to engage in dangerous thrill-seeking behavior similar to the pool-diving macaques. But bungee jumping and pool diving are not identical when it comes to the cognitive skills needed to experience the thrill. Santino would need to come up with a plan involving the assembly of materials to create a bungee cord that would take days to execute—involving mental time travel skills that he does not likely possess. He would also need a sophisticated grasp of cause and effect—an understanding of what happens to a falling object that is secured to another object via an elastic material. He would then need to assemble this sophisticated kind of tool and find a way to secure it to himself and the bridge; skills that are seemingly well above his pay grade. This is a kind of why specialism that chimpanzees lack. Even if Santino had bungee-jumping aspirations, he is just not intelligent enough to bungee jump.
But that’s a good thing. Barcia’s bungee plan was a case of complex human cognition gone wrong. His intelligence, not his stupidity, was directly responsible for his death. Santino, the less intelligent of the two on paper, behaved more intelligently precisely because he was less intelligent. In other words, intelligence sometimes results in very stupid behavior.
Consider this example of a human versus animal battle of the wits that highlights the pitfalls—or perhaps impotence—of human intelligence. There are three species of bedbugs that feed on humans when we are sleeping (i.e., Cimex lectularius, Cimex hemipterus, and Leptocimex boueti).4 Bedbugs are attracted to our body heat, our body odor, and the carbon dioxide we exhale when we breathe.5 They’re weirdly flat insects, which helps them hide in places we’d never think to look. They can slide in between cracks as small as the thickness of a sheet of paper. And because they feed exclusively on our blood, they find hiding places near where we sleep. They like us best when we are motionless in bed—an easier target. Their entire biology is centered around reading human behavior to try to figure out when we’re at our most vulnerable. “They won’t come out to feed until you let your guard down,” explained Dr. Jody Green to me over Zoom. Jody is the urban entomologist extension educator with the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and an expert in the behavior of the insects that drive us crazy: bedbugs, head lice, termites, fleas, etc. “They learn your schedule. If you work nights and only sleep during the day, they adapt—they get on your sleep schedule. If you go on vacation, they can wait for you to get back.”
Bedbugs’ hiding strategies can get quite elaborate. As they age, bedbugs shed their exoskeletons, which they leave behind as a ghostly shell. When you spray your house with pesticides, young bedbugs will sometimes sprint toward the nearest exoskeleton left behind by a larger adult and hide inside as the pesticides pass over them. “For extra protection,” explained Jody.
But bedbugs’ main strategy is to hide in the places that nobody looks or thinks to spray with poison. Think about a hotel room for a moment. It gets a thorough scrubbing every day, including changing the bedding. And yet, hotel rooms are notorious hot spots for bedbugs. That’s because hotel rooms, just like our homes, have plenty of locations that are overlooked when it comes to regular cleaning. Some items rarely get washed. Things like the curtains. Or bed skirts. Which are often riddled with bedbugs.
Maybe the craftiest hiding spot in a hotel is the one that you are the least likely to disturb: the Bible in the nightstand. Nearly every hotel room in North America has one thanks to a campaign by the Gideons International: a Christian evangelical group that has been distributing free Bibles for more than a century. The Bible has hundreds of pages between which a flat bedbug can slip. It’s the perfect hideout for an entire civilization of bedbugs. If you’re doing a sweep of your hotel room to check for bedbugs, this is the first place you should look, suggests Jody. “I know it’s probably not good to go flipping through the Bible looking for bedbugs, but…”
Bedbugs can generate these elaborate hiding strategies using, as we have seen in previous chapters, relatively simple decision-making skills that do not avail of things like episodic foresight or causal inference. And yet, these simple minds regularly outwit our complex human minds in a hide-and-seek battle. But this is not the most important lesson from this story. Because bedbugs are so difficult to find and squish, humans have been forced to unleash our most sophisticated why specialist abilities to come up with solutions for killing them.6 The chemical dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane—more commonly known as DDT—is a potent insecticide, originally used to kill mosquitoes, and deployed widely during the Second World War to stop the spread of mosquito-borne diseases like malaria and typhoid. But it’s equally as effective at killing bedbugs. After the war ended, DDT became commercially available in North America, and average citizens started spraying it around their homes with wild abandon. With good reason. In the early 1900s, every single home in the United States had experienced a bedbug infestation. Within a decade, though, and before we learned how bad it was for human health,7 the mass spraying of DDT in North America almost led to the eradication of the bedbug on the continent. Almost.
The bedbugs that survived this purge were the ones that had developed a resistance to DDT. While the humans were taking their victory lap, these resistant bedbugs began to multiply—slowly at first. But then by the 1990s, the bedbug population exploded. By the mid-2000s, every state in the US was infested. A 2018 report found that 97 percent of pest control companies in the US treated for bedbugs within the previous year.8 In other words, DDT-resistant bedbugs are everywhere these days. In fact, modern bedbugs are resistant to almost every pesticide out there. So in the end, our smartest solutions were still no match for the simple minds of bedbugs. But there’s even more to this story, which highlights the grand downfall of the human mind thanks to prognostic myopia.
It turns out that releasing huge amounts of DDT into the environment in our fight against bedbugs was a rather boneheaded solution. It has made its way into the very fabric of our lives in ways we are only just now starting to appreciate. Even though the United States banned the use of DDT in 1972, every single person living in the US right now (including children born after the ban) has trace amounts of DDT in their bodies.9 DDT has a half-life in water of 150 years,10 which means that the DDT coating the floors and walls of the homes we sprayed for bedbugs in the 1940s would have ended up in perfectly stable condition in our mop-bucket water. When those buckets were emptied, the DDT hitched a ride with the wastewater into sewage treatment plants, or straight into our rivers and oceans, where it began building up inside the bodies of fish and other aquatic animals. Some of those DDT-soaked fish ended up on our dinner plates, causing the chemical to build up in our own tissues, where it stays until we die. Mothers can pass traces of DDT on to their children through breastmilk, making it all but impossible to avoid ingesting DDT even today. What’s worse, DDT has induced epigenetic changes in women exposed to the chemical that are being passed down to their children and grandchildren. And these changes are directly linked to an increase in obesity, which is correlated with an increase in breast cancer in women whose ancestral line was exposed to DDT.11 “What your great-grandmother was exposed to during pregnancy, like DDT, may promote a dramatic increase in your susceptibility to obesity, and you will pass this on to your grandchildren in the absence of any continued exposures,” said Michael Skinner, an epigenetics expert from Washington State University.12 Not only are humans losing the bedbug war, but our hyper-intelligent technological solutions for fighting them has resulted in us poisoning ourselves and our grandchildren.
This is the problem with thinking of human intelligence as something special, and assuming that specialness is a good thing. Human cognition and animal cognition are not all that different, but where human cognition is more complex, it does not always produce a better outcome. In both the Barcia versus Santino and the bedbugs versus DDT battles, complex, human-style thinking was the loser. This is what I call the Exceptionalism Paradox. It’s the idea that even though humans are indeed exceptional when it comes to our cognition, it does not mean we are better at the game of life than other animals. In fact, because of this paradox, humans might be a less successful species precisely because of our amazing, complex intelligence.
F*ck complexity
What exactly is “success” when we’re talking about evolution? Evolutionary success could mean that a species has remained relatively the same for a long period of time due to its effective biological design. Or it could mean that it has spread out across the globe in huge numbers. By either definition, if you want to look at examples of “evolutionary success” in the animal kingdom, it’s simple cognition—not complex, humanlike cognition—that wins every time. Let’s talk about your colon for a second. You might already be aware that the human body is stuffed with (and covered in) bacteria. In fact, your body is home to equal parts bacteria and human cells; you have about 38 trillion of each.13 Bacteria cells are an order of magnitude smaller than human cells, which is why it looks and feels as if you are mostly human. But you’re not. You’re half-human at best. Most of these bacteria live in your colon. Every time you poop, you discharge billions of bacteria; half of your poo is comprised of bacterial cells.14 In fact, there are more bacteria in your morning poop than there are humans alive on this planet. There are five million trillion trillion bacteria cells alive on Earth right now—that’s more bacteria than stars in the universe.15 Just based on numbers, it’s clear that bacteria are the most successful life-form that has ever lived. And they are, by any stretch of the imagination, a life-form devoid of anything in the way of complex cognition.
