Spiders do not have extended cognition

I agree with Dawkins. A spider isn't using its web to think, it's using it to hunt. A cricket using its ears to find a mate isn't using an extended mind, it's just using its senses. No extra 'thinking' is being performed here in the way that a human would use writing for additional memory or calculation. Animals may think differently due to having their various tools, just as we consider different options if all we have is the proverbial hammer. But that is not the same as, say, using stones to count. A spiderweb does not encode the spider's thoughts, except perhaps in that the layout of the existing strands determines where the next one goes.

When the spider was confronted with a problem to solve that it might not have seen before, how did it figure out what to do? “Where is this information?” he said. “Where is it? Is it in her head, or does this information emerge during the interaction with the altered web?”

In February, Japyassú and Kevin Laland, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Saint Andrews, proposed a bold answer to the question. They argued in a review paper, published in the journal Animal Cognition, that a spider’s web is at least an adjustable part of its sensory apparatus, and at most an extension of the spider’s cognitive system.


This would make the web a model example of extended cognition, an idea first proposed by the philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers in 1998 to apply to human thought. In accounts of extended cognition, processes like checking a grocery list or rearranging Scrabble tiles in a tray are close enough to memory-retrieval or problem-solving tasks that happen entirely inside the brain that proponents argue they are actually part of a single, larger, “extended” mind.

Alternatively, more traditional theorists label these structures and spiderwebs alike as extended phenotypes, a term proposed by Richard Dawkins. Extended phenotypes are information from an animal’s genes that they express in the world. For example, bird nests are objects that are somehow encoded in the avian genome. And as with niche construction, natural selection affects the structure — different kinds of birds have evolved to build different kinds of nests, after all. But in the extended phenotype perspective, that selection ultimately just works inward, to tweak the controlling information in the animal’s genome.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-thoughts-of-a-spiderweb-20170523/?utm_content=buffer2044e&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer