The Baboon and the Safari Truck

I went on safari and it made me wonder about two things: how baboons see the world and why we find particular places beautiful.

Baboons are clearly intelligent. There's something distinctly human to them. Watching them in the Kruger National Park, it almost seems impossible they don't just get it: that they're in a fishbowl, fenced in, and being watched by humans.

They certainly seem to approach the raw intelligence required. The evidence is right in front of their eyes. It feels eminently obvious to us.

But what they lack is explanatory knowledge. How can they understand the concept of a national park, something even humans had only thought of in the last 200 years? For that matter, how can they even understand its constituent parts? Even if a baboon has encountered the perimeter fence surrounding the park, why should they know a human built it? After all, most baboons would not have seen that construction themselves.

Same goes for the park roads we drive on. Why should they think those are any different than the abundant animal paths everywhere? They don't understand what a car is, or the internal combustion engine, or a wheel, or glass, metal, language, conservation or a nation state. They are like a human baby before they absorb the collective knowledge of thousands of years of human culture into their brain.

Our ancestors understood none of those things either. That seems silly now. But yet we're not much more intelligent than they were, biology doesn't change that fast. We're just standing on centuries of good explanations that they did not have access to: we're seeing the world through generations of theories that we take for granted - ubiquitous background knowledge.

The baboons can't just look at the evidence around them and immediately understand what it means any more than our ancestors had any hope to look at the stars and understand they weren't just a sparkly dome roof over their flat earth.

With the baboons' high intelligence, they seem to come up with some rules-of-thumb after careful observation: it's good to stay out of the way of the big noisy moving boxes, sometimes they carry oranges that you can steal, etc. But understanding what a national park is, is an altogether different kind of knowledge than knowing the truck tends to carry sweet oranges: it requires you to connect all these different observations into an explanation for the "why" behind it all.

Once you understand the concept of a national park, and agriculture, then it won't surprise you if the safari truck switches to carrying bananas, even if you've never seen it happen before. But if you don't understand what a national park is, then this is a surprising development - just as surprising as if they started carrying baseball bats, Canadian flags, or live chickens. Without true understanding, the world seen through baboon eyes is a random and incomprehensible place.

Gaining this kind of understanding is hard. It requires language, an open exchange of ideas, rationality. David Deutsch writes how humans are unique in that we've developed such a culture of conjecture and criticism, one that he thinks turned us into "universal explainers". Since a universal explainer can theoretically gain the understanding needed to do anything not forbidden by the laws of physics, Deutsch thinks that this makes humans the most significant feature of the universe.

In a different league than the baboons indeed.

My second question on safari came to me in camp. Surrounded by the sounds of the African bush, I wondered: Why do we feel a place is beautiful? And I decided that the texture of a place is often the source of its beauty.

What makes it unique, what does it tell us about the people who made, designed it, used it? What did they view as self-evident and important? What were their stories, their triumphs, hopes, fears, and dreams? How was all that information captured in the work of their hands?

There are emotions embedded in the world around us, and it was put there by our ancestors.

We can feel what they valued, because we can see what they chose to create. In it, we can feel the local sounds of the birds and the way the sun falls through the trees, because these things were also there when they were alive and it inspired them too.

In the Kruger National Park we stayed in a very basic old public park bungalow. Thatched roof, a very specific dull green shade of bathroom tile, a casement window through which the bushveld afternoon light streams in warm and low. The doors: unpainted wood, with the same door handle everyone in South Africa had in the 1980s.

In a way this is nostalgia, because I remember these things from my own childhood. But it's also not quite - because I feel the same sense of beauty when I see the texture of a quaint New England village with its covered bridges, picket fences, and mainstreet post office - a feeling that I'm sure I'd describe as nostalgia if I grew up there myself. Yet I did not.

Beautiful things are often so because they compress meaning, they are alive with information that makes us feel connected to a deeply human experience. Because the texture of a place is what makes it unique, it often has the highest information density.

I think this is related to what Wikipedia calls: "The spirit of the place" (genius loci), or what the architect and design theorist Christopher Alexander calls the "Quality Without a Name":

So yes, I think there's beauty in the texture of a place. I even think there can be objective beauty, locked up in the warm bits of goodness that got stuck in its texture. A row of oak trees that provides its best shade long after the hands who planted them have passed, the handle on a cane worn smooth by years of faithful walking, a secret garden swing built for the great-grandchildren they would never meet.

And just because it's objective, doesn't mean it has to be appreciated by everyone. The truth is also objective, yet we all miss some of that. Mathematicians often describe groundbreaking theorems as beautiful, and I'm sure they are right: these are elegant compressions of deep meaning that are objectively true. But most of the people in the world could never experience that truth and beauty for themselves.

Just like truth, the amount of beauty we experience is limited by the capacity of the person who experiences it to appreciate its information. If minimalism doesn't say anything then it's cold and ugly. Maximalism tries to say too much and collapses into clutter. Information density is important: say something, say it concisely, don't say so much that your message gets lose in the noise.

And that brings us back to the baboon and the safari truck.

Because, notice: if a world that is alive with information is more beautiful, and human knowledge allows us to see more information in our environment, then knowledge also opens our eyes to see more beauty.

Driving around Kruger National Park, I recognize that I can experience beauty that an ant can not. The individual ant can barely see, even less comprehend the beauty of their colony's giant anthill. The antelope could perhaps process this, but in trying to outrun a lightbeam out of misunderstanding that it is a predator, it betrays that it could not possibly comprehend the beautiful colors and contrasts of a sunset. Elephants mourn their dead, so might be able to grasp the beauty of life, but without language could not grasp the beauty of an inter-generational narrative.

Certainly, as intelligence increases, so does our capacity for recognizing beauty. But, as with the baboons, I don't think raw intelligence is all there is to it. The antelope misunderstands the lightbeam because it lacks explanatory knowledge of what a spotlight and safari vehicle is. It feels obvious to us, but that's because we've invented those things.

I think the limiting factor here is also understanding, and it's just that intelligence is upstream of that: you need some level of intelligence in order to have the capacity for producing knowledge. Once you have knowledge, the world becomes alive with ideas, often fiery in their beauty.

To our eyes, stars still appear as tiny specks of light. Yet, due to modern knowledge, we look up and marvel at billions of distant fusion reactors of dizzying size suspended in the sky. We don't see more stars than the caveman did, but we see more in the stars.

This doesn't mean that you can only find things beautiful that you can explain. Appreciating art is mostly pre-rational. But understanding does allow you to see some texture that would otherwise have gone missing in plain sight. This process can be entirely subconscious, like when you rewatch a movie or reread a book after years, and suddenly it unlocks entirely different feelings. Perhaps you appreciate it in a different light now, because you've learned new things about the world. This knowledge might be tacit, but it still allows you to see more than you did before. You're receiving information that you didn't understand yet back then, you've discovered new texture.

And so it seems that the two things I wondered about on safari is almost the same thing after all. Humans can understand and appreciate safari trucks, national parks, and beautiful places for the same reason: the more we know, the more we understand, the more beauty we feel, the more we want to learn, the more we know. The cycle repeats over generations.

And I wonder, what great beauty is there in this world that goes missing in plain sight, because we don't understand it yet?