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Spiders seem to have REM-like sleep and may even dream
- baal80spam 4y agoThe real question is, do I want to know what do spiders dream about...?
- croon 4y agoProbably huge bipedal monsters hunting them and destroying their meticulously weaved webs.
- dvh 4y agoThose pesky bread-cooking bipeds and their internal skeletons...
- evelynsalt 4y agoI shiver with fear at the thought of things moving using two legs. Eight legs good, two legs bad!
- thebigjewbowski 4y agoKind of fun to think about, no? I had a cellar spider that was hanging out by my outside door for about a week and he would seemingly wave when I walked in and out. I wonder if he ever dreamed of me. I imagine their nightmares are probably about birds and centipedes.
- McBeige 4y agoAdrian Chaikovsky's Children of Time explores similar topics. I recommend it, it's alright and the ideas are cool.
- alistairSH 4y agoSolid book. The sequel (Children of Ruin) was pretty good too.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- amelius 4y agoThe same as we programmers dream about ... bugs.
- tokai 4y agoDunno, but i guess their sexual dreams are nightmares.
- misja111 4y agoUnless they are females
- ben_w 4y agoCataplectic sheep? (Only thing I could think of that rhymed with electric and made more than literally zero sense).
- pvaldes 4y agoProbably about flying, romance, gastronomy or children.
- yarg 4y agoFlies with teeth, always the flies with teeth.
- sweetheart 4y agoUnsurprisingly, we continue to learn that non-human animals are less foreign to us than previously thought. The fact that human beings take a “all animals are savage, primitive machines until proven wrong” POV is genuinely tragic. Was it Descartes that posited the screams of a dog being flayed were merely its programming? Being surprised that animals so different than us possibly dream is just another form of Descartes’ ridiculous thought.
- thanatos519 4y agohttps://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/okay-3 https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/okay-3
- sweetheart 4y agoHey I don’t eat any animals, so you’re preaching to the choir.
- hairofadog 4y agoI was frustrated by an episode of RadioLab recently in which a marine biologist explained why an example of humpback whales saving a seal from orcas wasn’t empathy or altruism but was just an evolutionary urge to save an animal in distress because there was a chance it might be a young member of their own species. It felt like a textbook example of not being able to see the forest for the trees; he was so focused on showing that the whale’s behavior was determined by biology (and therefore was not an example of altruism) that he forgot all behavior in all animals, including humans, is determined by biology.
- SnowHill9902 4y agoAltruism is an evolved trait, so. Would you rather save your brother or a stranger? Why do you think is that?
- hairofadog 4y agoI’m not totally clear on the point you’re making, sorry! But to answer your question, of course I’m partial to my family and people close to me, and I think the reason is that like all other living things I’m programmed to strive for the survival of my own DNA and tribe. That doesn’t mean I don’t think feelings aren’t important or valid—quite the contrary. It just means I don’t think humans are unique in that regard.
- noja 4y agoBut do they dream of electric sheep? Probably not.
- scsilver 4y agoThey dream of hydraulic sheep instead.
- towaway15463 4y agoI think pan-psycism was onto something. Not that atoms have consciousness but I think almost anything that is made up of complex cells or even a single cell has some form of consciousness and we are simply a very scaled version of that. Michael Levin has called attention to the remarkably complex and recognizable behaviour of single celled organisms, I think he’s right that there is a lot more processing going on inside a cell using all of that molecular machinery, much more than we ever dreamed possible.
- yarg 4y agoYeah, but the scaling functions for intelligence are exceptionally non-linear.
- deepdriver 4y agoThis alludes to an existential worry I have about machine intelligence. I worry that we might emulate the human brain approximately, to where it manages average human-level tasks but fails to accurately mimic the brain's full complexity. It'd be like a Nintendo emulator that isn't cycle-accurate; passable, even good most of the time, but inferior to the real thing in many small subtle ways. It's not clear to me how to test for such a condition. IQ tests maybe? College-level exams? Poetry contest? If a limited AI were to succeed humanity as the dominant life form on Earth, or as the being we send out to explore the stars, and if its flaws ultimately made it just too dumb to self-improve, that first biological spark would be lost for good.
- kypro 4y agoI'll take the other side of this and suggest that we're likely to build machines with a much greater depth of consciousness than ourselves. If consciousness is simply what occurs when you combine senses with the ability to reason and a concept of self, then we should be able to create machines with a far richer and deeper consciousness than anything we can even imagine. Our conscious experience of the world is limited by our 5 senses, but a machine wouldn't have that limitation. Their conscious experience of the world could be expanded to include radio waves or super-human hearing, for example. They could also have a far greater reasoning capability which would perhaps enable them to appreciate their senses as a conscious observer in a deeper way than we could ever imagine. Personally I think this is more likely to be the outcome of super-human intelligence. We like to think our of consciousness as special, but in the space of all consciousnesses I suspect we're on the lower end of the spectrum given our sensory and intellectual limitations.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- swayvil 4y agoSpiders can get high on marijuana. They share that with us.
- jnathsf 4y agoAnd LSD
- dghughes 4y agoIf you mean this video it's actually a spoof of very well known nature series the music is classic from the series and most all Canadians know it. Often shown on TV between shows mostly or maybe only on CBC channels. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHzdsFiBbFc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHzdsFiBbFc
- swayvil 4y agoI don't mean that video. cubic vulcanians.
- belval 4y agoHe probably means something like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect_of_psychoactive_drugs_on_animals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect_of_psychoactive_drugs_o... > Another study by the same institute found that when a "drunk" (BAC of over .1) zebrafish is introduced to a group of sober ones, the sober fish will follow the drunk individual as their leader. It's a very fun read.
- haskellandchill 4y agoSo I'm a Spider, So What?
- retro64 4y agoI wonder if ants dream as well. I've spent some time watching common black ant types sleep and they will twitch at times, especially as they are waking up.
- bitwize 4y agoBetween this and the experiments with bees pushing katamaris, it's become clear that arthropods think in a meaningful sense. I don't think that'll convince my girlfriend to give up shrimp and crawfish boils, though...
- FailMore 4y agoMy take on REM sleep dreaming: https://psyarxiv.com/k6trz https://psyarxiv.com/k6trz Discussed on HN here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19143590 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19143590