About Jane Goodall and Noam Chomsky

Why Jane Goodall wrong to conclude from her anthropocentric observations that chimpanzees use “tools.”

The “objects” chimps use individually to get food for themselves are extension of their body which they learn to use by imitation:

NB As you can see in this picture, and in many others showing chimps using objects, that they are as conscious of the objects they use to get food as they are of their teeth when chewing or of their digestive system afterward.

The “tools” we use are collective extensions of our mind

Everything we do socially are conscious applications  of principle already present in nature:

E.g., Gears in Jumping Insects vs. Manufactured Gears

Now we must redefine gears redefine engineers, or accept mechanical engineers as flees.

This image supports my long-held contention that Jane Goodall is wrong to have concluded, from her anthropocentric observations, that “chimps use tools.” They don’t. The objects they use to get food for themselves are not “tools” but extensions of their body, of which they are as conscious of as they are of the teeth they use to eat these foods.

Chimps Do Not Teach

 Chimps do not use “tools” to crack open nuts like we do consciously; it is a habit they have acquired through imitation. When they finally “get it,” it simply becomes a biological extension of themselves. Adult chimps cannot teach youngsters how to use rocks, no more that they can teach them how to grow teeth. Cracking open nuts for chimps is an “exosomatic” biological process. That is why there is “no active teaching” and “adults never teach.” (See 4:50 in Chimps Do Not Teach) Young chimpanzees have to learn for themselves at each generation. I will show later that the reason for that is that chimps and all animals live in the instant for themselves, without any spatiotemporal conceptualizations, which are the sine qua nons for conscious tools making and teaching. What chimps use to survive are not tools but their acquired ability to imitate.

And maybe, they don’t even have spatiotemporal “representations” of their surroundings; they don’t have image representations of their world like we do; they simply are “one” with their surroundings to which they react instinctively. This easily explains that when something is changing in the immediate surroundings of dogs, for example, they don’t realize it, and behave as if it was still there (See Stupid dog below), and it also shows that their instinctive behaviours are not reaction to spatiotemporal “representations” but to simple stimuli present in their surroundings, which they don’t “objectify” like we do (See Teacup chihuahua below):

Stupid Dog

Teacup chihuahua swimming over a shot glass

Here an aparté must be made to introduce the fact that my theory of “universal evolution,” (This is an excerpt of a longer text) on which I have been working for the last forty years, is based on the premises that biological animals live for themselves and in themselves as we do in our bodies, without any representations. The difference between them and us is that “their “self” comprise their whole surroundings from which they are not separated and to which they respond “instinctively,” like our body does while making thousands of unconscious decision every day without any representations.

Here’s another example which shows that the other animals do not have the same ‘representation” of the world that we have:

It is by becoming aware of space and time that we have separated ourselves from “the other animals,” and that we have “slowly” gained the capacity to “objectify” our environment and ourselves in it. An evolutionary process that has eventually opened up for us the possibility to make errors about the intrinsic nature of space and time.

Even though we also live for ourselves, we do it consciously in “space and time” and in societies, in both of which we have gained the ability to “use tools” and transmit our knowledge of them through teaching. It is indeed this ability to “objectify” space and time―unconsciously for millions of years and consciously for hundreds; and to recognize ourselves in it, unconsciously for millions of years as hominids, and consciously for thousands as sapiens―that has given us the transformative ability to live in society and create tools.

Chimps are not “transformed” by their capacity to crack nuts with rocks; they will never invent nutcrackers; they are simply animals who have learned to use rocks to eat nuts, for millions of years probably. The only one who’s been transformed by their habit is Jane Goodall. Sorry Dr Goodall, but if my refutation of your conclusion that chimpanzees also use “tools” is correct, and I am sure it is, your conclusion has to be exposed as false, since your mistaken identification of chimps to us because they use “tools” has been detrimental to humanity, since we are mental entities as different from biological animals as our everyday reality is from quantum reality. And because of this fact, which I will expose in De Evolutionibus res naturas, the PhD dissertation that I am writing in absentia, your “findings” have had many adverse implications on our social and scientific capacities to formulate our present existential problems in solvable terms.

