More Disney Effect: Chimps that Think and Believe

What this study reveals is the
tenacity—or perhaps desperation—
of an interpretive motive

 

Changing Minds or Denying Reality?
The Disney Effect III: Chimpanzees, Artificial Intelligence, and the Myth of Continuity

by John D. Wise, PhD

The Disney Effect (Again)

At last, the chimps have joined the conversation. Or so the headline promises:

“Chimps Can Weigh Evidence and Update Their Beliefs Like Humans Do: Are we the only rational thinkers? New research on our primate cousins suggests otherwise,” Scientific American, Oct 30, 2025.

If you’ve followed our comments on the Disney Effect, you already know the pattern. Every few months brings a new evolutionary pageant in which the human–animal divide narrows: crows “reason,” dolphins “speak,” and blinking baboons reveal lives “as full, nuanced, and idiosyncratic as [our] own.”

This time, chimpanzees supposedly ‘revise their beliefs’ when confronted with conflicting evidence. It’s the same old story, rehearsed with new props.

The Two-Box Experiment

The Science journal article behind the headlines describes a clever little experiment. At Uganda’s Ngamba Island Sanctuary, chimps watched food hidden in one of two boxes. They received one clue, then another—sometimes contradictory. When the second cue looked stronger, the chimps often switched boxes; when weaker, they stayed. The authors called this “rational belief revision.”

The wishful thinking here should be apparent.

To their credit, they modeled the data and found that a “rational-updating” algorithm fit better than some simple heuristics. Still, what the animals displayed was not reason but re-weighting: a flexible response to cue strength, completely explicable as instinctual programming.

Switching boxes is one thing; switching categories of mind is another. No one doubts chimp intelligence; certainly, I do not. But “belief” in the human sense—propositional, self-aware, conceptually expressible—is nowhere in evidence in this or any other study I am aware of (and I’m pretty attuned to this issue). The experiment shows instinctual intellect; it does not show self-knowledge.

From Behavior to Belief

The jump from “changeable response” to “changed belief” is the old category mistake of cognitive anthropology. Belief, as here meant, requires conceptual articulation—the ability to say (or at least internally represent), “I once thought the food was in Box 1, but new evidence shows it is in Box 2.” Nothing in this study suggests – or even remotely hints at – such reflective syntax of mind in chimpanzees.

What this study (and so many others like it) does reveal, is the tenacity—or perhaps desperation—of an interpretive motive.

The Motive Beneath the Method

Modern materialism, of which biological evolution is one species, cannot live with discontinuity. Its first principle—continuity of descent—demands that every cognitive hillock be stretched into a bridge. Each experiment must be a sermon within the same liturgy: continuity confirmed, uniqueness denied. The result, as in this case, may be underwhelming, but the myth must be reenacted, especially because common experience makes it too easy to see it for the sham it is. Science, “Chimpanzees are natural scientists: Humans and chimpanzees share the potential to rationally revise their beliefs,” 30 October 2025:

In his book The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin proposed that the greatest challenge for evolutionary theory is human intelligence. He predicted that psychological elements would be found in nonhumans, particularly in nonhuman apes, that bridge the gap between human and nonhuman cognition.

Darwin’s prediction remains, in effect, a null hypothesis: it has never been falsified, because so long as it remains an axiom of faith it is unfalsifiable. The well of hope from which evolutionary psychology draws can therefore never run dry. Evidence be damned.

They aren’t, after all (and it seems they know this) proving the myth; they’re protecting it. There is a certain pathos to their persistence. In a disenchanted cosmos, it is a comfort to find kinship in the animal’s eye. If chimps reason like us, even if reason is only an illusion, at least it is a shared illusion. Together we reenact the Hegelian hope in Darwinian clothing: Spirit, meaning and telos rediscovered in matter.

Progress and Its Prophets: Arthur C. Clarke and C. S. Lewis

A closing commentary in Science makes the metaphysics explicit. After rehearsing the results, the authors quote Arthur C. Clarke’s famous line that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Here, the “technology” is evolution itself—the grand apparatus by which mind emerges from matter, observer from observed. The tone is almost eschatological: the wall between species, like that between machine and mind, dissolves in the light of “Progress.”

Whose progress?

Wrong question. There is no who.