But even if we put aside the obvious champions of evolution (e.g., prokaryotes like bacteria) in terms of numbers, and look instead at which species have been around the longest in their current form, we find again that simple thinking outperforms complex cognition, even when it comes to larger, brainier, vertebrate species. Consider crocodilians. The ancestors to crocodiles, alligators, caimans, and so forth, first appeared about ninety-five million years ago—in the middle of the Cretaceous period.16 That means that crocodiles were sunning themselves along riverbanks as T. rex, velociraptors, triceratops, and all the other species from Jurassic Park sauntered by. The crocodilians handily survived the global mass extinction event that killed off three-quarters of all species on Earth, including the dinosaurs.
Crocodilians are perhaps the most successful large vertebrate species that has ever lived. And yet, crocodilians, like most reptiles, don’t have much of a reputation for complex cognition. Although they exhibit play behavior17 and even use tools,18 they are not prodigal problem solvers. They don’t exhibit anything in the way of episodic foresight, causal inference, theory of mind, or any of those hard-hitting skills we find in humans. This might be due to a sampling bias; there are no crocodile cognition labs that I know of. I can’t imagine too many university research labs willing to let a bunch of psychology undergrads stuff a crocodile into an fMRI machine. But it wouldn’t matter. Crocodiles are getting by just fine without any of these cognitive skills. Because sometimes less is more, cognitively speaking.
To understand evolution’s indifference to complexity, consider the plight of the sea squirt. Sea squirts are a marine animal from the subphylum Tunicata. There are around 2,150 different species. In their larval stage, they look a lot like a tadpole. They have a head and a tail, and a spinal cord with a little miniature brain that helps them swim around. Once they reach maturity, they cement themselves onto a piece of rock. They then digest their brain and spinal cord and spend the rest of their life on that rock, filter feeding. This is natural selection concluding that the best path to success for a sea squirt is to actively remove any chance of thinking at all. Because, as I’ve argued for humans, complex cognition can be an existential liability.
The simple organisms (from bacteria to sea squirts to crocodiles) have been winning the natural selection game for millions of years without any need for complex cognition. Which goes to show that simple cognitive traits—like the boring old associative learning we find in bedbugs—have an unbeatable track record when it comes to generating successful behavior. Lucy the dog from Chapter 1 used associative learning to understand that the shaking alder branches we saw during our walk in the woods could indicate danger. She and I both froze in place upon seeing those branches. My why specialist abilities might have given me a deeper understanding of the reason the branches moved, but the subsequent behavior Lucy and I displayed was identical. Natural selection doesn’t care about the level of complexity that gave rise to our vigilance, only whether it is effective at keeping us alive.
Our human causal inferential abilities seem impressive, and being a why specialist has helped us achieve so much, but causal inference is the new kid on the block. It will need to stick around for a good billion years before we can consider it a robust cognitive solution that could rival associative learning. And since prognostic myopia has put our species in imminent risk of extinction (e.g., via climate change, nuclear war, or ecological collapse), it’s exceedingly unlikely that our species is going to be around for another millennium, let alone another billion years. Those ancient cave paintings of therianthropes in Sulawesi have become a prophetic symbol of our own fate; they are evidence of our complex thinking about morality and the meaning of life. And yet, the paintings themselves are beginning to vanish. After surviving for forty thousand years, they are now being rapidly destroyed, flaking away due to droughts and high temperatures brought on by human-induced climate change.19
Barcia, then, is the ultimate symbol for our species as it relates to the Exceptionalism Paradox. It was his human brand of exceptional cognitive complexity that led to his removal from the gene pool. We are cursed by prognostic myopia and seemingly preoccupied with tying the bungee cord of self-extinction around our ankles. In the grand scheme of things, we are destined to vanish from the Earth long before either bacteria or crocodiles. It’s a dark and cheerless way of looking at things. And maybe not the grand conclusion you were hoping for. Luckily, not everyone agrees with my bleak assessment of the value of human intelligence.
#winning
My friend Brendan is a journalist who is not shy when it comes to picking apart arguments or challenging ideas. We meet regularly at a diner for breakfast where we drink too much coffee and rant about our passions and problems. After a long discussion about why the Danish prime minister Birgitte Nyborg’s husband was such an unsympathetic character in season 1 of Borgen, we wandered into the topic of human intelligence. I argued that intelligence is a value-laden term that we should eighty-six altogether, and instead simply catalog and describe individual cognitive skills without judgment. If we judge the value of cognition not by its complexity but by biological success, then humans are both too new on the scene to properly evaluate, and likely to run afoul of natural selection due to prognostic myopia. Crocodiles might be a better candidate for the moniker of intelligent animal if we’re valuing cognition for its ability to generate evolutionally advantageous behavior.
