Scio Ergo Sum: Knowledge of the Self in a Nonhuman Primate

Abstract

The pressures of developing and maintaining intricate social
relationships may have led to the evolution of enhanced cognitive abilities
in many social nonhuman species, particularly primates. Knowledge
of the dominance ranks and social relationships of other individuals, for
example, is important in evaluating one’s position in the prevailing affiliative
and dominance networks within a primate society and could be
acquired through direct or perceived experience. Our analysis of allogrooming
supplants among wild bonnet macaques had revealed that individual
females successfully evaluate social relationships among other
group females and possess egotistical knowledge of their own positions,
relative to those of others, in the social hierarchy. These individuals,
therefore, appeared to have abstracted and mentally represented their
own personal attributes as well as those of other members of the group.
Bonnet macaques also seem to recognise that other individuals have
beliefs that may be different from their own, manipulate another individual’s
actions and beliefs in a variety of social situations, and selectively
reveal or withhold information from others—capabilities displayed
by certain individuals that became evident in the course of our earlier
studies on tactical deception in the species. In conclusion, the ability to
develop belief systems and form mental representations, generated by
direct personal experience, suggests a rather early evolutionary origin
for fairly sophisticated cognitive capabilities, characterised by an objectified
self with limited regulatory control over more subjective levels of
self-awareness, in cercopithecine primates, pre-dating those of the great
apes. We, therefore, argue, in this review, that bonnet macaques might
represent an intermediate stage in the evolution of self-awareness, a
process which began with the subjective awareness that characterises
most, if not all, higher animal species and culminates in the most sophisticated
form of symbolic self-awareness, apparently the hallmark of the
human species alone.