The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris

I had a great time reading this book. Despite coming out almost fifty years ago when I found it, much of what it says is still thought provoking and relevant. The book owes a lot to psychoanalysis which was more dominant at the time. Which is good since Morris uses it to good effect to tie together physiological and behavioral facts into a general theory of human nature.

What is that theory of human nature? Well, that we are the way we are because our ancestors were forced to become a predatory species/hunting-ape and couldn't stay in and around trees picking fruits. Millions of years ago in Africa the forests started to disappear, and the apes could either cling onto whatever was left, or leave the "garden of Eden" and enter into competition with the predators on the ground. Ape populations have dwindled since, and we have emerged the apex predator. To get to that point we had to overcome the other predators, but with inferior equipment so to speak; no fangs or claws. So we made use of two things carried over to a certain degree from our ape past; intelligence and social communication. "His whole body, his way of life, was geared to a forest existence, and then suddenly he was jettisoned into a world where he could survive only if he began to live like a brainy, weapon toting wolf."

Our social lives are to this day built on a sort of tension between social communication and intellect (from ape life) and obedience and violence from our predatory existence. Vestiges of our ape life are our greater reliance on sight at the expense of smell and a more various taste palate. Our predator life involves traveling greater distances to find game, rather than remaining close to the trees, having a home base to protect and return to, and having regular meals rather than momentary snacking. Being a predatory ape means developing ways to facilitate male cooperation, to hunt together with dangerous weapons, and to guarantee a share of the kills and a female for the effort. Monogamy and private property likely arise from a need to secure the loyalty of males to females and children while they hunted and prevent conflict among the males. This isn't all bad, as the predator life means some degree of male solidarity. We can't have a single alpha male who gets exclusive access to women and food. The ability to cooperate and use weapon technology means the lesser males can gang up and resist, limit, or kill the alpha male. Thus some satisfactory distribution of females and resources becomes necessary for social order, and this is likely where marriage and property and even government developed from.

Morris channels Sigmund Freud and argues that religion emerges from the guilt of (symbolically) killing the alpha ape. Even with all his faults, an all powerful male does instill some sort of order and security which is socially useful. You knew where you stood, and the alpha ape in a way encouraged exogamous mating, preventing incest by kicking the sons out of the harem. So religion projects the seemingly omnipotent alpha ape onto the cosmos, extending its influence to our personal lives without actually being here.

There are several downsides that ape life has: lack of cooperation (among males), a pecking order with one individual on top, and less incentive to control nature. Ape and monkey society is more about competition and dominance, and dependent on nature providing food for the picking. Depending on the environment means not traveling too far and remaining close, thus reducing the need for defense of home as well as needing to know what others are up to as they aren't far. If we just forage for food, there isn't a need to cooperate. It's "finders keepers", and so dominance becomes more important. The alpha male gets the first pick, and so long as everybody abides conflict can be avoided, with little need to work together other than staying out of the big guy's way. 

Despite all these downsides, we are still closest to the apes. We haven't evolved to be complete predators, just enough behaviors to utilize our intelligence and social cooperation to survive and thrive. And we only evolved that way because the environment made us, forced us out east of Eden. It seems that much of our aesthetics, tastes, curiosity, and enjoyment of life are owed to our more ape aspects. A pure predator kind of society would resemble the Spartans I think. What we do in leisure however reflects both aspects of our nature, in varying degrees. The popularity of sports and online first person shooter video games reflects the more predatory side. More relaxing and solitary activities like cooking or painting reflect the ape side.

As for the title, the naked ape, the reason why we don't have a full coat of fur is to aid us in hunting; cooling us down by chasing animals. Other predators can make fast dashes after prey, but our bipedal stature and the occupation of our hands makes this difficult. "By losing the heavy coat of hair and by increasing the number of sweat glands all over the body surface, considerable cooling could be achieved- not for minute by minute living, but for the supreme moments of the chase." Our subcutaneous fat and ability to fashion clothes help keep us warm without fur. With the help of neoteny, the retaining of youthful traits into adulthood, all this explains our appearance as the naked ape. Younger chimps have flatter faces, a long slender neck, smaller teeth, absence of heavy brow ridges, non-rotating big toe, and more hair on the head than the rest of the body. Our extended childhood also allows us to develop our powerful brains. A desire to explore and learn new things are also associated with youth, and so we are the young ape as well as the naked ape. Though of course neoteny is selective, as we aren't attracted to infant genitals, infantile emotions, or infantile strength.