“In that sense, crocodiles are winning,” I said.
“No. We won,” argues Brendan. “No other animal has dominated as hard as we have.”
“What do you mean by dominated?” I countered. “Because there are more bacteria living in your butt right now than there are humans living on Earth. If we’re judging ‘dominance’ on sheer numbers, bacteria are winning.”
“Bacteria might be plentiful,” argued Brendan, “but they can’t have this conversation. We can reflect on our own lives and bacteria and crocodiles can’t. We’ve gone above and beyond simply finding food and shelter. How are we not winning? I have always taken for granted that we’re winning. Because look at what we’re doing!”
Brendan then went on to cite example after example of our species’ greatest achievements: space exploration, splitting the atom, vaccines, legal systems, mega-cities, industrialized food production, the internet, music, art, poetry, theater, literature, etc. This list of things that humans can create that other animals cannot is mind-blowingly long. All of it built on the back of our capacity for language, culture, science, math, and so forth. I argued that none of it really matters, that it’s all just noise. In the billion-year history of animal cognition, these achievements are just flashes in the pan—bright, smoky footnotes to a much longer story about the dominance of simple minds.
“That’s bullshit,” Brendan said.
Am I seriously arguing that these kind of achievements—like walking on the moon—have no real value? If we don’t attribute value to biological success in terms of either a numbers game (i.e., how many individuals of our species are alive right now), or a longevity game (i.e., how long our species has existed and is likely to continue existing), what other way do we have to judge the value of our cognition and the behavior it generates? Is our exceptional ability to understand and manipulate the physical properties of the universe something that is inherently good? That’s what Brendan is suggesting. He is wrestling with a concept of value untethered to biology, where the pursuit of knowledge, truth, and beauty is a worthy goal on its own. I, on the other hand, am determining value from the standpoint of fitness. To me, Copernicus and Ada Lovelace are shining beacons of the awesomeness of human intellectual achievement, but don’t account for much if our species goes extinct after just 300,000 years. For Brendan, living a billion years splashing about in the water like a crocodile is worthless if it’s not going to result in a Copernicus or a Lovelace cropping up to help unravel the secrets of the universe.
I think there is middle ground here. I think there is a method for determining value that melds Brendan’s philosophical bent with my coldhearted scientism. And, like everything in my life these days, it all comes back to my chickens.
What matters matters
What is the value of human intelligence? There are a few things that humans do that other species cannot, which is what generates that long list of human accomplishments that Brendan championed, and which are the result of our unique cognition. I’ve grappled with the problem of what good is supposed to mean in reference to those accomplishments, and concluded that cognitive things that are good are the ones that generate the largest amount of pleasure for both the individual animal, and the world at large, both now and in the foreseeable future. For me, this middle ground for determining what constitutes “success” makes the most sense. I don’t think success should be grounded in either a numbers game (e.g., how many individual humans there are) or a longevity game (e.g., how long crocodilians have been around) for this reason: The Earth is going to get swallowed by the sun in a few billion years. That’s a fact. Before that happens, there will be millions of new species formed from weirdo selection pressures that we can’t conceive of. Maybe humans will go extinct and be replaced by a giant crow species with prehensile tails, full-blown theory of mind, and a ravenous desire for space exploration. Who knows? Does it matter? The sun will eventually destroy these new über-crows along with every living thing on the planet, so what does all this talk of population numbers or biological longevity really matter in the long term? The value of life then must be framed in the here and now. And what matters most to you, me, or any animal species alive at this very moment is pleasure.
Every living thing exists for a blink of life. And in that blink, if it’s lucky enough to have a brain, it will float from day to day on a cushion of qualia. It is qualia that fuel life, and push animals to behave, think, and be. They matter to us, so they matter. We can rejigger the question of value away from notions of domination and have it apply to the one thing that seems universal: the pursuit of positive qualia. In other words, the pursuit of pleasure. I think both Brendan and I can agree that the one thing that all animals value is the maximization of pleasure and the minimization of misery.
