Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

I once watched a spider in a web have to rapidly run around it's web and scoop up it's little baby spiders to escape a flame that was coming close to it. The reaction did not appear to be some kind of mechanical automated reaction - it very clearly had awareness of the danger, and an awareness of it's offspring, and made a coordinated effort to rescue them and move them away to safety.

To me - as someone who is not a biologist or a professional in this field - this appears to be consciousness. I couldn't imagine anyone trying to argue against that.




Optimize a creature for "survival" over billions of years and you get behavior like this. It doesn't require consciousness however. And it's quite hard to ask a spider whether it is conscious or not.


As the top comment in this thread pointed out, we don’t have a definition of consciousness that allows you to tell whether a spider has it or not. As far as I know, no observable behavior requires „consciousness“ for most layman definitions of the term.


Just FYI, all the it'ses you used in this comment are the wrong ones. Should have been its


Banging it out on my phone, it was automatically putting in apostrophes :(




Join us for AI Startup School this June 16-17 in San Francisco!

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: