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.
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.
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.
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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
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.
They make decent pets, or so TikTok has convinced me.
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 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.
If you like this kind of thing, check out Watts' novel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel)
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'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.
> 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?
They are obviously tiny, but I wouldn't have imagined what titans we must be from their perspective.
It'd take entire nations years of effort to build a gun or rocket that could even hurt something that much bigger than us.
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.
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...
"Sir. I will follow any legal order, but I will not countenance the destruction of the entire shrub."
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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.