This is really interesting research. It’s fascinating to hear about how these experiments are designed in the first place.
If anyone is interested in this topic, I highly, highly recommend the book “Ways of Being” by James Bridle. [0]
It covers such a diverse range of ideas about intelligence, including neural network–style intelligences, that I think pretty much everyone would find something of interest.
One of the takeaways is that these intelligence-seeking experiments have been poorly designed for so long, that they tend to reveal way more about the humans running the experiment than the animals being researched. And part of that is due to how uncomfortable we are with admitting that animals have completely different (not better or worse) ways of being and thinking than us.
It makes you aware of the limitations of our hierarchy-and-comparison-based concepts. For example, even a simple phrase from this article:
> Although spiders can’t literally count one-two-three, the research suggests some jumping spiders have a sense of numbers roughly equivalent to that of 1-year-old humans.
The experiment doesn’t really prove that spiders can’t count, and surely if they did count it wouldn’t be by speaking out loud like we do. Saying that their faculties are equivalent to 1-year olds only really serves to diminish them. Not that I’m blaming the author, it’s just so easy to accidentally slip into these very limited ways of thinking.
> The experiment doesn’t really prove that spiders can’t count
There is very easy to prove spiders can count. They can tell bigger object from smaller, so they have some concept of measure and comparison. They can tell 10 is bigger than 2 and so on.
The first time I ran into one of these cute little jumping spiders was in a backyard while I was reading a book. I felt something on my chair and moved and I saw something jump across to the small table next to me. I noticed that it was a spider. I didn't know spiders could jump like that. I was very surprised when it turned around and looked at me. Scrutinizing me. It literally was moving its head looking at me trying to figure out what had disturbed it. After that my girlfriend at the time joked that he was my little friend.
> Here's the thumbnail sketch: we have here a spider who eats other spiders, who changes her foraging strategy on the fly, who resorts to trial and error techniques to lure prey into range. She will brave a full frontal assault against prey carrying an egg sac, but sneak up upon an unencumbered target of the same species. Many insects and arachnids are known for fairly complex behaviors (bumblebees are the proletarian's archetype; Sphex wasps are the cool grad-school example), but those behaviors are hardwired and inflexible. Portia here is not so rote: Portia improvises.
> But it's not just this flexible behavioral repertoire that's so amazing. It's not the fact that somehow, this dumb little spider with its crude compound optics has visual acuity to rival a cat's (even though a cat's got orders of magnitude more neurons in one retina than our spider has in her whole damn head). It's not even the fact that this little beast can figure out a maze which entails recognizing prey, then figuring out an approach path along which that prey is not visible (i.e., the spider can't just keep her eyes on the ball: she has to develop and remember a search image), then follow her best-laid plans by memory including recognizing when she's made a wrong turn and retracing her steps, all the while out of sight of her target. No, the really amazing thing is how she does all this with a measly 600,000 neurons— how she pulls off cognitive feats that would challenge a mammal with seventy million or more.
> She does it like a Turing Machine, one laborious step at a time. She does it like a Sinclair ZX-80: running one part of the system then another, because she doesn't have the circuitry to run both at once. She does it all sequentially, by timesharing.
I also immediately think of this book. Also the main character of the jumping spider species in the book is called Portia, likely refer to the same species in the article.
Do checkout Blindsight because is great, but the Portia reference is actually from the sequel Echopraxia (a good book, but inferior to Blindsight; I mostly remember it for the Portia reference).
Blindsight. One of the most interesting sci-fi stories I found impossible to get into and enjoy due to the author's dense and obtuse prose. I have a squirrel brain, so maybe it's just me.
I just wish one day someone will be able to turn it in a video game or a movie so I can understand how alien those aliens really are.
> It carries a crew of five cutting-edge transhuman hyper-specialists, of whom one is a genetically reincarnated vampire who acts as the nominal mission commander.
One of the craziest things to me when looking at a jumping spider is the unbelievable size and mass difference between us. An 80kg person is ~6,000,000x heavier than the average jumping spider. Whereas a blue whale is only like 2,000-3,000x heavier than that 80kg person (if I'm doing my math right).