From a biological perspective, this pleasure-maximization idea makes sense insofar as the job of brains is to produce behavior that will help an animal survive and reproduce. Therefore, a brain will create pleasure qualia to let the animal know that it’s on the right track. The animal behavior researcher Jonathan Balcombe explores this idea in his book Pleasurable Kingdom:
The animal world is teeming with an enormous variety of breathing, sensing, feeling creatures who are not merely alive, but living life. Each is trying to get along—to feed and shelter themselves, to reproduce, to seek what is good and avoid what is bad. There’s a diversity of good things to be gotten: food, water, movement, rest, shelter sunshine, shade, discovery, anticipation, social interaction, play and sex. And because gaining these goods is adaptive, evolution has equipped animals with the capacity to experience their rewards. Like us, they are pleasure seekers.20
Pleasure qualia are the drivers of evolution. Pleasure is both intrinsically rewarding to the brain experiencing it, and biologically rewarding in that it inspires animals to pursue goals that increase their biological fitness. From an ethical perspective, you could argue that behaviors that produce the greatest pleasure in the world to the greatest number of conscious beings are the ones that carry the most value. The human achievements that Brendan listed (e.g., vaccines, farming) do exactly that, which is why Brendan considers them inherently valuable.
This pleasure-focused value is old-school ethics stuff. Pleasure is the beating heart of utilitarian philosophies first described by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill more than two centuries ago.21 Bentham described his pleasure-based utilitarian moral philosophy as follows:
Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne. They govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think: every effort we can make to throw off our subjection, will serve but to demonstrate and confirm it.22
Slap together this utilitarianism with the biological value of qualia, and you have a system for judging which animals are, as Brendan says, #winning. The winning species are the ones that can live their lives having experienced the most amount of pleasure. Unfortunately, if we rebrand success as the ability to generate pleasure in the world, then humans still run afoul of the Exceptionalism Paradox.
Consider language, one of the cognitive skills that Brendan singled out as part and parcel of what makes humans so special. Indeed, this is a behavior that knows no equal in nonhuman species. Like all cognitive skills, the building blocks of language can be found in the communication systems of many other species, from the referential calls of prairie dogs that can describe the size, color, and species of animal that they see,23 to the complex structure of bird or whale song that we can sense is a rudimentary form of grammar.24 But there is no species other than humans that has a generative grammar system capable of combining meaningful word elements into sentences that can represent any and every idea that pops into our heads.
The first question is, do we, as a species, experience more pleasure from our use of language than the nonlinguistic animals with whom we share this planet? On one hand, language can be used to create songs, jokes, and stories that are, in my life, perhaps the single largest source of pleasure I experience on a regular basis. My chickens will never know this pleasure. But does that make them less happy? This is a tricky question. Chickens did not evolve to use language, in the same way that humans did not evolve to roost. Is my life impoverished because I don’t sleep on a branch at night? Clearly not. My biology is not designed for roosting. It is, however, designed to learn and use language, and I would very likely lead a much sadder life had I grown up without any exposure to it. Chickens, then, do not know what they are missing because they are not designed to miss it. Their pleasure is drawn from scratching the ground and eating larvae. They would draw no similar pleasure from watching an episode of Borgen. Thus, there is no reason to assume a net loss in pleasure for our nonlinguistic animal brethren.
But there might be a net loss for humans precisely because of our language capacity. Chapter 2 explored the human capacity for deception, which accelerates with language. Our ability to lie and deceive, to convince and cajole, is partly responsible for all the evil in this world. Linguistic aptitude can be what gives tyrants and leaders their power; think of the influence Hitler’s speeches (and Nietzsche’s writings) had in driving the rise of Nazism in Germany. And even when leaders are not particularly eloquent, their words convey ideas that drive nations forward toward jingoistic and genocidal goals that result in the suffering and death of millions. As much as language is responsible for the glorious achievements of our species (e.g., culture, art, science), it is also to blame for its ability to spread misery and destruction. Without language and the underlying sociocognitive skills that make it possible, it is unlikely that my chickens will ever unite en masse to rain death down upon the world in pursuit of glory for the Great Chicken Nation. Like most human cognitive achievements, language is a double-edged sword responsible for as much misery as pleasure. Would we, as a species, be happier without it? Quite possibly. Would the world have experienced as much death and misery had humans remained a nonlinguistic ape? Probably not. Language might generate more misery than pleasure for the animal kingdom as a whole. Language falls victim to the Exceptionalism Paradox: It is the ultimate symbol of the uniqueness of the human mind, and yet despite its wondrousness, it has helped generate more misery for the creatures on this planet (including ourselves) than pleasure.