Disturbing implications which I cannot “describe” until I formulate my theory of universal evolution in which humans are not seen as “other animals,” but as an emergent class of mental beings antithetical to the animal dimension. My theory of universal evolution will indeed show that we are to the animal world what matter is to energy and life to matter, with all the theoretical implications that these two latter dichotomies imply.

***

“It is the theory that describes what we can observe.” Einstein

And in this, I am in good company. My theory is as revolutionary to our understanding of human nature as General Relativity was to our understanding of space-time and gravitation. Indeed, by providing a material explanation of consciousness, it opens to specialized scientists the road to the unification of quantum mechanics and classical physics—among many other new avenues of research.

  • “Roger Penrose, a mathematical physicist at Oxford University, believes that if a “theory of everything” is ever developed in physics to explain all the known phenomena in the universe, it should at least partially account for consciousness.”Why Great Minds Can’t Grasp Consciousness

Mind you; my theory also shows Einstein to be wrong for reasons also related to space and time, as I have shown Goodall to be; and as I will show Noam Chomsky to be also, but for the opposite reason than for Goodall. Indeed, while Goodall mistook the rocks used by Chimpanzees to be tools, Chomsky considers language (grammar) to be innate, instead of being a mental artifact that we have “exosomatically” developed during evolutionary history, to “describe” the spatiotemporal reality in which we live, and which does not objectively exist at the biological level. Languages are artifacts develop independently by all societies to describe the spatiotemporal reality in which they live. And if there are commonalities between each language, it is not because the grammar that they use is innate, as Chomsky assumed, following Plato (innate ideas) and Kant (synthetic a priori), who both didn’t know about evolution, but because all languages use rules that need to be congruent with the spatiotemporal reality that they describe, which is the same for all societies with variations.

Although they are not already exiting all made to be used by , which individuals have to learn how to use. They are artifacts that has to be rebuilt by individuals on their own to describe the wealth of stimuli that create the foundation of their brains (synapses connections) during their two first years of life.

Baby’s Brain [poverty of stimulus

Synapse Density Over Time Figure 3 Source: Corel, JL. The postnatal development of the human cerebral cortex. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; 1975.

 During the three first months of life, which are the “fourth trimester of gestation” (which I used to call “social womb”) an infant learn that there is a world out there that he can see and touch. It is then that the “stimuli” he receives (my subject is a boy) form the outside world are creating memory synapses, which will be the ground foundation of his personality. If there are no social contact during these three first month (feral children) an infant does not become full human since he or she will never be able to use language.

As for Einstein, you will not be able to understand why his theories are wrong before I develop my theory, which is based on assumptions about space and time that are antithetical to his. And when I do, because it is as true as the fact that the Earth is not fixed at the centre of the universe, it will become so easy to understand that even 6 or 7-year-olds will.

***

Of course, this refutation of the use of “tools” in chimps is also valid for all other animals that use “objects.” Indeed, if sets of “gears” could evolve by “chance and necessity” in jumping insects, without these gears being “tools.”

Or proteins evolved to carry waste materials out of cells (Kinesin protein), without them being conscious transporters. It is entirely possible that some similar evolutionary mechanisms have worked in crows and other animals to develop in them some unconscious “abilities to use objects.”

What differentiates us is the capacity that we have evolved to “objectify” reality in space and time. Capacity which has given use the ability to create tools out of materials found in our environment. Contrary to animals that use objects already present in their surroundings as “bionic extensions of themselves,” without having developed the conscious ability to refine them. Maybe some of them did it to some degrees, we don’t know, at least I don’t, but never like this:

source I added the rocket to the source.

However, it is this “progressive behaviour” of ours that has become an anomaly of evolution, because of our misunderstanding of its evolutionary meaning in time. As the anomalous behaviour of the planets were due to our misunderstanding of our true place in space.

As the planets were still moving in retrograde motions but were not anomalies anymore once we understood that we were not at the centre of the universe. Very similarly, but antithetically, once you, whoever you are, will have learned how your misunderstanding of where we stand in universal evolution affects your personal behaviour and all your theories, you will still be an anomaly of evolution, but will have gained the motivation to “consciously” use your personal resources for the benefit of our species in the context of a survivable sustainability, instead of using them for your own benefits in a context of a destructive progress.