They are obviously tiny, but I wouldn't have imagined what titans we must be from their perspective.
A thought I've sometimes had is that if we had evolved to be as tiny as something like these spiders, but still at our current level of intelligence and society, chimps or elephants or whales would still be almost insurmountable threats to us even with today's level of technology.
It'd take entire nations years of effort to build a gun or rocket that could even hurt something that much bigger than us.
Which is why animals at that scale develop techniques of very rapid flight instead of brute fight. That and poison. We would probably pour the resources into genetic engineering and biological warfare.
I wonder if anyone has calculated a range of body sizes which maximise intelligence and the ability to exploit resources of their planet.
Could a spider-sized human intelligence build a rocket to go to the moon? Would it have been easier to develop our civilization if we had been as large as a whale?
Maybe the universe is teeming with life a little too large or too small to build an ultra-technologic culture, or space travel. Imagine how long it would have taken us just to explore the Earth if we had been spider-sized, with spider legs and spider eyes.
> I wonder if anyone has calculated a range of body sizes which maximise intelligence and the ability to exploit resources of their planet.
I don't think we understand intelligence well enough even on Earth to do something like that. For example, these spiders seem to have certain cognitive capacities beyond what a hippopotamus can do, even though the hippopotamus is obviously much larger. Even in a single genera, the intelligence of mammals or even just apes doesn't seem to scale with size or brain size.
There did seem to be some correlation between intelligence and the ratio of brain size to body size, but even that is not well established, and it is not clearly evident why it would matter. And, as others are pointing out, many studies of animal intelligence are actually deeply flawed, so perhaps we have just been measuring very wrongly.
> Could a spider-sized human intelligence build a rocket to go to the moon?
I suspect without doing the maths that their rockets would still be similar in size to ours, because of the fuel required to achieve escape velocity, and the good old rocket equation. But they would certainly be able to fit a lot more spidernauts in.
They also could provide insurmountable opportunity. You'd have a huge advantage against enemies if you could develop some kind of mutualism with the beasts of nature.
Imagine living on top of an elephant. I guess you would attend to its skin and health, in exchange for a great defensive position, free transport, the potential to live off dying cells and moisture, etc.
Fast forward a very long time, and you might have humans controlling all the animals of the wild, which would have developed their own ways of survival, territory and rivalries. Animals which lack this 'army' of humans tending to them would die out. Wouldn't be so different to now...
Not clear, we might have ended up building industrial machines of roughly the same size. Elephants are soft compared to metal no matter how tiny the driver.
Sure, but the tinier the worker, the more effort you need to build a machine of a certain size. Even today, most construction of any kind has significant manual work components. We are pretty good at building things hundreds of times bigger than ourselves, but I'm not sure we would be great at building something a million times bigger than a human. Of course this is not directly comparable, since we are often limited by materials science before raw manpower if attempting something like this; a 2km tall skyscraper is fundamentally harder to build than a 20m one regardless of the size of your workforce.
I had a pet jumping spider that came to me one day. She was magical. She used to make artistic scribbles in the (sometimes) foggy glass of her terrarium. The she escaped one day (I always left a little crack open at the bottom of her home to give her the option of leaving) and I never saw her since.
Anyone who's watched jumpers hunt a while can see they're really clever little spiders. Always love finding them outside, they're little muppet spiders.
Agreed. I genuinely find this so much more meaningful than working on the next software buzz to help companies that are too big make even more money by tracking users even more.
apropos of nothing to do with leaping arachnids -- if you do delight in the absurdity of specialties academics can find themselves in, check out the short novel Irregular Portuguese Verbs by Alexander McCall Smith
I had a pet jumper in my first apartment. He would follow me and my wife from room to room, wave at us, and sit by the sink when he was thirsty. We gave him water and called him Steve.
There's a reasonable pet trade for them. I never had the heart to put one in a box though.
