Spiders are intelligent

Lots of luck with that. There is no consensus on what we mean by "intelligence", and there is a wide diversity of views. I think it mainly differentiates by using "instinct" in its terminology, but by avoiding "intelligence" except in informal usage. And this is about what you would expect, if there is no consensus on the meaning of "intelligence." The AI (Artificial Intelligence) people might agree with you. But many people, myself included, would disagree. But now you have introduced "nature of processes" as another confusing term. Unless you are able to give a clear definition of that, I don't see how it helps. Now we get to the nitty gritty.Some people use "intelligence" in a strong sense, where it requires consciousness and thoughtful deliberation. And, typically, such people mean consciousness at the level of humans. Those who use "intelligence" in this strong sense would usually deny that a guide dog can be intelligent.Then there is what we could call a weak sense of "intelligence" that might allow that a dog could be intelligent. But you seem to be going for what might be called a very weak sense of "intelligence", by even allowing that spider web building is intelligent. Personally, I accept a weak sense of "intelligence", but I'm not sure that I would go so far as to consider spider web building as intelligent. On the other hand, I haven't studied web building, and if I did perhaps I might come to agree with you. I'll comment, but I won't debate this. I agree that it has to do with a desire for separation from animals. But I suspect that this desire is found also in cultures that have not depended on the bible, so it is perhaps a mistake to consider it as coming from biblical notions.If you accept a weak or very weak sense of "intelligence", then it is entirely possible that evolution itself should be consider intelligent, thus a system of intelligent design. However, the proponents of teaching of intelligent design are using a strong sense of "intelligence."

You might try reading what you just wrote. You are asking people to agree with you because you believe you are correct. But surely, that's an unreasonable expectation.Most people believe that there are clear distinctions between instinctual behavior and intelligent behavior. Your saying that there are no differences isn't likely to sway minds. If you want people to agree with you, then you have to present a persuasive argument. Up to now, you haven't done that.The other alternative is for you to stake out your own position, describe it carefully and give reasons for it, but not be concerned about whether people agree with you. To an extent, you have done that, except you have not given very good reasons.Your mistake is to want people to agree with you. I suggest you concentrate on giving good reasons, maybe examples of things that people think of as intelligent and why those are not importantly different from what is done instinctively. And expect disagreement.Hmm, just noticed you are a brit. My spell checker flagged your British spelling of "behaviour" in the quoted text.

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Let's end the political smears

Then ask people to provide examples.I will give you one, though others might find it controversial. I see intelligence in nest building by birds. This is often taken as instinctual. My view is that the birds have an instinctual drive to build a nest. But they have to build it with materials that happen to be available in the local region, and that takes some learning in the sense of trial and error experimentation. Perhaps not a lot of intelligence, but I think there is some.I don't see an equivalent with spiders. They build their web with material generated by their own biology, so don't have to learn to cope with a variety of different materials.Your turn.

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Let's end the political smears

The way I look at it is this.Designing a robotic spider (a robot that could build a web) looks a lot easier than building a robotic bird (a robot that could build a bird nest). The robotic spider has a relatively simple job, that I think is within range of what we can automate. The task for the robotic bird is far harder, and at the least would require some pretty complicated heuristics to:

recognize and evaluate local material that could be used in the nest;

learn how to put that material together, in a way that it holds its shape

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Incidently, there are researchers working in what is called "artificial life" where they do try to build robotic versions of insects and other simpler creatures. You can probably google it, or google "Rodney Brooks".

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Let's end the political smears

I'm inclined to agree with sinequanon here. Sure, we know quite a bit about neural processes, but this is primarily in humans rather than spiders. There are plenty of hypotheses in the literature as to how cognition works, but none of them adequately accounts for cognition. On this point I have to agree with molbiogirl. Relatively simple automated procedures can construct apparently complex structures, yet what is constructed would vary with the physical conditions. So unpredictability does not demonstrate that this is not done by a relatively simple stimulus-response system.

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Let's end the political smears

Sure. But it is mostly not the kind of data that would help us understand cognition. I hope you are right. However, I don't find anything in the literature that is even close. Even if an approximately correct theory were published tomorrow, it would probably take more than 5 years of argument before there could be any consensus that it was a good theory.

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Let's end the political smears

Thanks. Yes, totally brilliant. No doubt we will have a breakthrough in two or three years.Oops, wait. That was filmed 5 years ago. Where is the break through.Sorry, but this is just another wild goose chase (of which there are many in cognitive science).

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Let's end the political smears

When you drive down the street twice, why don't the car wheels go in exactly the same place each time?If you or I wanted to build a web, we would look at the space where the web is to go, come up with some sort of design, and then build the web to that design. If we did it twice, we might well get similar results each time.It is very unlikely that the spider is doing it that way. More likely, it is following local rules. There might be rules such as "move 3 body lengths, then turn left". There can be such local rules that have the effect of generating a geometric pattern for the whole web, but the spider need not have any overall concept of that pattern. If built by following local rules, the effects of small variations in detail will be amplified, so that in similar circumstances you can get two very different webs. The problem the spider is solving might be very different from the problem that you think the spider is solving.Part of the difficulty with this discussion (the entire thread), is that we don't have a clear enough idea as to what we mean by "intelligence". The term "intelligence" comes mostly from our use in human affairs. When we apply it to other creatures, we are anthropomorphizing. This anthropomorphizing works tolerably well with mammals. But the further we get from our own species, the more unreliable it gets.We really cannot decide questions such as whether insect or spider activity is intelligent, until we have a clear definition of "intelligence." And it needs to be a clear enough definition, that we can apply that definition to other creatures.We are currently in the situation where we measure the IQ of people, and IQ is often defined as "that which is measured by an IQ test." There is no agreement on whether IQ is the same as intelligence. So we are a long way from being able to settle questions such as whether spiders are intelligent. The question presupposes that the spider has a concept of the web as a whole, and is able to compare webs. But it may be that it is only able to conceptualize very local parts of the structure of a web, and maybe it is repairing the web based on tensions in the web fibers rather than on the geometric structure.

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Let's end the political smears

I suppose I could call it an educated guess.In order for the spider to be able to plan the design of the web as a whole, it would need to have a visual system that could see the web as a whole. I doubt that it has such a visual system. One could attempt to find out, by experimentally testing the visual capabilities of spiders.When I watch squirrels be almost run over by cars, it becomes clear that squirrels don't have anything close to the visual capabilities of humans. I would expect spider vision to far worse than that of the squirrel. I think it evident from watching animals, that the further they are from humans the harder it is for us to comprehend their behavior. We do pretty well at understanding mammal behavior. It is considerably more difficult for us to comprehend bird behavior, and still harder to comprehend reptile and fish behavior. Our distance from spiders and insects is far greater. Again, I think we can do better at attributing our notions of intelligence to other mammals than to attributing them to birds, etc. You can interpret it that way, but it might be a poor interpretation. What you suggest is roughly how most cognitive scientists look at it. For example, they tend to base their ideas of vision on Marr's theory of vision. It is, roughly, based on how an engineer might design a robot. For myself, I think that mistaken, and see Gibson's theory of vision and perception as a better candidate, though a harder theory to deal with from the engineering point of view.

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Let's end the political smears