Here, I must say that I am perfectly aware that I am “generalizing” and that there are many generous people in the world. However, I must also remind you that “the road to hell is paved with good intention,” and that, for the honest observers among us at least, this road is well on its way to being completed and carrossable… Forty years ago, I never thought that it would come that fast. I was still thinking in terms of centuries I was then already aware that we needed to regulate progress somehow. However, PCs, which have the power of accelerating everything, were not yet in the picture.

THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE

Maja, in Jacques Attali,s L’Anti économque, 1975

If I mention “you” instead of “we,” here, it is because that I already know what is this “original fallacy” that we made about our relation to reality in space, and later to evolution in time. And you don’t. And that I have myself intentionally start to work independently for the survival of our species, forty years ago when I came in contact with this Maja’s caricature, five years after a deep “secular” meditative experience about the nature of energy.

And if you ask me to tell you what is the content of this meditative experience, I will retort that I cannot reveal it until I expose my theory, after I succeeded in preparing your minds to be receptive to what will be a human paradigm shift utterly incommensurable with everything you know personally. And it is not that what you know is irrelevant; everything you presently know will have the potentiality of being relevant, but only when you willingly use it in the evolutionary context of our survival, which is entirely different than the historical context of progress in which you see yourself presently. And if you ask me what is this “original fallacy” that we made about our relation to reality I will also tell you that I cannot divulge it until I expose my theory since, having to do with your personal “egocentric” understanding, it happens that it affects each one of you differently.

What I can tell you about this life-changing experience that I had about the nature of energy while meditating at the age of 25, and the correlated dream that I made five years later about the true nature of time and its relation to energy is that those personal experiences are to my theory of “universal evolution,” what Einstein’s thought experiment he made at 16 was to his theory of special relativity.

However, the “extraordinary” (in Thomas Kuhn’s sense) discovery that I have made about the true nature of time and our actual place in evolution is the antithesis of “normal” scientific discoveries. While these latter discoveries are firstly made and understood by few individuals before being accepted as undeniable truth and put to use collectively for the benefit of progress. Mine will have to be understood and accepted simultaneously by everybody at different levels of understanding and individually put to use for the benefit of our survival in conjunction to everybody, as in a single individual. This universality is why it took me so long to formulate my findings (I am 72) in terms understandable, I hope by everybody, and why the Internet will be essential to broadcast what will be if I am right, a “second” Copernican revolution showing the true nature of space-time and our real place in it.

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IRISH ELK: UNCONTROLLED GROWTH LEADS TO EXTINCTION.

Irish Elk

This comparison that I am making with the first Copernican revolution is thoroughly appropriate since the historical time-lapse of scientific progress is as fixed “in time,” compared to evolution, as the earth seemed to be “in space” for the Medieval scholastics, and still for us. The only thing that has changed is our understanding of inertia. However, because this understanding has triggered an era of progress that has alienated us from nature, it has made us lost (among other things) the detail knowledge that we had of the stars.

The Los Angeles’ earthquake of the early 90s provides an excellent instance of this phenomenon of “acquired ignorance” through progress. After this quake, indeed, the observatories of the region were inundated by callers warily wondering if the quake had had an effect on the stars (sic). If these callers were that illogically wary, it is because, the Los Angeles’ lights having been completely turned off by the earthquake, they could see the stars for the first time of their lives, and they didn’t know what was happening. They had been blinded by the lights of progress. And so are we all, completely isolated from nature in the destructive “environment of knowledge” in which we live. And here I do not contradict myself. This knowledge is not with us anymore, but in our technologies, which is “a way of organizing the world so we don’t have to experience it.” (Max Frisch) If “life is a knowledge process,” (The Tree of Knowledge) humanity is cancer for the environment since our knowledge only serve our purpose, as cancer does for itself in an organism. If this is it, the only thing we can do to save ourselves is to go into remission. And it is possible since, as Starman has already noticed about us, we are at our very best when thinks are worst.

From a caricature in Reader’s Digest, which I had to draw myself circa 1995, because it was BS (before scanner)

(Work in progress; I am presently settling Noam Chomsky’s case, hopefully as convincingly as I did for Goodall.)