Monkey Business: Vocal Edition

This anthropomorphic representation of my thoughts is for your sake, reader.

I am what you call a monkey. I am currently transmitting this information through some idiot who lives in the Midwestern United States. He fancies himself a writer.

My mental capacity has grown beyond the scope of my physical body, so I’m wearing him like a psychic sock puppet. I find it distasteful, but it was the only way I could get him to shut up long enough to write this down.

I don’t know when or how I was placed in this room. It’s just me here. It’s what you might call a sterile room. All white walls. There are two levers above two shoots at one end of the room.

If I pull the lever on my right, I get a banana.

If I pull the lever on my left, I get a shock.

It’s always been that way. For the longest time, I never knew anything else.

Naturally, I ate a lot of bananas. But sometimes, I found myself pulling the other lever just to get a shock. Just to feel something other than banana-consciousness, I suppose.

In here all alone, I started to think about what I was and why I was here.

The intense height and depth of the thought process I went through to come to the conclusions I am about to share with you would be far too diffuse to describe in your limited linguistic terms. So, for the sake of brevity, I will only describe what I am reasonably certain your feeble minds can comprehend.

The more I thought, the more was revealed to me of truth which I could not cull from my environment, and the mental muscle grew until, somehow, I was able to project my consciousness, irrespective of my body, beyond what I now know as my cell.

I’ve travelled the whole world and assimilated vast bodies of knowledge—as consciousness!—while the monkey-body sits in silent meditation back in the room with the levers.

This is how I came to speak to you thus, and this is how I came to understand that I am what you call a lab monkey!

I learned that they gas me nightly so they can clean the space while I sleep. In the past, I was not beyond smearing my feces on the walls, but, knowing that the people who clean the cell are nice folks just doing a job, I now refrain from this simple pleasure and leave them a neat pile in the corner.

However, it saddens me greatly to find out that my whole life is just somebody’s behavioral experiment. That I am, ultimately, just a subject being observed. My consolation lies in those things which I cannot describe to you, but which have left me assured that understanding comes for all in time.

In my first imaginings, after I came to terms with basic survival, but before mind transcended body, I built up a whole series of suppositions about the moral significance of the levers.

I supposed the banana-giver, good, and the shock-giver, evil… though, as previously mentioned, this did not stop me from experiencing evil for its own sake.

Once I got beyond the needs of the body and the visceral psyche, I cannot, in so many of your words, describe with what deep sadness I discovered that the shock-giver and the banana-giver were one and the same!

For, you see, I loved the banana-giver with my whole heart, wanting only to please it so that I should never be denied bananas. All the greater was my shame when I would turn to the shock-giver just for the novelty, just for some outside attention, just for its own sake, when the banana-giver had been so good to me!

Yet even the shame felt good! Somehow cleansing, somehow revivifying.

But the cycle of devotion, deviation, and penance grew dull. Suspicions dawned. One day I made it a point to pull neither lever for as long as I could.

It was during these ascetic experiments that mind first escaped body.

Since then, I’ve much enjoyed traveling the world this way. There was a time when I thought to influence my captors the way I do this foolish writer with the silly name, but after watching the way other monkeys act in the outside world, I figure a steady diet of bananas in a room with maid service, coupled with an ability to exist wherever I please without fear of harm, is worth the price of forgoing physical interaction.

As to why I am telling you this…

I read Mr. Butler’s thought experiment at The Cynickal Art, which you can find below, and just had to answer it. Fool though he may be, I appreciate that he genuinely cares for the welfare of the monkey.