the thing about tumblr that i think i’ll miss the most if it goes down is the like…quiet companionship on this site. i’m not talking about like knowing there are other people here who have the same views you do, or who don’t judge you for being honest and expressing yourself, though those are all good. i mean like…the mutuals you’ve had for years who you don’t talk to but you know. you might not know them well but it makes you happy when they post a cute selfie, or talk about something good that happened at their job. familiar names. little friendships. little connections in the vast sea of the internet, where you have to choose between total anonymity or sharing everything. we built communities in this hellscape and i don’t want to say goodbye to my neighbors just yet.
When something dances at the edges of your history, flirting with the core of your personal taste – don’t refuse to check it out based on its Wikipedia article
This was about Blindsight by Peter Watts*, but I forgot why I eventually checked that out: I happened upon [an incredible article he wrote] about the Portia genus of jumping spiders.
Portia spiders demonstrate some intelligent behavior – for example, changing hunting strategies based on whether the prey is carrying an egg sack (they mainly eat other spiders), or taking long detours which bring them out of sight of their prey. Smart-seeming behavior isn’t unusual in small invertebrates, but what is unusual is that all of it seems to actually hold up under examination.
For instance, take this experiment, a test of the aforementioned ability to take long detours:
A Portia spider’s eyesight is as good as most mammals, but she has a tiny field of view. So they sit at the top of the pole for an hour, scanning the scene below them like a friggin reverse CRT, until they finally compress the spacial configuration enough for it to fit into their tiny, tiny brain (bigger than a fruit fly’s, but smaller than a honey bee’s). Then they climbs down the pole and, [around two thirds of the time], picks the correct path to the food. Half the times which they pick the wrong path, they realize it immediately after rounding the first bend in the wire.
They attract prey by strumming their webs to imitate trapped insects. They take advantage of gusts of wind to cover their movements. They improvise and learn by trial and error.
It’s like this spider is simulating a mammal consciousness on a spider brain, compressing everything down until it will run on a hundredth of the amount of wetware, and it’s amazing.
*A high-concept first contact novel, [freely available online]. Some pretty awesome thought-provoking hard scifi, although kinda depressing if you let it get to you.
Portia is so cool and this is a great explanation! It’s so frustrating that nobody has looked much into the neuroanatomy of these things yet (as far as I can find) – who wouldn’t want to know how they do what they do?
Also, if you don’t mind, how did you happen upon that blog post? I think the trajectories people take through the internet are very interesting, and where cool articles like this one are found others are often nearby.
Not Portia specifically, but I did find several papers about the brains of jumping spiders – [this one] is pretty recent and has a bunch of citations to others (a disproportionat number of them from the 1970s for some reason?). Most of the literature seems focused on the spiders’ visual processing centers, which is understandable.
And maybe “happened upon” is the wrong word to use – the article was posted on the Parahumans subreddit, and I followed the link.
i’m making this post because a question i often get is…. “why?” and because some people have been commenting negative things out of fear of my spiders.
why do i have pet jumping spiders? and what makes them so different to other spiders? both very good questions.
in my experience, jumpers are easy to care for and are quite interactive. they aren’t your typical cuddly pets, but they each have their own unique personality and quirks - for example one of my females is super shy and will only eat crickets, absolutely nothing else, whereas one of my males is more boisterous and eats anything. theres also the fact that theyre fascinating and intelligent. they are able to quickly form and reverse associations, navigate in virtual reality, learn by trial and error and learn from observing conspecifics. there’s a lot of ongoing research into just how smart they are as well, so who’s to say you won’t spot a new behaviour by keeping them? and on the mention of their ease of care, their low maintenance makes them ideal for someone who doesn’t have the time or funds for other, more conventional pets but still wants a companion. (i.e. me, a mentally ill full time student with a job)
i understand why some of you would be taken aback, afraid of or weirded out by my spiders - all i ask is you try to understand why i would keep them and share them with you all 💖
So apparently we’ve known that salticids have been smart since I was a kid and I just never heard about it???
When something dances at the edges of your history, flirting with the core of your personal taste – don’t refuse to check it out based on its Wikipedia article
This was about Blindsight by Peter Watts*, but I forgot why I eventually checked that out: I happened upon [an incredible article he wrote] about the Portia genus of jumping spiders.
Portia spiders demonstrate some intelligent behavior – for example, changing hunting strategies based on whether the prey is carrying an egg sack (they mainly eat other spiders), or taking long detours which bring them out of sight of their prey. Smart-seeming behavior isn’t unusual in small invertebrates, but what is unusual is that all of it seems to actually hold up under examination.
For instance, take this experiment, a test of the aforementioned ability to take long detours:
A Portia spider’s eyesight is as good as most mammals, but she has a tiny field of view. So they sit at the top of the pole for an hour, scanning the scene below them like a friggin reverse CRT, until they finally compress the spacial configuration enough for it to fit into their tiny, tiny brain (bigger than a fruit fly’s, but smaller than a honey bee’s). Then they climbs down the pole and, [around two thirds of the time], picks the correct path to the food. Half the times which they pick the wrong path, they realize it immediately after rounding the first bend in the wire.
They attract prey by strumming their webs to imitate trapped insects. They take advantage of gusts of wind to cover their movements. They improvise and learn by trial and error.
It’s like this spider is simulating a mammal consciousness on a spider brain, compressing everything down until it will run on a hundredth of the amount of wetware, and it’s amazing.