What about our capacity for science and math? Like language, our mathematical competencies have roots that run deep in the minds of all animals. Spotted hyenas can count how many individuals there are in rival hyena groups, which helps them decide whether it’s worth getting into a fight.25 A newborn guppy is able to count to at least three, preferring to join a group of three fish over two, a handy skill when there is safety in numbers.26 Honeybees can count the number of landmarks they fly over on their way from the hive to a food source, helping them find their way back to a yummy flower patch by, for example, tallying up the number of houses there are along the way.27 But humans have taken these mathematical competencies to a new level. Einstein’s field equation explaining how space-time is warped by gravity might have its roots in a numerical ability common to hyenas and honeybees, but that resemblance is about as strong as my cinnamon-scented candle’s resemblance to the sun.
Science operates on a similarly sophisticated level. It’s our why specialist capacity for causal inference on steroids. The scientific method gives us the tools to test hypotheses and uncover cause-and-effect relationships that have given us paradigm-altering ideas like germ theory or quantum mechanics. Our collective culture is built on the back of science and math, and the modern world exists because of these skills. And these skills simply do not exist in nonhuman animals in anything but the most basic form.
So does science and math generate an abnormal amount of pleasure for our species? Arguably, yes. While science and math have brought us death and destruction (e.g., atom bombs), it is also responsible for modern medicine and food production. So, on average, we have seen a spike in pleasure—as a species—because of it. And that spike might then mean that our daily lives are slightly less misery-filled than that of other species. They may spend more time struggling to find food and shelter and fight off disease than your average human.
But then again, science and math did bring us that atom bomb, and the mechanized farming practices that brought us a grocery store full of bananas, but also an atmosphere full of carbon. So it’s not all good. Like language, it is a double-edged sword. The average human might be better off now than we were 100,000 years ago thanks to our technical and scientific discoveries, but the planet itself (and the creatures on it) is far worse off. There is far less pleasure for the million species currently threatened with extinction thanks mostly to human behavior.28 And, if we wind up going extinct by the end of the century (for which there is that 9.5 percent chance of happening), then all that net gain in pleasure will have been for nothing. Our capacity for scientific thinking and mathematical competencies are another fantastic example of the Exceptionalism Paradox: awesome and awful in equal measure.
The final verdict
Are humans winning in the sense that we both produce and experience more pleasure—on average—than other species? Before I answer that, we need to have a frank discussion about this idea of “average.” I am not an average human. As a middle-aged white male living in a country that ranks near the top of health, education, and standard of living indices, my lifestyle is privileged to an absurd degree. I can lounge around sipping my imported coffee, watching my hobby chickens roam my yard without any worry about where my next meal will come from. This is not normal. At the moment, one in four people living on this planet are experiencing moderate to severe food insecurity, meaning that they do not have the means to acquire enough food for a healthy diet, or have run out of food altogether.29 Despite the falling rates of food insecurity since the start of the millennium, it is still quite normal for the average human to not have enough food to eat. In Canada, my life expectancy is 82.4 years, nearly a decade more than the average global life expectancy of 72.6. And almost thirty years more than the Central African Republic, which has the lowest life expectancy at just fifty-three years.30 The average human living in the Central African Republic, which has been beset by a civil war since 2012 and where 2.5 million people out of a population of 4.6 million need humanitarian relief,31 is leading a very different life from my own. I would wager that moments of pleasure and happiness are exceedingly rare for every one of the fourteen thousand child soldiers in the Central African Republic. The “average” human, then, is living a much more difficult and less pleasure-filled life than I am. Because of the paradox of human intelligence, we have created a world in which there are extremes in terms of pleasure maximalization (on my end) and pleasure deficit (as we see in the Central African Republic right now). One’s own privilege must be considered when having breakfast conversations about the value of the human experience.