The most interesting interaction I had was watching one hunt a fly. The fly landed, and it crawled down on the side of the board the fly was on, out of sight. It emerged behind the fly, then snuck up on it, similar to how a cat does (move, pause, move, pause). Then, when it attacked, it didn't jump at the fly, but jumped up in the air where the fly would be. It grabbed onto the flys back, then rotated, so the spider landed on its back, so the flys legs would be straight up, so it couldn't try to crawl away. It bit its neck area, waited a bit, then dragged it away. Really amazing, especially considering the fly was about the same size as the spider's body.
I had a similar experience with one many years ago, but with the differences that it happened on a chair, and another fly tried to save his "buddy", which I had never seen before. It was like watchin' somethin' from the Nature channel unfold right there in "real life" in front of me. Smartest little spiders I know of. Amazing little critters for sure.
They are small like another poster mentioned, but their big primary eyes and their behavior makes them seem a lot less threatening than other spiders as well. For example, if they notice you they tend to reposition themselves to get a better look at what you are. They are also pretty rare to find indoors, which means you're not likely to be surprised by them while brushing your teeth or taking a shower.
I stopped bothering cellar spiders I found in my house after one morning a fly woke me up and proceeded to land on a spiderweb behind the radiator. They are welcome guests now.
The larger ones though I politely but firmly invite to leave.
The moment you lock eyes with one of these you can tell they are thinking a bunch. There’s a certain recognition that humans can sense through eye connection that is quite instinctual
I saw a bold jumper [1] a few months ago and it was truly beautiful. It was quite large, black and white, and had iridescent mouthparts. It really felt like coming across a shiny Pokemon IRL.
Not only are they cute (the have a fuzzy look about them) but they tend to eat the stuff we hate. I tend to have one or two in my back yard almost every summer.
Just had to bop a black widow in my office a couple months back. I’ve been check the spot she had set up in every few days since, I will for years I bet.
I played Grounded and I swear that game fucked me up.
Next time you see a jumping spider, interact with it. Try to coax it to you with slow repetitive movements. Get close to it. Tap and wiggle your fingers gently. You'll likely find that they come to you. They seem to be curious on a different level than any other spider that I've interacted with (which are all garden-variety spiders in north america). They do tend to freak out if you try to take their picture with a multi-lens phone camera...presumably because it looks like a set of robot spider eyes looking at them.
They're one of the only insects that show hunting behavior, as in pattern recognition and path planning [1], with brains so large that their esophagus has to go through it, to fit, with one of the largest brain to body rations of any animal. And, they dance [2]!
Edit: Here's an evolutionary tree: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthropod#Evolutionary_history.... Insects are a group under "Hexapods", and are more closely related to crabs, lobsters, shrimp, centipedes, and millipedes (none of which are insects) than they are to spiders, which are under "Chelicerates".
Yes, but does your esophagus get pulled out every time you shed? I think not!
And, you have simple fixed zoom balls for eyes, where they have muscles that point little telescopes [3], that pivot at the eye hole, each with two lenses, allowing control of focus and magnification.
Jumping spiders are quite common here in Singapore, and occasionally one will wander across my monitor while I'm working. If I move the mouse cursor in a circle around it, it will turn and follow the cursor. Amazing little things. Generally, I have an irrational fear of spiders, but for some reason these little guys get a pass from me. They're fascinating.
Oh, the anthropocentrism is strong here grasping at straws. It may also be just a genetically-imprinted fixed action pattern lacking strategic flexibility.
Scientists have been experimenting with portia spiders for a while and the surprising thing is specifically that a lot of their planning behavior does not seem to be hardwired. They can genuinely adopt to new preys and new environments and show learning behavior.
I think the scientific consensus for cognition and brain size has been for a long time that the size matters much less than we previously thought. For instance, ravens/crows show remarkable problem solving skills and intelligence on par with much larger animals and their brains are extremely small.
Given how much meat we as a society consume, and how we treat animals generally, it makes sense that we'd collectively accept and yearn for a narrative that animals are dumb. I think science is steadily showing that this is not really the case.
