Animals are alive; they are living beings, same with bugs and insects. What do you think goes through their minds? Especially insects like flies, ants, spiders, etc., especially when they’re so small and can die so easily?
Animals are alive; they are living beings, same with bugs and insects. What do you think goes through their minds? Especially insects like flies, ants, spiders, etc., especially when they’re so small and can die so easily?
Most of the things you mentioned like insects and spiders don’t have a mind. Their brains are too small for anything resembling a mind. It’s all instinct, learnt responses based on stimuli.
Something like a cat or a dog is smart enough to have some kind of internal concept of the world around them, but still very limited. It’s hard to say how much of a mind they have, but it’s much simpler than the one humans have. There are simply cognitive tests one can do on small children, which most animals fail. Although cats are notoriously hard to test in these kinds of things, because they don’t give a fuck and if they don’t feel like cooperating they just won’t.
But humans are unique in this aspect, the way we have minds is something no other animal has. It’s the unique trait that has made us masters of this planet (for better or worse, probably worse). Perhaps some animals like dolphins and some apes can come closer, but their mind would be similar to a very young child at best.
Jumping spiders have an interesting amount of cognition, more than I would’ve thought, and especially for their size.
Yeah definitely, they are some of the smartest spiders out there.
I would recommend the book series Children of Time, which heavily plays with this concept and is an overall good time.
It’s hard to say if they actually have mind tho. I guess it would depend on the definition of what actually is a mind. And then you quickly get down into metaphysical stuff. We also like to frame stuff in terms of human concepts (which makes sense, being human), where the mind of an animal (especially something like an octopus with it’s more distributed intelligence) might be so foreign or alien it doesn’t even compare.