The book is full of interesting speculations about behavior, always trying to link us to our animal nature. The message of the book is that we are still operating with an animal mindset no matter how developed we are. Even the most complex behaviors like pacing back and forth and the conduct of war harken back to our more modest origins.

Knowledge & Freedom

Happiness itself, in the positive sense, is never long lasting. Human happiness is qualitatively different than that of other sentient beings. It is not enough to feel pleasure; we form expectations about the future and analyze the past to guide future actions.

The physical world is one of perpetual change; of perpetual desire for what cannot be gratified for more than a moment, for one always lives in the moment and not in the past or future. When we try to connect these unique moments, contradiction abounds to continually frustrate attempts to synthesize a single picture of the world.

We always live outside of ourselves, the physical self. The capacity of thought is merely to imagine a different world like ours, which could be if things were or will be different. Memories of the past and expectations about the future allow us to compare ourselves with a better imaginary world, or haunt us with the memory or expectation of loss. We are victims of the success of human knowledge.

The lack of foreknowledge of the future forms prejudices in the mind, expectations which are based off of what has worked before in uncertain situations. Unfortunately, most people do not change their minds when the facts change before having to learn a hard lesson. There is a tendency to stick to ideas in the face of contradictory information because we have invested ourselves into them. This is due to a desire for consistency, a freedom from worry. The bias towards certain attitudes always faces the threat of conflicting with what happens or could happen in the future. This persistence in the face of conflicting information is really motivated by our own egoistic ends, but we take them to be indicative of the truth, universal. Whereas in reality we have to make such prejudices universal, by eliminating or explaining away contradictions.

Knowledge leads ultimately to the realization that we will die, for the best we can predict about the future comes from what has always happened in the past. We live in space and time, a certain space and a certain time, and yet imagine alternatives that are possible within this checker board. Namely that our existence and that of everything we perceive is contingent. Existence will continue without us as it has for billions of what we call years.

Freedom (not in the physical sense of absence of impediment) is merely the lack of certainty between our actions and the environment. If there was complete freedom, knowledge would be impossible.

What is not determined is not knowable. In a completely undetermined universe, there would no expectations at all for there would be permanent basis to build such expectations. No regularity to establish connections between what are fundamentally different things.

This is the freedom that people talk about when invoking free will, that the actions of the will are without necessity. But this concept is mistaken. The will is merely the power to affect changes in our sensations, the establishment of this power is only possible if there is a necessary connection between will and the environment. If not, there is no way to ever know if will is the efficient cause of anything.

It could be the case that we do what we do and just happen to want what we do, but not actually do what we want. Free will advocates want not only the will to act without necessity, but that the will also has the power to determine what happens in the world it inhabits. A childhood narcissism, a feeling of absolute power over the external world. If we had this power, we would cease to be individuals, as to be something is to be opposed to something else. Fate and tragedy belong to individual existence.

Freedom of thought without action is meaningless. This is too much to ask for. We can never know with necessity what causes what, and there is no reason to believe that we as pure ego are the cause of all our actions. We are spectators, trapped in a world of objects.

There you have it; knowledge and freedom are sources of unhappiness. But they are bound up to the life of the individual. If we celebrate the individual, then we should remain respectful of the suffering involved; and embrace it as a means of self-overcoming.

The Orgasm Biopathy: Breakthrough to the Biological

A preliminary excursion into biology, inspired by from the chapter "The Breakthrough to the Biological" in The Function of the Orgasm by Wilhelm Reich. Drawings done on my iPad; the two diagrams are from Reich.

Life must be rooted into the physical. Early attempts relied on teleological or metaphysical language to make sense of something so eminent. Some more current biological explanations explain life in an abstract rational language based on reflection, while life from a phenomenal perspective operates intuitively. 

It is true that inclusive fitness is what determines the fate and characteristics of species, while not caring much for the individual. But this is known in hindsight. Living things do not occupy their time with such unforeseeable consequences . 

Sexuality for the individual is not exclusively concerned with reproduction or even genital pleasure early on. Sexuality is the qualitative expression of pleasure from the quantitative expansion of the body and its internal content into the environment. Sexuality involves the physical processes of the whole body. It is the purpose of every organism; not in a teleological way, but from the continued activity of life. I see this conception of sexuality not at odds with the traditional view of sex being for the propagation of the species, but as the complementary psychology of individual sexuality.

