you're right, Chimps are definitely thinking of how to improve their lot.....
I am laughing too hard to type, sorry....
They aren't? I'm pretty sure that every organism that has even one neuron (like the 'mentally challenged' lowly Caenorhabditis elegans, a very simple worm) is using that neuron to improve their lot. You're going to have to do better than that.
As a result of language studies in chimps, we now know that they are aware of themselves and their future, and they can communicate that fact.
Come now, the difference between a mind of a human and that of a monkey is merely one of degree. Anyone who has spent an afternoon tea-time with monkeys can testify to that. Monkeys can even play chess, though perhaps not well or with familiar rules. Lloyd Morgan offers this apology for Darwin,
In "The Descent of Man" Darwin dealt at some length with intelligence and the higher mental faculties... His object, he says, is to show that there is no fundamental difference between man and the higher mammals in their mental faculties... Darwin was too good an observer and too honest a man to minimise the "enormous difference" between the level of mental attainment of civilised man and that reached by any animal. His contention was that the difference, great as it is, is one of degree and not of kind.So, yes, humans have mental faculties for cathedral-building, art, mathematics, music, literature, chess-playing, rational discourse, and engineering - while monkeys merely have less of it.