Spiders think with their webs, challenging our ideas of intelligence | Hacker News Reader

Spiders think with their webs, challenging our ideas of intelligence

newscientist.com

74 pointsjonbaer19 comments

Interesting to think of how this relates with the Extended Mind theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Extended_Mind) and how our environment and setup is effectively part of our cognition. In a way, maybe we should consider intelligence to not just be about our ability to connect A to B in complex ways (or equivalent views) but rather as the ability to create frameworks both in an internal and and internal process. In that sense, you could think of intelligence as a stack. Would love to hear thoughts on this.

Thank you for sharing this "Extended Mind" concept, it is mind-blowing -> on an arbitrarily contained mind inside a skull to keep collateral damage to a minimum. In the mind experiment of Inga and Otto they use a notebook to extends Otto's mind and claim it is so because "it is constantly and immediately accessible to Otto", can we say the same of the Internet? Does it extend our own minds?

Absolutely. More specifically, the Internet itself can be thought of as an extended network of neurons. To extend cognition with it, you need to integrate its knowledge without yours (for example by reaching information as quickly as via in-body cognition, eg via Google or a notes app), and you need applications that can deliver this knowledge (usually SAAS). If you have such a system in place, it's functionally the same as having a bespoke work stack that complements your cognition.

Distributed cognition is a really powerful idea that breaks a lot of our assumptions about individuality and agency. When applied to something like AI, I think it promotes much better thinking about how to get productive work done -- since it isn't so much about the algorithm as the system as a whole.

I recommend Ed Hutchins book "Cognition in the Wild" or Don Norman's "the design of everyday things"

Other related ideas are "the extended mind" and "actor-network theory". It is hard not to come to the conclusion that personal identity is useful for drivers licenses but ultimately a very elaborate social illusion/myth.

I really like the implications for reincarnation, though!

Well, I extend my cognition quite extensively to my pen and paper notes, my whiteboard and my code. Suddenly I get a sense of familiarity with the spider...

Based on encephalization quotient, spiders are the most intelligent animals. Some baby spiders' brains overflow even into their legs.

I guess a web can be used as a turing machine tape... though, 3D and finite.

Their big problem is asociability.

Well it's not too crazy when you think about it. The web is just encoding location and size data for them. Any medium that generated the same results every time would do the same thing. I think because of their smaller intelligence it just seems more profound than it actually is because it represents a significant portion of their capabilities.

We see this in some types of machine learning. Echo state networks and reservoir computing essential just encode the data with their random connections.

So I think it's cool, but not that surprising. The spider is just learning the world through its web just like a musician learns music through a specific instrument. The difference is its not a significant portion of our intelligence and we have extra space/power to learn the world through different tools. Language, writing,reading, computing, mathematics, etc.

Well, we know that ants use their extended phenotype (pheromone trails) as part of their collective decision making processes. And we know spiders that use their extended phenotype (net) as part of their sensing apparatus. And we know that sensing and sensory processing are not clearly distinguishable.

Personally, TIL that there is already a name "extended cognition"/"extended mind" connected to the idea. I just wonder that neither Wikipedia article recognizes that this is clearly a subfield of the more general idea of the "extended phenotype".

Does anyone have a link to the paper?

I found this paper online: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10071-017-1069-7#...

Lacks mention of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portia_(genus) the jumping spider which hunts!

Do people think with The Web too then ? Baity headline.

Sorry, but I don't see a lot of real substance here. It seems like "Forcing the religious idea of an universal consciousness again down to our throats".

Are spiders smart? yes. With capital letter. Some at least can be top of the game for a small arthropod. But If spiders think with their webs then we should consider the hair in our arms, our shoes and our googles part or our brain also. As philosopical idea It could have some merit, but it has not any sense in biology when what we call brain is clearly defined and delimited.

Oh but the brain isn't clearly delimited. You think with your gut, your spinal cord, your hormones. Even your eyeballs preprocess information before passing it up to your brain. :)

I wonder if cats and dogs carry scents around like memories. If so they have to be really confused when you bathe them.

I'm thinking of ants and scent trails, and bees dancing.

And humans think with their phone today.

It is like the third hemisphere of our brain

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