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Comment by goda90 | Hacker News Reader

I was reading Reddit comments the other day from people who keep pet jumping spiders. They report them to have personalities and a degree of intelligence.

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If you find that interesting, then I recommend the book Children of Time. It is a sci fi novel spanning the demise of humans and the rise of another species.

Sounds like a cousin of the pathetic fallacy. Human beings are very good at anthropomorphism.

Why is it any less plausible for them to have personalities than to not have personalities? Patronizing dismissals such as yours without any reasoning and facts are extremely frustrating.

Because they we have a hundred billion neurons and they have a few thousand. Also, because humans are known to anthropomorphize an awful lot. One common example is thinking that dogs feel guilty when you scold them for naughty behavior. Instead, they are reacting to the scolding.

Both reasons weigh very little.

The first one makes a jump from quantity to quality. But, counting to three and counting to whatever is not a qualitative difference. A definition of "personality" is required to define where it starts, and it is easy to conceive interpretations which allow for broad labelling.

The second one is just a caveat. As John had to tell his wife as he surprised her in bed with Frank, and she went "Yes but you know you are jealous and a bit paranoid".

Your numbers are off, for a start. Neuron count is in the order of hundreds of thousands to millions for the more socially complex species, including the Asian giant hornet. These are known to have cognitive abilities that might surprise you, including in many species the ability to recognize familiar conspecifics by sight. And in any case, why shouldn't that size of brain be enough to sustain a personality? They aren't clones, after all, except in rare cases, and even then you have to take mutation, epigenetics, and developmental effects into account.

But hey, I'm not the one implicitly advancing the claim that anything not clever enough to be human is a meat robot. You're the one doing that, and so far you've done nothing but assert it. Why don't you source it and actually defend it, instead? Until then I don't see why anyone should take it all that seriously.

Oh a hornet can recognize a conspecific, huh? Can you describe the house you grew up in?

Not just a conspecific, a nestmate, and to be entirely clear that's known in polistid wasps [0] but not, so far as I'm yet aware, in vespids, which are understood primarily to use scent cues instead. That said, with regard to V. mandarinia it's not easy to be familiar with current research unless you read Japanese, which I don't; probably in a decade or so there will be a great deal more in the way of English literature, given the rate at which I expect they will establish across at least the western half of the continent. Maybe a decade after that we'll have a reasonable depth of English-language papers that have to do with something other than unsuccessful extirpation strategies; I expect it depends first on how quickly they find a way across the Rockies, and second on whether anyone actually cares to fund entomology departments for something other than bee husbandry and "pest" management.

In any case, if you're attempting to make an argument here, its thesis could stand considerable clarification. I'm not even sure whether you're intending to agree or not with my own argument, so would you like to elucidate a bit on what point you're trying to make and how you support it?

[0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/11243513_Visual_sig...

People so often jump to claims of anthropomorphism when discussing the faculties of other animals, and it’s so weird. This happens constantly when trying to get people to understand that animals suffer very, very deeply. Claims that suffering is somehow reserved for only homo sapiens seem to be founded in nothing other than the discomfort of needing to take other living things into consideration. This is true not only of suffering but really any sort of feeling.

We will look back on our current understanding of animals feelings one day like we look back on Descarte, who vivisected dogs because he was convinced they had no feeling whatsoever.

For a good overview of the history of, and philosophy of, discussing animals capacity to feel I suggest “A Plea for Animals” as continued reading.

This whole physical existence is suffering without end. It is literally the core of any being. Buddhism has a core imperative to either lessen the suffering (by not inflicting more of it), or to eradicate it altogether by means of final death in nirvana (escape from samsara). However, as any novice of buddhism knows, dogs simultaneously both possess buddha-nature and are unaware of it. In that sense, is actually knowing that to be is to suffer better or worse?

And as far as the fetish for anthropocentrism is concerned, it is a western religious thing deeply rooted in psychopatic (as opposed to empathic) abrahamic tradition, which proved to be a superior memeplex here.

(yeah it touches a nerve, doesn't it)

I don’t know what any of that has to do with what I said, but if it boils down to “I agree, animals are sensitive and should be taken into consideration”, then I agree.

it's complicated, but yes.

Justify that «abrahamic tradition» is «psychopatic» as opposed to another «empathic» tradition.

Human beings are also very good at hubris. For whatever reason, they seem to think they are fundamentally different from all other living beings on this planet although they share the same descent.

In that we all come from the sun and are comprised of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen? Sure.

Plants, too. Guess I'll read up on airatarianism.

:-) Still, the "brains" in insects work more or less the same as ours. So the hypothesis here is that something akin to emotions are a basic feature of brains + bodies. The hypothesis is not that stones have feelings although there are people who would think otherwise.

> Sounds like a cousin of [a] fallacy

Which does not change facts a tiny shard. The argumental level is in the epistemic mode, not in the aletic.

"It seems like A". "Yes but humans are biased". "Ok, it probably still seems like A".

Having less reasons to believe A does not imply having more reasons to disbelieve A.

Have you heard of abductive reasoning?

Yes. Abductive reasoning is all fun and games, until one places believe in the "educated guesses": abductive reasoning is a technique to jump to ranked hypotheses, not to (theoretical, epistemic) conclusions - it would be fallacious to use it otherwise.

Sure, it is one key aspect of decision making, of the role of the bounded economic agent, of the analyst applying Bayes to give advice - of the gambler placing bets on a sheerly practical need.

Not only hypoteses of minor ranking can still be truthful and productive: sometimes criteria adopted for the computation can have largely accidental aspects ("- John won the lottery // - Pah, winning is so improbable // - Well he did"; "We selected a good candidate // - Mah, don't get me started about interviewers // - Well...").

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