# The Boat Theft Theory of Consciousness

[ *Context: [The Debate on Animal Consciousness](https://archive.li/2015.01.19-081439/https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10152588738904228%23), 2014* ]

There's a story in [Growing Up Yanomamo](https://www.amazon.com/Growing-Yanomamo-Missionary-Adventures-Rainforest/dp/1602650098) where the author, Mike Dawson, a white boy from America growing up among Yanomamö hunter-gatherer kids in the Amazon, is woken up in the early morning by two of his friends.

One of the friends says, "We're going to go fishing".

So he goes with them.

At some point on the walk to the river he realizes that his friends haven't said whose boat they'll use [ they're too young to have their own boat ].

He considers asking, then realizes that if he asks, and they're planning to borrow an older tribesmember's boat without permission [ which is almost certainly the case, given that they didn't specify up front ], his friends will have to either abort the mission or *verbally say* "we're going to steal John's boat". This would destroy all their common-knowledge [ in the game-theoretic sense of common knowledge ] plausible deniability, making it so that no one would be able to honestly say, upon apprehension, "I was there, and we didn't really plan to steal any boats, we just . . . walked to the river and there was one there."

In order to be making the decision -- deliberate *or not* -- to *omit facts that will later be socially damning from their explicit communication*, while still getting away with ostensible moral violations -- Mike and his friends had to have a *razor-sharp model of what was socially damning*.

*And*, in order to *differentiate* between [ their razor-sharp model of what was socially damning ], versus [ what they personally felt they could get away with if certain facts were carefully omitted from their explicit communication ], they -- or rather, their brains, since the bandwidth of conscious human cognition couldn't realistically handle this explicitly -- had to have a *very strong* ability to navigate the *use-mention distinction*.

Use-mention almost had to be a primitive, in addition to all the other primitives -- social and otherwise -- their brains had natively.

If you've read GEB, you know the natural way to make use-mention a primitive is by running a self-model.

Monkeys are really bad at concealing their guilt. 

If a monkey tries to steal something, it will usually give itself away to any watching conspecifics by its cringing posture.

It knows theft is wrong -- it has to know this, to avoid social punishment -- and it lacks the ability to partition *use* -- the act of reaping the benefits of theft itself -- from *mention* -- the explicit reification of the act as theft, in the social consensus narrative.

Chimps are intermediate between monkeys and humans at this. Monkeys categorically lack it as far as I know. [ Here's [a paper](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10329-014-0423-5) about monkeys *physically hiding* their faces as a deceptive tactic, which I believe is the best they can do. Neither adult humans nor competent adult chimps generally do this, because "face data not available" is an obvious tell once your conspecifics' brains are as good at Bayes as adult chimp and human brains are [ hence the "breaking eye contact is proof of intent to deceive" wisdom ]. ]

Chimps also:

\- are generally moderately impressive at politics as far as animals go -- see de Waal's *Chimpanzee Politics*, and compare to Lorenz's writings on jackdaws [ *Studies in Human and Animal Behavior* ]

\- sometimes pass the mirror test [ and so are treated as likely-moral-patients by Yudkowsky-consciousness-theory people, including me ]

[Roger Penrose thinks](https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=gscEK5df8vE) consciousness helps us with solving some abstract class of reasoning-about-the-environment problems.

I think that's very silly and obviously consciousness helps us steal boats.