Instinctual Behavior Vs Intelligent Decisions

It is going to be very hard for spiders. If they are "conscious" then their consciousness is likely to be sufficiently different from ours, that it would be hard for us to understand it.The term "instinctual" is also not very precise.Let me talk about birds building nests, to illustrate what I see as the issues.As best I can tell, nest building cannot be completely specified by the DNA. And that's because the way a bird builds a nest will depend on the materials used. There isn't enough DNA to have special instructions for every type of material. And birds do use human made synthetic materials at times.I would tend to characterize it as the bird having an inherited drive to build a nest, but that the bird has to learn on the scene what works and what doesn't work with the particular material used. And birds can be slow learners. I had a robin build a nest on the top my patio light. That was not a good idea, so I disassembled it. The next year it happened again - possibly the same robin.My general view: the organism is responsible itself for specific acts of behavior (not counting the knee jerk kind of response), while what is inherited can give a general directional bias toward some kinds of behavior but it is unlikely to handle the specifics.

This depends on what "in the same way" and "conscious component" mean. Those terms are not easily defined.If the spider is following a "program", then I doubt that it is the same type of program that we use with computers. That is, I doubt that it is a fixed sequence of mechanical steps. It seems to me that it would need a program that involves feedback and adjusting what it is doing based on the feedback - a sort of self-adaptive behavior. When I suggested in an earlier reply, that a bird has to learn how to build a mouse, I did not intend that to imply learning by imitation (or copying). I meant only learning by trial and error discovery of what works. In the case of the spider, I would guess there is little learning. That is, building the second web probably does not build on what could have been learned from building the first web. For the bird, I would guess that there is some learning, so that building the second nest is probably influenced by the experience of building the first nest.Note that I am not a biologist. I suspect some of the above could be tested empirically, and perhaps this is already known.

Yes, I'm well aware of that.In that case, I don't consider the behavior to be programmed since it partly depends on the feedback.