Anyone who's ever interacted with any kind of animal knows how they are intelligent.
The lack of science on this matter is not the reason we still consume meat and more science won't change anything.
We've always found ways to justify/accept our need for meat and wel'll continue doing this as long as science doesn't find an equally nutritious alternative that can be produced at scale.
But chickens have a social order, keepers say, and more complex behaviour than a naive city slicker might expect. They may not be grandmasters, but they aren't completely stupid.
Sorry, I wasn't really arguing against you. It's just that every time an article like this comes out everyone act likes it's a step towards abandoning meat. Unfortunately that's not so easy.
I forget who said this or exactly what they said, but someone has pointed out that the more research humans conduct the more we find that animals and even plants are more complex, more intelligent and more sophisticated than we thought. It is worth keeping this in mind the next time someone tells you a small creature (perhaps a crustacean) cannot feel or think or do something that would mean we ought to be less cruel towards them.
In my opinion, many ancient cultures have known this for a long time. Of course the universe eats itself, everything seems to eat everything, that's natural, but having respect for this process is what I think we've lost.
Driving a car through a bunch of mating insects? Who cares right?
I think you are trying to come off as like, cute or funny or ironic or something. But I think this attitude is impoverished. Unless you live in a place that has spiders which are particularly dangerous to humans or pets, most spiders are just another little bug that has no interest in harming you.
Over the last ten years I went from smashing every bug I saw in my house to taking a moment to carefully scoop it up with paper or a cup and then take it outside. Most bugs (at least in my area) are safe to handle. Instead of seeing them as a threat to be destroyed, I recognize that they are innocent creatures that have no desire to mess with me, and I can serve as a steward to move them somewhere more acceptable.
There are some exceptions - pest creatures which nest in your walls or go after your food which must be exterminated to ensure a safe living environment for your home - but most often I just find little bugs trying to do their own thing, and I take a moment to provide them a little care so we don't get in each other's way.
I think this mindset helps me be more respectful of all living creatures, rather than presuming I have the right to kill those which I dislike.
I'm with you, except for Pantry Moths. After having to throw away basically my whole food storage, every Pantry Moth is now killed on sight, no exception, no mercy. I think they gave me a mild form of PTSD (half joking).
But yeah, other bugs get carried away. And I also don't touch cobwebs. I'm actually really scared of spiders, but I know that they'll not hurt me and provide kind of a service, so I'm fine if they hang around.
Wasps are another exception. Immediate kill, no patience for these fuckers. Bees are fine, of course, way less aggressive. I know that wasps are useful as well, but I don't feel like handling them when they decide to visit my apartment.
That's so sad. I'm pretty militantly anti-spider but jumping spiders, despite seeming like they were sent from hell to terrify us, are just little furry big-eyed arthro-bros
When I learned that they compete for territory with centipedes I decided to stop killing them. I'd much rather share my home with a tiny 8-legged cat than with a venomous centipede.
How do you know it's genetic memory and not simply popular attitudes from childhood? I know when I was a kid people generally viewed spiders as a threat and so I adopted this attitude. It was only as an adult that I learned this is basically folklore and in my area not based on fact. But I don't think that's genetic, I think it is cultural. I would be curious to see what anthropologists have discovered about this.
It's just your conditioning. If you look at it from another angle you can see that they are actually harmless and clean. And even playful amd cute if you goof around with them a bit.
Even if we are predisposed to be fearful of spiders, so what? Not all spiders are the same, and jumping spiders are certainly 100% harmless to humans of all sizes. Why not work on promoting that experience and rationality override any (often mistaken) primal urges that we have?
If you don't know anything about any wild berries, beyond some are poisonous, it might be a safe bet to never eat any of them.
If you know something about berries, like this species is definitely poisonous, and this species is definitely safe, and this species you don't know anything about, then it is perfectly safe to avoid the first and third and indulge in the second.
May be because of their unpredictability owing to their jumpiness? That seems very reasonable since humans do instinctually stay away from unpredictable organisms/animals in nature. That unpredictability doesn’t always have to correlate with the real dangerousness of those creatures.
I'm unbelievably scared of syringes and especially giving blood samples. To the point where I get hot and feel sick when people around me talk about it.
Don't even want to imagine what exposure therapy would be like for this :D
Completely understandable. But just know it can be overcome, albeit gradually. You'll start small and decide the pace your comfortable with.
As an aside, at a younger age I shared your aversion to syringes. It wasn't the adminstering per se, but the perceived lack of control. What helped me was realising that 23 hours, 59 minutes and 55 seconds out of the day, I am in control -- those 5 seconds of needling (if that) pale in comparison.
Each time became easier after that. I hope you are able to overcome your aversion.
EDIT: I think blood sample is the wrong term, what I mean is blood count/work, where they take quite a bit of blood out of your arm. Not the small tests where they prick a finger.
> I hope you are able to overcome your aversion
Yeah, I hope so too. Thanks for the empathy. I've actually overcome my fear of vaccines. I can't sleep that well the night before and I'm still sweaty and stressed, but I know that it will just hurt a tiny little bit.
Giving blood samples is actually the big issue. I've had two of those as a kid, both times I became unconscious and once I had to throw up. Also had general anesthesia three times as a kid, I guess these five times where a needle had to go into my arm just traumatised me in some way. I hate the pain it gives me and the whole experience just really stresses my out. I'm actually getting sweaty palms right now, just because I'm writing/thinking about it :D
I recently went to the doctor because I started getting migraines. Doctor recommended me going to a Neurologist and mentioned that they would probably have to take blood samples, which was the reason that I refused. I just couldn't handle the thought of having to do it again.
The last blood sample I had to do was as a young teenager, like 10 years ago. I know that you should frequently test your blood to spot deficiencies, but I'm simply too scared...a bit embarassing to be honest. I've actually considered asking them to just give me nitrous oxide so that they can do it while I'm unconscious :D But I think nitrous oxide is an american thing, never heard of someone getting it where I live.
Anyways, no real sense to what I wrote, I just felt like documenting my thoughts about this situation. Actually feel quite queasy now. Time for some fresh air.
Again, I completely understand. Something is taken from you, and the whole song and dance leading up to it can amplify the negative associations.
You have agency in this situation and should inform and communicate your anxieties to any attending nurse or physician, possibly in advance. There are guidelines and support protocols in place exactly because of the strangeness some medical procedures invoke.
At the same time, their (slight) discomfort is the 'price to pay' for a mind at ease. My advice: try and rationalise it to a fault. I'd wager millions have blood works taken each day, and are only better for it. You will be among them.
Dare I say, I've even learned to be intrigued by those little vials whenever I have my blood works done -- so much information can be gathered from so little. A life in need can be a beneficiary from less than a minute of your time.
Don't let the imprints of your childhood define you. There is much else to gain.
I take the opposite approach - any spider I see inside, even Black Widows, I carry outside in a cup. At least they then have a chance. And Widows will do their level best to nest somewhere far out-of-site and never bother you. I also encourage my neighbors to not sterilize around their houses with industrial bug spray because spiders and bugs are 99,999/100,000, nothing but beneficial.
Same. It can get tiresome in CA though! I'll take widows over recluses any day.
On the one occasion where I found an infestation too extensive to relocate (under almost every one of my outdoor chairs), I tried bug spray. Horrible. Thanks to CA's hysterical bans on everything, the spray is ineffective and merely tortures the spiders and often leaves them alive but maimed. I felt terrible. Never again.
It was too late to repel them. The chairs were rife with brown-widow nests.
Anyway, now I just blast these areas with a hose from time to time. Individual spiders I will relocate if they're in an area where people are likely to sit.
There's a tiny baby spider roosting in my oven hood right now. The two last evenings he has descended on a web to look around. I considered putting him outside, but it's too cold so I just let him return to his hiding place.
I learnt to control my phobia over time, luckily I live somewhere where there's nothing dangerous or large, so I can leave them be.