Here, then, is the final verdict. Homo sapiens are no more likely to experience pleasure—on average—than other species. Whatever gifts our capacity for language, math, science, etc. have given us, there is no evidence to suggest that my life—as privileged as it is—is filled with more pleasure than the lives of my chickens.
Not even the happiest of humans can necessarily out-happy my chickens. Consider the life of a Buddhist monk who spends their day in quiet contemplation, having mastered the ability to minimize the discomfort felt by negative thoughts or emotions. Matthieu Ricard, for example, is a Tibetan Buddhist monk considered to be the world’s happiest person. On his best day, let’s say that Ricard experiences only pleasure, no negative thoughts or sensations of any kind. His brain is flooded with positive qualia letting him know that his physical, social, and emotional needs are met and that he has nothing to worry about. Is that really any different than what my chickens experience every day? Arguably, my chickens experience little to no negative qualia each day; they can forage inside a huge enclosed area (safe from predators) and have access to all the food and water they need. They can roost high up in the rafters (i.e., their favorite place to be at night), and live in a social grouping that, according to research into chicken social cognition, is exactly the norm for their species (i.e., one rooster, ten hens). My chickens are, like Ricard, living a pleasure-maxed life. He and my chickens have identically pleasure-soaked minds. Which means that any human living a life filled with less pleasure than Ricard (e.g., me, you, a child soldier, everyone else) is technically losing to my chickens at the game of life.
Of course, the way my chickens live is not the norm for the species. And this, too, is a product of human intelligence, and a sad result of the Exceptionalism Paradox. Humans have the power to create a life of pleasure maximization for chickens. But we typically use that power to create far more misery for them than you would find for an “average” chicken living in the wild. Because humans have devised ways to streamline the production of eggs and meat to maximize our access to food, we have created a situation for farmed chickens that is the stuff of nightmares. Most chickens alive today are stuck in battery cages, deprived of normal roosting, foraging, and socialization. As a whole, chickens likely experience less pleasure than humans. But that is, paradoxically, humans’ fault. It’s due to human cognition creating more misery for chickens, not more happiness for ourselves.
The future of human intelligence
The human mind is exceptional. We have a capacity that all other species lack: the ability to intentionally produce more pleasure for other minds. As why specialists with episodic foresight and theory of mind, we understand that our actions can generate pleasure and misery in the minds of other creatures, be it human or animal. We understand that child soldiers and battery cage hens are miserable. We know these things, and we have the ability to change them. We have the cognitive and technological capacity to create a world that maximizes pleasure for all humans, as well as nonhuman animals. We could flood the world in pleasure qualia, if we wanted to. And this would elevate the value of human intelligence to something beyond that of other species, who cannot conceive of a pleasure-maxed world. If there is one way in which human minds are superior to those of animals in terms of worth, it is our capacity for understanding that pleasure is important and wanting to spread it as far and wide as possible. Paradoxically though, we don’t.
One of the reasons I love Star Trek is because it envisions a kind of techno-dork utopia like this, where humans live somewhat harmoniously with one another and have eliminated much of the day-to-day suffering that we currently experience. Is Star Trek’s pleasure-maximization world a fantasy?
There are two schools of thought on the future of the human species when it comes to creating a pleasure-maxed utopia. In one corner, you have Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychologist and linguist who has written extensively about why there is hope for our species when it comes to bettering ourselves. Pinker points out that humans have been doing a bang-up job of improving our lot in life thanks to the kind of Enlightenment thinking (i.e., “reason applied to human betterment”32) that has doubled our average life span in just two hundred years, and reduced global poverty to its current levels (an all-time low). When asked to speculate on the future of our species, Pinker is somewhat optimistic, arguing that “problems are inevitable, but problems are solvable, and solutions create new problems that can be solved in their turn.”33 It’s not a promise of an inevitable utopia, but it’s got a Star Trek ring to it that smacks more of optimism than extinction.
In the other corner you have the philosopher John Gray, who has written many books on humanity’s place in the natural world. Gray acknowledges the lovely boost that comes with Enlightenment style–thinking that has given us modern technology and medicine and everything else, but does not seem to have much hope that these advantages will be enough to free humans of the endless cycle of self-destructive prognostic myopia. In his book Straw Dogs he writes:
The growth of knowledge is real and—barring a world-wide catastrophe—it is now irreversible. Improvements in government and society are no less real, but they are temporary. Not only can they be lost, they are sure to be. History is not progress or decline, but recurring gain and loss. The advance of knowledge deludes us into thinking we are different from other animals, but our history shows that we are not.