*A high-concept first contact novel, [freely available online]. Some pretty awesome thought-provoking hard scifi, although kinda depressing if you let it get to you.
When something dances at the edges of your history, flirting with the core of your personal taste – don’t refuse to check it out based on its Wikipedia article
I don’t ever remember how I found it, but I just read all of Strong Female Protagonist (so far) yesterday.
It’s a “realistic”-type superhero comic. The characters are fully fleshed-out, they screw up, etc. A couple of times, there’s some pretty heavy horror stuff.
But what I appreciate the most about SFP is that it is absolutely, inarguably, unrelentingly, hopeful.
It depicts a world of sinister psychic masterminds, wrathful knifehanded juggernauts, undetectable serial killers, and every single one of them gets a second chance. Some of them don’t take it, but all of them get one.
It acknowledges the complexity of the moral issues. The problems of certain people having so much more power than others. Hell, there’s basically a whole chapter about moral philosophy. But it takes the sentiments that plague so much “realistic” fiction – everything must be at least kind of terrible all the time, sometimes there’s no such thing as the right thing to do, things can’t really ever get better – and says fuck that. If you screw up, you learned something. If you make a mess of a relationship, talk to them. If you’re confronted with a moral dilemma, do the best you can and then face the consequences.
It agrees that, after realizing that you can’t change the world just by punching the right bits of it, a superhero might question her self-worth. But the step after that isn’t returning to the status quo, or going down fighting, it’s changing your approach. Go to college! Start a national support group! Work on viable nuclear fusion!
…I had a couple half-formed potential endings for this post in mind, but the middle got out of hand and none of them fit here any more, so…that’s all I got.
I’m not totally sure what you mean by mind/body dualism but there are three stances of weakening strength that I can think of, of which I only kind of agree with the weakest:
Full-on Abrahamic (and no doubt many other) religion-style souls that are indivisible and wholly separable from the body: honestly don’t even think this is coherent due to the indivisibility (though maybe it could be if each soul were ontologically fundamental, specified as like a Chinese Room kind of thing? just thinking of this and not sure, can clarify if asked). Coherent or not, though, there’s no reason to think it’s true because it doesn’t play very nicely with the fact that humans are evolved creatures and that brain damage is a thing.
The mind is a kind of soul that is still fundamentally a part of physics in some way (e.g. can be reduced into simple interacting parts), but a separate physics from the material world, such that minds can exist without any material substrate (allowing life-after-death, etc.): coherent, but there’s no reason to believe this and plenty reason not to? Like, you can suppose some kind of fucked up system by which drugs and head trauma can affect your mind through a certain channel between the different physics mediated by your brain, but then when the brain shuts down and starts to decay that channel closes and your mind goes off and does its own thing, but why would you? Most statements about the world are false, and absence any evidence for them should be considered so.
“Mind” is dependent on certain patterns in space and time and not the actual materials they are embedded in, so you could simulate me on a computer at high-enough resolution and you’d have my mind (or a copy of it) in the computer: seems right, but I don’t know enough to be really confident. Not really sure what it would look like for this to be wrong, but it couldn’t hurt to simulate some brains and ask them how they feel. I’d like to try that someday, though there’s probably some tricky consciousness shit involved that makes it impossible to know for sure if they’re “really” minds. Whatever.
Hope that helps.
(the last of a few replies from @weirdbugboydraws, “that bent” can be read as “wrong”)
Yeah, personal identity is weird as all hell and I don’t have it figured out, unfortunately. Thought experiments like the classic destructive teleporter one intuitively give different results to me depending on differences that should be unimportant, e.g:
If you scan my brain then make another me with it is it me? What if you do it while I’m unconscious then destroy my physical body before it wakes up? What if you slowly replace my brain with other material doing the same computation while I’m going through life? (isn’t that just normal life?) What if you do it while I’m unconscious?
The first two of these seem like easy “no”s, and the last two easy “yes”s, but if you do the last one quickly it’s the same as the second one, and why should the speed of some stuff going on while I’m unconscious affect my identity? Fuck if I know.
Really the most telling point that I’m confused here is that reading Homestuck had a pretty substantial impact on my intuitions (and therefore viewpoints) here. That should not happen.
I find it most convenient and consistent say two people are the same under either of the following conditions
One can remember being the other, or could hypothetically remember being the other if their memory were better
They are indistinguishable in a Turing Test situation barring trivial transformations beforehand (eg, having gotten enough sleep, transfer of small amounts of information)
This gives an unequivocal “yes” to such quandries. But it does raise one thorny question, that of duplication:
If, in the future, I am duplicated, then Hex A and Hex B will temporarily be the same person. If circumstances allowed, and they make the effort, A and B could continue to be the same person for some time, but will inevitably diverge. If the two mes are different (eg if Hex A is a newly instantiated digital consciousness) they will stop being the same person pretty much immediately. In either case, continuous personal identity stops being a true equivalence operation: Present Hex is the same person as Eventual Hex A, and Present Hex is the same person as Eventual Hex B, but Eventual Hex A and Eventual Hex B are not the same person.
However, this only seems wrong because duplicating people is not currently possible, and because we don’t think of easily duplicated items in the same way. Consider 2 identical, newly manufactured laptops. If asked whether they were the same laptop, most would say yes unless they were being a smartass. But after years of use, nobody would say they were the same laptop, especially not their owners.
