[ExI] Portia Spider hunting Spiders on 600K neurons - Was: Bees are clever!

[John Grigg]

Perhaps along with dolphins, chimps, gorillas, cats, dogs, ravens, big
parrots, ferrets, iguanas, eagles, octopi, whales, and racoons, we should
one day genetically uplift Portia?  Well, not to human level intelligence
or size, but enough that they have a great deal more to work with....

I will have to add "Starfish" to my reading list!


John

On Wed, Apr 22, 2015 at 10:53 AM, Claus Bornich <clausb at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> Anders Sandberg  wrote:
>
>> I have another new favourite smart arthropod, the Portia spiders.?
>> http://www.dichotomistic.com/mind_readings_spider%20minds.html
>>
>
> Thank you for the link, enjoyed reading that. I too stumbled upon the
> Portia in "Echopraxia". Anyone interested might find it easier to look for
> "Firefall" which is Blindsight and Echopraxia in one volume.
>
> I first discovered Peter Watts with the excellent, but very dark and
> menacing, Starfish. Since then my awe for his work has only grown.
> Blindsight is crammed with great and well researched ideas, unusual highly
> transhuman characters (posthuman even?), clever plot and a great take on
> consciousness and intelligence. Echopraxia was a bit less convincing in
> parts, but still a good read with wonderfully researched ideas.
>
> That the Portia seems to be able to build up a complicated path to its
> target by sequentially scanning the landscape for up to an hour and then
> spend as long traveling the complicated route without even seeing the
> target, and all on just 600K neurons is fantastic.
>
> Claus
>
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