"Procreation is a function of sexuality, and not vice versa. Sexuality can no longer be regarded as an unfortunate concomitant of the preservation of the species." Wilhelm Reich 

Reproduction and the primacy of genital copulation are not the original impetus for sexuality for the individual, as this develops later in life. Sexuality is a lifelong process from the very beginning of life. It is a biological process of expansion and discharge into the environment from the built up energy of the body. It can be described as a transfer of electrical potential energy into the mechanical energy of bodily motion. Success in this endeavor continues the growth and development of the individual. The health of mind is related to sexual health.

The orgasm's function is the continuation of the individual organism which comes to serve reproductive functions. The orgasm services the expansion of living things by making such effort pleasurable by not only providing relaxation after a release of tension, but by delivering greater pleasure for greater stores of tension. The orgasm is life in its most potent immediate form. The expression of the "will to power."

Higher potential energy-> greater kinetic energy. A highly charged current will flow to less charged one; flow from first to second. Static electrical energy is converted into current energy. Equalization takes place. Equalization presupposes a difference in potential energy.

"Since the concentrations and structures of the membranes are not homogeneous, differences develop in the tensions at the border surfaces, and, simultaneously, differences in potential of varying energy." Wilhelm Reich

Muscles discharge as energy in the body is in constant motion from places of higher to places of lower potential. Atoms have a fixed quantum of electrical charge; depending on their position atoms cations or anions, having positive or negative charge.

There is a four part formula for the orgasm: mechanical tension, electrical charge, electrical discharge, mechanical relaxation. 

Tension- sexual organs fill up with blood; build up of potential electrical energy

Charge- transfer of mechanical to electrical energy; electrical excitation sent to brain

Discharge- muscular convulsion discharges electrical charge, release/flow of fluids. 

Relaxation- flowing off of body fluids to areas of lower pressure, towards exterior. Drive towards equalization. 

Something that expands in all directions forms a sphere. As internal pressure increases, surface tension of the exterior resists this expansion.

Two things can happen. The sphere can burst, like a balloon. Or the accumulated charge from the fluid tension can be discharged. 

If the body or body part remains in one piece, then the shape will become serpentine while expelling material, becoming more linear as the discharge must go in one direction to avoid bursting. 

Biology shows us how the function of the orgasm is observable among the most simple organisms and common life processes

Mitosis, the division of the cell, reflects this process at the most basic level. The cell is limited in size because the membrane must keep what is inside inside. As the inside grows, internal pressure and surface tension increase. To avoid bursting, the cell shape becomes a little wavy, like the serpentine pattern, but with one trough. The energy can be discharged into the separation of another cell rather than a continuation of the pattern which changes the shape of the cell, which requires constant effort.

The single cell amoeba sustains itself by moving the edge of the membrane to where food is, by distributing the body fluid cytoplasm to areas of the membrane edge, creating pseudopods to move in a particular direction. 

The bladder expels fluid from the body after expansion, increased internal pressure and surface tension. The trail of urine approaches a line the more fluid is being expelled and more effort is being used. 

Organisms are not homogeneous in structure. Differences develop in surface tension on the surface, and the quantities of potential energy inside the body. Energy is distributed unevenly, produced and built up internally. Organic bodies can expand and contract. 

The Inorganic is homogeneous; energy is evenly distributed on the surface, no internal production or build up of energy. The entire body is rigid in structure. 

Muscular armoring makes our orientation to the world rigid, inorganic. Our body still attracts and builds up energy, but does not allow free movement or release. The muscles constrict the flow of fluids like blood in order to prevent the expression of sexuality. Just as when we try to hold in urine when the bladder becomes full to prevent the visible release of what is inside to the exterior. External excitation is reflected or kept inside. 

The twin drives of sexual pleasure and anxious pain can be mapped onto the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems. The parasympathetic nervous system aims outward towards pleasure and expansion. The sympathetic nervous system draws inward, exciting the body against external threats. 

Sympathetic- "fight or flight" and homeostasis, basic living functions. Eye dilation, sweating, adrenaline. 

Parasympathetic-"Feed and breed" or "rest and digest." Body at rest, after eating. Crying, peeing, digesting. 

Pain and suffering are related to a build up of tension, but which doesn't lead to expansion for the organism or a pleasurable discharge for the organism. Discharge takes effort to do, rather than being a lessening of tension. Internal pressure increases, to the point where the energy can only be released by external pressure. 

Repression of sexual energy puts one under the control of others for tension reduction. The release of energy built up into internal pressure can only be pleasurable if given an outlet to where there is lower pressure. This is what an organism does naturally, according to its physical constitution. It is unnatural to go against the functioning of the body, which aims outward, and instead increasing tension without release for a pleasurable end. 

When tension and energy are increased without controlled release, the pressure turns inward. The individual turns away from the world and aims to avoid an increase of personal expansion.

Getting to the Unconscious

If we had to learn everything we need to survive in our own lifetimes, we would never have made it this far as a species. In some way we live out the development of the species in the comparatively short span of our individual lives. I find it amazing how often we can understand each other without explaining what we meant. How much effort it takes to hide our feelings and lie to each other. How most of communication is non-verbal. The best explanation I've found for such thoughts is the notion of unconscious mind, something which is worth exploring to get a better understanding of mental life.

The earliest notions of an unconscious are a priori ideas which do not originate from any experience we can name from our individual conscious lives. Such thinking is found in Plato's doctrines of the theory of forms and knowledge as recollection. Aristotle who was critical of the theory of forms instead came up with potentiality, what we are able to do but haven't made manifest.

But it is with Rene Descartes that consciousness becomes something in and of itself which isn't necessary to explain the physical world and which we argue about a deal. The possibility of someone being physically identical to us and behaving like us but not being conscious would have been a very strange thought in ancient days. But now we are surrounded by machines which can perform tasks which were once exclusive to us. Thinking about the the unconscious can get us back to a connection between consciousness and the physical world, as whatever is unconscious cannot be observed directly. Maybe someday artificial intelligence will be so advanced that consciousness itself can only be inferred as well.

A great many philosophers since Descartes have identified consciousness with the ability to use language. The assumption is that we only have access to our own consciousness, which unchecked we attribute to everything else in the world. It is only by inference that we establish the existence of other minds. It is how the world resists our will that we know matter, which isn't conscious. Language is how we express our thinking through symbols. If someone else acts how we expect ourselves, being conscious to act, then they are conscious.

While I do think that language is necessary for consciousness, Descartes went further and argued essentially that any sort of perceptual awareness was consciousness or self-consciousness. Even animals which act as if they feel pain, which requires no language to understand, actually don't feel pain and just act as if they do. This was a very restrictive and human-centric understanding of consciousness to include any feeling whatsoever.

This kind of reasoning becomes mechanical. Manipulating symbols, inferring from a set of rules algorithmically. The assumption is that if something acts consciously and is physically indistinguishable from what is conscious, then it is conscious. Any other criterion reflects only our own thinking. Descartes said in the Meditations that even the most fantastical things can only be put together from something objectively existing. "Even when painters try to depict sirens and satyrs with the most extraordinary bodies, they simply jumble up the limbs of different kinds of real animals, rather than inventing natures that are entirely new." Even HP Lovecraft's most bizarre monsters are composed of tentacles and eyeballs, which can be found individually without difficulty.

This kind of reasoning is what computers can do today, well enough to fool a good number of us that they are conscious (Turing Test). Aristotle defined human beings as the rational animal as if the ability to reason made us unique. With computers and the formalization of logic, what is unique about humans in today's society is what we share with animals (our species-life). A strange state of affairs indeed.

What Descartes didn't have was the intentional unconscious. Descartes had an inkling of the unconscious, which really was a second state of consciousness to explain mental ideas but not caused by the mind as we know it.

"And as to the other reason, which is that these ideas must proceed from objects outside me, since they do not depend on my will, I do not find it any the more convincing. For just as these impulses of which I have spoken are found in me, notwithstanding that they do not always concur with my will, so perhaps there is in me some faculty fitted to produce these ideas without the assistance of any external things, even though it is not yet known by me; just as, apparently, they have hithero always been found in me during sleep without the aid of external objects." Meditations on First Philosophy

This unconscious for him is a causal mechanism which is like mind, except that we are not aware of its cause. This unconscious is really the preconscious, the potential to become conscious, because these thoughts can enter into consciousness without much difficulty, and are only strange in that we don't remember where exactly they came from.

Gottfried Leibniz, an admirer of Descartes, brought us the first conception of the unconscious.

14 "The passing state...is nothing other than what is called perception, which must be carefully distinguished from apperception or consciousness, as will appear presently. And herein lies the great mistake of the Cartesians, that they took no account of perceptions which are not apperceived. It is this also which makes them believe that minds alone are monads, and that neither brutes nor other entelechies have souls." -Monadology

For Leibniz, we must have an idea of everything that exists in the universe, because we are affected by them whether or not we are conscious. If the external world exists independently of consciousness (object permanence) then it should be that our minds are affected by external things even when we are not aware of them. There is a difference between unconscious perception and conscious perception of things.

The key is that the perceptions are not strong enough to be brought to clarity or distinction, not stored by memory or continually seized by the mind. Perception comes from Latin percipere which means to seize. Consciousness is properly apperception, an appetite for perception. Appetite comes from Latin appetitus to desire for or seek after. The difference between consciousness and unconsciousness is a sort of continual intensity on a single thing. [For more on Leibniz's Monadology]

20 "For we experience within ourselves a state, in which we remember nothing and have no distinguishable perception; and when we fall into a swoon, or when we are overcome by deep dreamless sleep."

These states Leibniz describe can be empirically investigated. In the 19th Gustav Fechner and Ernst Weber and others came up with psychophysics which explores the relationship between physical stimuli, like touch, and sensations, like pain. For thousands of years philosophers have debated the relationship between mind and body. Prior to psychophysics Spinoza and Schopenhauer, both very influential to the 19th century German thinkers, argued for mind and body being two aspects of the same world, and not some causal relationship, a debate which continues today. But they didn't really have a measurable quantitive mechanism to the relationship between the two. Psychophysics likewise avoided the debate between whether and how body and mind interact and instead looked to when exactly the mind becomes aware of physical activity. Much like Leibniz's difference between consciousness and unconsciousness, as degrees of awareness. Psychophysics aims to establish the quantitative relationship between the two without reducing one to the other. What difference in physical stimuli is noticable? This is what psychophysics explores. 

Looking to psychophysics, there must be a way in which physical stimuli affect us even when we are not consciously aware of them. To explain phenomena like dreams, slips of the tongue, hysteria, neurosis, phobias, fetishes etc.

This gets us to a link between conscious sensation and physical stimuli, but what about stimuli that is beneath the threshold of consciousness? How can we measure that?

The truth is that the unconscious as a causal factor as well as a psychological reality must be inferred. We cannot experience or measure the unconscious directly, but neither can we experience or measure directly the thoughts of others. We infer that others are conscious, even if not in daily life because we are familiar with our own consciousness and apply that to others readily. But the unconscious by its nature is not something we even want to apply even to ourselves. We want to be in control of ourselves. But it is a qualitative "mechanism" which could explain our ability to understand each other, not as physical phenomena but in terms of something we do share. The unconscious as the missing link between the body and consciousness. 

For the mature notion of the unconscious, the German speaking philosophers of the 19th century had to eliminate the vestiges of idealist/dualist thinking, inherited from Leibniz and reaching its apex in Georg Hegel. The revolutionaries would follow a line of criticism against Kant's thing-in-itself and thing-as-appearance and the German idealists who offered stronger idealisms as a solution. I'll write about that in a different post. 

The Necessity of Empirical Knowledge

There are things which are known without regard to sense experience. The truths of geometry are self-evident, as are the conclusions of deductive arguments like the old 'Socrates is mortal.'

But such truths cannot yield other truths. This sort of reasoning cannot lead to anything else than is already known. The truths are ultimately tautologies. 'A is A' and 'A is not not A' do not tell me anything new. Nothing else than what is contained in the subject. And even truths of mathematics like 7+5=12 requires something other than is in the notions 5, 7, and 12 (once we have these notions, however, the truth of mathematics require no further experience for their truth).

Experience is what gives us new information. Experience is the content of our concepts. Analytic concepts which require no new experience to know are themselves derived from experience at some point. They are the products of the condensation and distilling of experiences, by our own activity, whether we are aware of it or not.

Our concepts are given the impression of universality because of external conditions which are stronger than individual will. Our species life is what gives commonality amongst other humans and with animals to different extents due to our common biological descent.

The other reason for the seeming immutability of our conceptions, and equally as hard for most humans to comprehend, is that the nature of consciousness imposes conditions on our knowledge. To understand the world, the purpose of which is self-preservation, it is entirely unnecessary to be aware of or remember everything. Only what is advantageous to maintaining difference with the environment to continue bodily motion is sufficient for life. This selectivity, due to our limited budget of energy expenditure, is responsible for our notions of space, time, and causality, which are the basis for scientific or objective knowledge [As is the existence of rest mass].

Reality is radically pluralistic, even as it is 'one' reality. One only knows something in relation to something else. Everything comes together and apart; invades each other's personal space. We attempt to impose unity or a false pluralism where similar things come grouped together under a set of arbitrary rules. Any thought we have is accompanied by a physical action, not by some mechanical relationship, but in that they are different aspects of the same thing. They are material, they are sensual.