The chimps have joined the conversation; soon, everything will. This is the seductive grand narrative of our age that CS Lewis so elegantly describes in “The Funeral of a Great Myth”:

For in the myth, ‘Evolution’ … is the formula of all existence. To exist means to be moving from the status of ‘almost zero’ to the status of ‘almost infinity.’ To those brought up on the Myth nothing seems more normal, more natural, more plausible, than that chaos should turn into order, death into life, ignorance into knowledge. And with this we reach the full-blown Myth. It is one of the most moving and satisfying world dramas which have ever been imagined.

In that flourish, this experiment becomes allegory. The ape’s glance across the box is transfigured into a cosmic wink—the universe awakening to itself, and the restaurant at the end of the universe is open for business.

It is ironic that this Science article chooses to close with one of our greatest science-fiction writers, don’t ya’ think?

Analogues of Mind: Animal, Machine, and Man

The resemblance between animal cognition and artificial intelligence is not accidental. Both operate by immanent process, without self-transcending subjectivity. They exhibit structure, adaptability, even a kind of proto-logic—but not reason in the full human sense.

This comparison clarifies what the chimp study obscures.

If a machine (AI) can simulate conversation without consciousness, then a chimp can simulate belief revision without belief. In both cases, intelligence is functional, not reflective; it manipulates representations without representing the act of representation itself. AIs model symbols; animals model environments.

Only human beings model mind.

This is the decisive threshold—the movement from awareness to self-awareness, from thought as mechanism to thought as meaning. Philosophically, it marks the emergence of interiority: the ability to turn cognition upon itself and ask whether it is true. Neither the machine nor the chimp can do this, for both remain bound within the circle of causation.
They display logical continuity, but not rational comprehension.

Humans, by contrast, can reconstruct their own processes and recognize them as rational.
We see the logic of a conversation or the pattern of a history and grasp it as intelligible—that is, as directed toward an end. This retrospective comprehension, the act of understanding necessity within contingency, is the signature of Spirit in Hegel’s sense and of the Imago Dei in the biblical one. It is what allows us to know, not merely to compute; to interpret, not merely to react.

Thus, when AI produces sentences that seem insightful, or chimps make choices that seem reasoned, we confront analogues of human rationality, not its essence. They imitate the form of intelligence, not the freedom of intellect.

The imitation is just real enough to reveal the gulf, and to warn us from being sucked into it.

Froth Without Substance

Step back from the rhetoric of this study and what remains is admirable but modest: animals skilled at adjusting to signal strength, as survival instinct demands. Nothing here compels the inference that they know they are reasoning, still less that they inhabit the moral or conceptual world of man.

To borrow Aristotle’s taxonomy: they possess phantasia, not nous; for Aristotle, the former belongs to perception, the latter to reason. Kant would call it understanding without apperception; the Bible, soul without Imago Dei.

Even if we conceded, for argument’s sake, that the difference is one of degree rather than quality, the gap is a chasm, not a fissure.

Why the Myth Endures

There’s a reason this story keeps returning.

Science today is not just an enterprise of measurement but of metaphysical reassurance.
Each new claim that “animals think like us” re-affirms the MN-creed that nature is enough—that man is continuous with nature, not exceptional.

It is the Disney Effect in its theological form: the longing for unity masquerading as data.

The Real Wonder

None of this diminishes the glory of animal mind. Chimpanzees, crows, and baboons all testify to a creation rich in purpose and play. But thinking is not the same as knowing that one thinks. To cross that threshold is to enter the realm of reason, language, and moral law—the domain that makes art, worship, and science itself possible.

The tragedy of these never-ending attempts to collapse the distinction is not that animals fail to be human, but that humans forget the radical difference of what being human means.

Bottom Line?

When science teaches chimps to change their minds, the mind that changes is the scientist’s—and with it, reality itself.

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John Wise received his PhD in philosophy from the University of CA, Irvine in 2004. His dissertation was titled Sartre’s Phenomenological Ontology and the German Idealist Tradition. His area of specialization is 19th to early 20th century continental philosophy.

He tells the story of his 25-year odyssey from atheism to Christianity in the book, Through the Looking Glass: The Imploding of an Atheist Professor’s Worldview (available on Amazon). Since his return to Christ, his research interests include developing a Christian (YEC) philosophy of science and the integration of all human knowledge with God’s word.

He has taught philosophy for the University of CA, Irvine, East Stroudsburg University of PA, Grand Canyon University, American Intercontinental University, and Ashford University. He currently teaches online for the University of Arizona, Global Campus, and is a member of the Heterodox Academy. He and his wife Jenny are known online as The Christian Atheist with a podcast of that name, in addition to a YouTube channel: John and Jenny Wise.