Yes, it’s possible we will break this cycle of inevitable loss and live in a technologically beautiful future like in Star Trek, with adamantine cities floating in the sky above lush, untouched rain forests blanketing a rejuvenated Earth. Where biodiversity has been restored, and humans get their food from sustainably grown farming that doesn’t require as much land or water usage, and where we have eliminated the animal misery created by current farming practices. That’s my daughter’s dream for the world. Floating cities. Forests. Life.
She tells me about this as we are on our way to the youth rally for climate change in Halifax. We are driving down the Trans-Canada Highway in my Subaru past new swatches of clear-cut forest dotting the Nova Scotia landscape. We march through the streets in a huge crowd—the largest Halifax has ever seen—demanding that the world’s governments take action to address climate change. On the way home, we stop for a coffee and a doughnut and talk about all the ways in which humans are destroying the Earth, and what we need to do to fix it.
A fossil fuel–burning car? Imported coffee? Clear-cutting? A climate rally? That’s a whole lot of mixed messages for just one day. I am rotten with prognostic myopia. We are all rotten with prognostic myopia.
I am hopeful that we will find a solution to the existential threats marching toward us. I believe that we can create laws that bypass our decision-making blind spots and channel our collective actions into stopping the threats of climate change and ecological collapse. I hope that the Star Trek utopia that is within us becomes a reality. I’m just not sure when that hope bleeds into delusion.
If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal
Let’s revisit our old pal Nietzsche. Here’s what he had to say about animal happiness:
Consider the cattle, grazing as they pass you by: they do not know what is meant by yesterday or today, they leap about, eat, rest, digest, leap about again, and so from morn till night and from day to day, fettered to the moment and its pleasure or displeasure, and thus neither melancholy nor bored. This is a hard sight for man to see; for, though he thinks himself better than the animals because he is human, he cannot help envying them their happiness.34
The thing is, Nietzsche was wrong about cows. They are not “fettered to the moment.” Cows, like most animals, make plans, albeit for the near future. And they experience melancholy. They have a minimal concept of death, and feel some kind of sadness at the loss of their friends and family.
But he was right to acknowledge their capacity for pleasure. He was right to envy their happiness. Depending on the individual cow in question, it’s likely that a cow will experience more pleasure in its lifetime than did the soul-tortured Nietzsche. Unlike a Buddhist who seeks to end suffering through the elimination of desire, Nietzsche embraced suffering as a path to meaning. Misery was, for him, a worthy teacher. His human cognitive capacities—his death wisdom, causal inferential skills, and cognitive-linguistic aptitude—brought him no happiness. No pleasure. Only the suffering that he craved. In the end, Nietzsche would have been better off as a narwhal. And, if we think seriously about increasing pleasure and reducing misery on a global scale—the utilitarian utopia—then the world would have been better off if we were all narwhals. Think of the happiness it would spread throughout the animal kingdom if humans suddenly stopped doing all the destructive things that make us human.
Human intelligence is not the miracle of evolution we like to think it is. We love our little accomplishments—our moon landings and megacities—like a parent loves their newborn baby. But nobody loves a baby as much as the parents. The planet does not love us as much as we love our intellect. Because we are indeed exceptional if not necessarily “good,” we have generated more death and destruction for life on this planet than any other animal, past and present. Our many intellectual accomplishments are currently on track to produce our own extinction, which is exactly how evolution gets rid of adaptations that suck. It is the greatest of paradoxes that we should have an exceptional mind that seems hell-bent on destroying itself. Unless we can pull out a Pinkerian Star Trek solution in the nick of time, human intelligence is going to wink out of existence.
So instead of looking at the cows and chickens and narwhals in your life with pity because they lack human cognitive capacities, think first about the value of those capacities. Do you experience more pleasure than your pets because of them? Is the world a better place thanks to our species’ intelligence? If we are honest about the answers to those questions, then there’s good reason to tone down our smugness. Because, depending on where we go from here, human intelligence may just be the stupidest thing that has ever happened.