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Comment by polishdude20 | Hacker News Reader

I was surprised by the intelligence of a little spider I encountered the other day. As I was looking for my keys to enter the house, this little jumping spider was on the front door. As I approached the door he moved almost with anticipation. As I turned the keys, he got closer to the door edge. As I opened the door, he swung himself around the door and into the house ahead of me!

At that point I decided if got this spectacular show, he can enter my house and do whatever he wants.

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This is an article on the intelligence of jumping spiders and how they plan their approach for an attack and that they e.g. fake being a different animal or even a gust of wind to camouflage when they move through the web of another spider. Maybe you like that:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/10/spiders-are-much-sma...

It's interesting and sophisticated behaviour, but there are limits to what extent I'd characterise it as intelligent. I'm sure the spider has no concept of the animals it's mimicking, or that it's even mimicking an animal, or anything else. It might even be a stretch to describe their tactics as 'planned' in the human sense, as they're probably automatic responses to stimuli. They're still one of the most interesting and adept creatures we commonly encounter though.

I once saw a spider with long legs in a web by my bathroom sink. I flicked a bit of water at him and a drop of water stuck to his body and covered it. He quickly climbed down the web to the counter (only 6 inches or so) and crouched down to briefly touch his body to the dry countertop. That removed the drop of water from his body, and then he climbed back up.

Aside from that, I sometimes like to toss foreign objects in spider webs. For example, I'll toss a piece of a leaf into a web. The spider will quickly come over, work some magic for a few seconds, and then the leaf is suddenly untangled and floats away. It's really interesting to see how quickly they're able to remove unwanted objects from their webs to keep them clean.

Heh Heh Heh. If you're into Science Fiction, then Adrian Tchaikovsky's "Children of Time" might be your kind of thing:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0316452505

It's really, really good. :)

It is, however in his story the spiders gained intelligence from a "virus" that helped them accumulate and carry over experience across generations.

BUT! The book and Tchaikovsky is still brilliant; he did a great job "thinking outside the box" by creating a thought experiment of "how would human-like skills, like reading, develop over time in non-human-like creatures, like spiders" - I'm pointing to the balls of spiderweb as "books".

Tchaikovsky himself used to study zoology and had a focus in insects. Coincidentally he just turned 50 yesterday. Happy birthday to him!

Jumping spiders are very smart. I follow a small youtuber who breeds them and let some free roam. They are trained to perform little "high-fives" with their front leg when he puts his finger in front of them.

They are a spider with very good eyesight. That allows them to interact with us way easier than other spiders and insects.

There are a few living on the outside wall of my building and sometimes they get get stuck in my sinks. They appear to have a good memory, at first they would avoid my hand now they seem to expect that I will be there to get them out and jump on me almost immediately.

I have heard they make great pets, the only issue is their short lifespan means you will need to let them breed if you want to keep them for a long time.

Also, the relationship between qualia and intelligence is a mystery. Maybe spiders or ants "feel" more or are more subjectively "alive" than us, or in a complete different qualia space. Maybe in qualia matters we are closer to rocks than them.

What is qualia? I've never heard that word before, and I don't want to go down some weird rabbit hole and get lost. Got any references you could share?

Qualia are elements of subjectivity, e.g., the color red or the taste of chocolate as we experience them, rather than their physical corrolaries out in the world.

I think the idea of alternative 'qualia spaces' here is being used to say, essentially, that other creatures might have radically different subjectivities to the point that we would struggle to recognize them or make analogies to them, but that there would still clearly be subjective experiences for them.

I see now. I definitely agree with you and believe that identity transcends any effort to quantify an identity. There are elements to any and every identity (and person) that cannot be quantified with a measuring device and an Excel spreadsheet, and to ignore those elements of our experience is to ignore what it is that makes us human, in my opinion.

This idea is captured well in the difference between the terms "personnel" and "human resources". The former feels much more like treating people as individuals, with needs, concerns, and abilities that are unique to the person vs. treating people as inconvenient and unreliable machines that need to be drugged into submission to the needs of the machine.

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