I used to have a particular fear of jumping spiders, I blame the film "Arachnaphobia", I don't know why I agreed to see it, I was petrified the whole way through. I can handle it now, I made a point of trying more media that had spiders in them, from b movies to documentaries to photos.
But I don't think I could handle any of the bigger ones in the wild still, like tarantulas, or the absolutely massive Orb spider I saw in Africa once, ugh..
Not sure what you're on about. The article itself states they're typically 1mm to 2.3cm in length, and most of them that I've ever seen are closer to the 2cm than 1mm. Probably helps that just about anything 1mm in size looks about the same from a normal viewing distance, so there's reason to believe most people would have seen more from the bigger end of the spectrum.
Regardless of the size I quite like them, many are quite pretty and fascinating to watch.
I'll second that they are cute and fun to interact with. They are about as innocuous as an inchworm crawling on you. Except they exterminate bugs for you as a free service.
> Except they exterminate bugs for you as a free service.
Yes but as the majority of hobbyist exterminators must be aware, most of them steal their extermination service. Who cares if the people who exterminate for a living get paid?
Is this fair? One thing you don't do by stealing extermination services is get back at Terminix for some problem you may have had...
I just finished reading Children of Time and was indeed imagining that he was looking at earlier research on this subject, because the way he describes the spiders' initial thinking skills quite echos the article. It was very fun to read from that perspective!
Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky is probably the best sci-fi I've read in the last 10 years. Its won the Arthur C Clarke award and recently the series (the other two books in the series are also great) won a Hugo
The more I learn about various living beings around us, the more I'm convinced that they are all unique, individual people, with unique opinions and desires. They have unique DNA and unique personalities.
If you've ever spent an extended period of time with any animal, you know that they all have different personalities and opinions that differ from other animals of the same species, eerily similar to humans. They truly are different people. Some are shy. Some are gregarious. Some are brave. Some are lazy. Some are dumb. Some are mean. They're all different.
I don't really know how to reconcile this feeling and I'm very much an omnivore but the thought is inescapable to me.
In order for you to keep living, something with a unique personality, opinions, and desires has to die. And that includes plants.
Of course you can try to minimize the sentience of what you eat - wheat < ants < pigs < people - which may be better than nothing, but I'm sure you've thought of that.
I heard of a small religion that eats only nuts and fruits, with the belief that the plants want them eaten - they evolved to make the nuts and fruits desireable in order to spread the plant's seeds. It's arguably still exploitation: The plants evolved that way because it is the least bad option among predators.
Alan Watts used to say, it's ok to eat plants and animals, as long as when you cook them, you make something beautiful out of them to respect their sacrifice. It's the least you can do.
I feel there is some truth to this. Eventually, your body will be consumed by insects.
Well it's an inescapable fact that anything alive is going to die, and likely be eaten.
Basically all animals, and even plants (living creatures too) are going to die horrible deaths, being ripped apart by predators etc. We too, will likely be food for worms.
The point he is trying to make is to celebrate the life of whatever you're eating by at least making something special out of it an enjoying it rather than turning it into fast food junk which pointlessly ends up in the trash after 10 minutes in the burger warmer or whatever.
It's a weird way to celebrate a life when you do it after killing it for your own pleasure. We should aim at minimizing pain, not at creating feel-good rituals for our meals.
The context was, even killing plants is wrong, so we should cook and enjoy those to the best of our ability.
You can say "plants aren't self-aware" or something, but there's no way out of it. Plants might even be home for insects or other creatures which die when you take the plants. Plants are living organisms and you shorten a beetroots life when you tug it out of the ground.
I think the point still stands. Be grateful for each meal and do your best to enjoy and savor it. It's not about "celebrating killing" you injected that into it. It's about showing respect.
You can make all the rationalisations you want and operate however you see fit, but Homo Sapiens Sapiens is an omnivorous apex predator of the highest order.
Meat eating and tool use, borne out of the need to maximise the amount of calorie-dense food available are the reason we are here today discussing the finer points of vegetarianism.
Instead of being a blind zealot, I try to understand that life is a series of paradoxes and compromises. Balancing the fact that meat is good for me while minimising suffering for any plant and animal that crosses my path does feel more human than altogether discarding evolution, our DNA and place in the ecosystem for a wishy-washy ideology that only exists for people leading rich and comfortable lives.
Vegetarianism is a fine and commendable personal choice, as long as it doesn't devolve in proselytism.
The simplicity of my position hardly invites rationalization or blind belief. Even if you assume plants feel pain, you would still end up agreeing that vegetarianism is the correct choice, since it still minimizes the pain that would be caused by feeding animals with wasted calories from plants. On the contrary, it's you who is attaching yourself to misconceptions about what humans require to lead healthy lifes, even when you know (I mean, you can't be that blind) that plant diets can be as healthy (or arguably even more healthy).
IIRC Alan Watts believed that were are all one being, living every life in sequence, at different points in time. So you would at some point be the same chicken you slaughtered.
It's been many years, though, since I listened to him. And I was usually focused on other things. That may have been just a supposition on another point.
If anything it's moral justification for not doing that. I was pointing out how I kill living things in order to remain alive, even though I think they are unique individual people and it's troubling and confusing to me (because in order to live, another thing has to die).
I'm an energy well. They are an energy well. I can't hold off the march of entropy if I don't bring in more energy. So I absorb their well into mine.
Until we figure out how to integrate photosynthesis / photovoltaics into our bodies its not worth stressing out over the necessary survival process of killing other living things.
Well it is worth thinking about if one energy well suffers and the other one does not.
We have very little reason to believe that a bean plant is sentient and experiences suffering to a comparable level like a factory-farmed chicken. It actually seems absurd.
I always feel like these papers are excuses. Like: Whoops, we found out they are intelligent, while what really happend is that we over estimated our own intelligence and downplayed the lifeforms we can't understand.
Do yall ever think there could be more practical uses for research money than doing IQ tests on jumping spiders? These results could well be made up. After all, you'd hate to be the guy who spends years studying spiders just to conclude that they're about as stupid as everyone thinks they are.
These are real questions that people have been thinking hard about, and finding solutions for, for centuries. It would be valuable to explore them, IMHO.
That's actually a good point. The spider people should have looked into this instead. Much better ROI if they could solve it. Maybe they could even incorporate jumping spiders somehow. It would be excellent marketing.
do you think they know that portia are smarter than most spiders by only studying portia? these are novel outcomes arrived at by attempting to prove observed theories, not flights of fancy for someone attached to a favorite species
> Do yall ever think there could be more practical uses for research money than doing IQ tests on jumping spiders?
Actually, I wish we allocated more money to biology and understanding the living rather than bullshit technology that literally is destroying the world (which is an observable fact).
> These results could well be made up.
Sure, but in terms of priority about "made up" results, I would first look at all those damn startups that literally make up results in order to get VC money.
If anyone is interested in this topic, I highly, highly recommend the book “Ways of Being” by James Bridle. [0]
It covers such a diverse range of ideas about intelligence, including neural network–style intelligences, that I think pretty much everyone would find something of interest.
One of the takeaways is that these intelligence-seeking experiments have been poorly designed for so long, that they tend to reveal way more about the humans running the experiment than the animals being researched. And part of that is due to how uncomfortable we are with admitting that animals have completely different (not better or worse) ways of being and thinking than us.
It makes you aware of the limitations of our hierarchy-and-comparison-based concepts. For example, even a simple phrase from this article:
> Although spiders can’t literally count one-two-three, the research suggests some jumping spiders have a sense of numbers roughly equivalent to that of 1-year-old humans.
The experiment doesn’t really prove that spiders can’t count, and surely if they did count it wouldn’t be by speaking out loud like we do. Saying that their faculties are equivalent to 1-year olds only really serves to diminish them. Not that I’m blaming the author, it’s just so easy to accidentally slip into these very limited ways of thinking.
[0]: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/58772732