Asked about personhood for chimps, Steven Wise clarifies (NewScientist 9 May 2015) (paywall):
We are looking for chimpanzee rights for chimpanzees, looking to understand what the most fundamental interests of chimpanzees are and giving them rights to protect those interests.
Why do chimps deserve legal personhood?
They have been studied for well over half a century, in the wild and in captivity. The findings only go one way – chimpanzees are extraordinarily complex cognitive beings with minds that are startlingly close to ours. More importantly for our argument, they are autonomous and self-determining, not just bound by instinct. It is also clear that they are autonomous in a way that is very familiar to us as human beings. Courts have shown the utmost respect for autonomy. For example, if someone rejects medical treatment, the court respects their right to autonomy, their right to die. Autonomy is of supreme value.
Which is an interesting statement from a magazine which has also published numerous articles arguing that free will is an illusion, such as this one (paywall):
As enticing as ‘t Hooft’s theory may be to physicists, it has an unexpected and potentially frightful consequence for the rest of us. Mathematicians John Conway and Simon Kochen, both at Princeton University, say that any deterministic theory underlying quantum mechanics robs us of our free will.
“When you choose to eat the chocolate cake or the plain one, are you really free to decide?” asks Conway. In other words, could someone who has been tracking all the particle interactions in the universe predict with perfect accuracy the cake you will pick? The answer, it seems, depends on whether quantum mechanics’ inherent uncertainty is the correct description of reality or ‘t Hooft is right in saying that beneath that uncertainty there is a deterministic order.
Which reminds me that I’ve been (slowly) reading Noson S. Yanofsky’s THE OUTER LIMITS OF REASON: WHAT SCIENCE, MATHEMATICS, AND LOGIC CANNOT TELL US. In section 2.2 on language, he brings up a number of well-known self-referential paradox, with an example of the word heterological, which means an adjective that does not describe itself, as opposed to autological (or homological, if you prefer), which is an adjective that does describe itself (for example, pentasyllabic is autological). The question is whether or not heterological is heterological.
He suggests (or perhaps he borrows from philosophy; he doesn’t say) that because language can talk about itself, is, in a sense, aware of itself, then irresolvable paradoxes may be expressed. (If he has more to say about irresolvable paradoxes, I haven’t gotten to it just yet.)
So let me draw an analogy: If we can be aware of the question of free will, of the mechanistic view of the universe vs the stochastic view of the universe, and if we can discuss and research the question, then we have a self-referential system in which paradoxes may be expressed, and – intuitively, I’ll grant – I think free will must win out as it becomes a node of … I want to use the word chaos, but only because none other comes to mind. Perhaps instability is better. Although I grant that a proponent of the mechanistic view would probably view my suggestion with disdain; if the universe is mechanistic, what it contains doesn’t really matter so long as it rolls along according to the rules.
And I apologize to the folks who thought this would have something to do with animal-rights. Welcome to my world. OK, let me connect back to those rights … so, if we can make a credible argument for free will, then suggesting chimps have both autonomy and free will – that is, they are not ruled entirely by instinct – then I think you need to show self-awareness in those chimps, or at least a potential that is sometimes fulfilled. Chimps have passed the mirror test, so Mr. Wise may have a case.
(6/8/2015: Updated with the entire title of Yanofsky’s book.)
