Spiders are intelligent

Thanks for the thoughts everyone, and thanks for the OP. I read an article by Dan Dennett which addressed the difference between human creativity and animal instinct. The conclusion, to simplify, is that there is important difference only in magnitude.

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Weaver birds create intricate nests; sculptors and other artists and artisans also create intricate, ingenious constructions out of similar materials. The products may look similar, and outwardly the creative processes that create those processes may look similar, but there are surely large and important differences between them. What are they, and how important are they? The weaverbird nestmaking is ”instinctual,’ and ”controlled by the genes’ some would say, but we know that this is a crude approximation of a more interesting truth, involving an intricate interplay between genetic variation, long-term developmental and environmental interaction and short-term environmental variation-in opportunities and materials accessible at the time of nest building. And on the side of the human creator, a similarly complex story must be told. Genes play some role surely (think of the likelihood of heritable differences in musical aptitude, for instance), but so do both long-term and short-term environmental interactions. The myth of the artist “blessed” by a spark of ”divine genius’ is even cruder and more distorted than the myth of the birdnest as a simple product of a gene-as if it were a protein.

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Call any such product of earlier R and D a crane, and distinguish it from what Darwinism says does not happen: skyhooks (Dennett 1995). Skyhooks, like manna from heaven, would be miracles, and if we posit a skyhook anywhere in our ”explanation’ of creativity, we have in fact conceded defeat.

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What, then, is a mind? The Darwinian answer is straightforward. A mind is a crane, made of cranes, made of cranes, a mechanism of not quite unimaginable complexity that can clamber through Design Space at a giddy-but not miraculously giddy-pace, thanks to all the earlier R and D, from all sources, that it exploits.

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The cranes of human culture didn’t just open up Design Space; they opened up perspectives on Design Space that permitted ”directed’ mutation, foresighted mutation, reflective mutation, both in cultural and, most recently, genetic innovation... Does a Darwinian gloss actually supplement or adjust the traditional intellectualist ways of thinking? I think it does, because without the steady pressure of the Darwinian ”strange inversion of reasoning,’ it is all too tempting to revert to the old essentialist, Cartesian perspectives. For instance, there is always the temptation, often succumbed to, to establish ”principled’ boundaries, or to erect a polar contrast between insightful and blind processes of search, as we saw in the unsupportable assertion that Kasparov’s methods are fundamentally unlike Deep Blue’s. If Deep Blue’s methods are ultimately ”blind and mechanical,’ then so, ultimately, are Kasparov’s-his neurons are as blind and mechanical as any circuit board.

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I don't think I have much to add to that. I would say that where instinct becomes intelligence is a subjective one, which has utility in communication but when examined closely simply confuses the issue. However, I think a useful starting point would be differentiating (as best as possible) behaviours which are dominated by phenotypical constraints (ie the behaviour is significantly hardcoded and only partially based on experience) from behaviours which are learned predominantly through experience (thus learning itself is instinctual, but perhaps engaging in behaviour based on learned things is the beginning of intelligence). That is to say, perhaps we can differentiate instinct from intelligence by the complexity of the 'software' that is able to be 'loaded' onto the 'hardware'.Right now, quantifying that is impossible, but I think it is reasonable to consider that spiders are somewhere over towards the extreme edge of 'instinct' and that humans represent the closest known example of something to the 'intelligence' edge.