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Researchers find signs of intelligence among jumping spiders

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Re: Researchers find signs of intelligence among jumping spiders

#151

Post by gpderetta »

sph wrote: post #142
gpderetta wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 is very much a preference thing. I do like Watt's prose quite a bit.

Re: Researchers find signs of intelligence among jumping spiders

#152

Post by psd1 »

rickydroll wrote: post #59
aulin wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Anyone who's ever interacted with any kind of animal knows how they are intelligent. Anyone who's ever had backyard chickens knows they are not intelligent. Nature gave them a brain to keep the spinal cord from fraying.

I'm stealing that line!

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.

Re: Researchers find signs of intelligence among jumping spiders

#153

Post by tsimionescu »

sph wrote: post #143
tsimionescu wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 spac…

> 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.

Re: Researchers find signs of intelligence among jumping spiders

#154

Post by tsimionescu »

Kinrany wrote: post #137
tsimionescu wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: Researchers find signs of intelligence among jumping spiders

#155

Post by psd1 »

McBeige wrote: post #128
rukuu001 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also see Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky for more smart-spider science fiction

It keeps getting recommended on HN - should there be a book club?

Can we get that sweet VC cash for it?

Re: Researchers find signs of intelligence among jumping spiders

#156

Post by keep320909 »

ianstormtaylor wrote: post #25

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…

> 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 rest is only how precisely they can count.

Re: Researchers find signs of intelligence among jumping spiders

#157

Post by EdwardDiego »

hailt wrote: post #135
rukuu001 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also see Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky for more smart-spider science fiction

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.

Yep, origin of the name.

Re: Researchers find signs of intelligence among jumping spiders

#158

Post by EdwardDiego »

shoo wrote: post #71

previously: science fiction author Peter Watts' 2009 post musing about spider intelligence vs Turing machines: https://rifters.com/real/2009/01/iterating-towards-bethlehem... > 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 carr…

> Blindsight

> 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.

Space vampire eh?

Re: Researchers find signs of intelligence among jumping spiders

#159

Post by secretsatan »

jjackson5324 wrote: post #55
adriand wrote: post #11

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…

That's great, but if I ever see a jumping spider in my house then I will not hesitate to murder it in cold blood.

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..

Re: Researchers find signs of intelligence among jumping spiders

#160

Post by freilanzer »

gpderetta wrote: post #133
shoo wrote: post #71

previously: science fiction author Peter Watts' 2009 post musing about spider intelligence vs Turing machines: https://rifters.com/real/2009/01/iterating-towards-bethlehem... > 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 carr…

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).

> Echopraxia (a good book, but inferior to Blindsight

It's been half-read on my nightstand for months now because it just didn't interest me very much halfway through. Yet I read the first one twice.

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