Verified by 
Neuroscience
Spiders, Minds, and Values
Do spiders have minds? Do they have moral value?
Posted December 16, 2014
I reflect on two questions in this blog and answer them from the vantage point of the unified approach. First, do spiders have minds? And, second, do they have moral value?
The question of what are minds and which creatures have them is one of the longest standing debates in philosophy and psychology. For many, the term “mind” is closely associated with “consciousness”. And, for many, the word consciousness refers most centrally to rational, self-reflective awareness (e.g., my conscious experience of myself as being who decided to write this blog). If this is one’s working definition of mind, them my answer would be “no”, spiders do not have minds.
However, via the unified approach, this is not how I define ‘mind’ (see here for more). Mind refers to that which is mental, and in a relatively unique twist, the unified approach defines mental defines “mental” largely in terms of behavior. More specifically, mental is an adjective that represents the novel forms in which animals behave. Thus, animal behaviors are mental behaviors. This is a twist on the normal definition of mind in everyday language, but it has a rich tradition in psychology (e.g., behaviorism) and philosophy (e.g., Gilbert Ryle’s The Concept of Mind is a work in this tradition).
In this sense when someone asks, “Do spiders have minds?”, the answer then is “Yes”. Their “minds” are what allow spiders behave as whole units in a way that is radically different than plants. Thus, spiders jump, see, hunt, defend territory, etc. which all mental behaviors. But what about the stuff that is going on inside the spider, like right as it gets ready to pounce on something? Can we talk about mental processes going on? Yes. The mind can reasonably refer to the informational structure instantiated in the nervous system that allows spiders to act as a whole unit. In this way, neural firing is a form of information processing, whereby neuronal action potentials (i.e., a nerve firing) is analogous to 0s and 1s in digital computation. Thus, in the language of the unified approach, the behavioral neuroscientist studying the nerves in the brain of a jumping spider in this clip are getting a window into how its mind operates.
However, saying spiders have minds, does not mean they are “conscious”, at least in some important senses of the word. The most basic reference the word consciousness refers to is aroused and aware. And it is in this very limited sense the spider is “conscious”. It is awake and its mind is “on-line”, as opposed to being “unconscious” if, say, it were anesthetized.
But there are two other important senses of the word conscious that I don’t think apply to spiders. First, there is the phenomenological experience of being, what Thomas Nagel made clear in his famous essay “What is it like to be a bat?”. Bernie Baars’ work on the theater of consciousness is another good angle on understanding this meaning. Current work on neuroscience and consciousness is not at all clear on whether something like a spider has a “theater of conscious experience”.
But if it does not have a theater of experience, then how does it “see” or “jump” or “hunt”? The answer here is that we know there are many “implicit” or nonconscious mental processes that guide overt mental behavior. And many complicated behaviors can take place without conscious/experiential awareness. For example, in humans (and other mammals), our procedural memory/action systems are largely nonconscious. For example, you don’t “consciously” know how to ride a bike. You know that you can ride a bike and you might recall when the last time you rode a bike and you would be conscious of the experience of riding it if you rode it tomorrow. However, the actual neuro-cognitive processes that enable you to ride a bike riding are essentially nonconscious and are run by “procedural” systems. Likewise, I would generally assume that the jumping spider studied in the NY Times piece is essentially operating on procedural mechanisms, and I would not impute experiential consciousness to it.
The third meaning on conscious is the highest and it refers to self-conscious awareness of being. This is something I think “higher” animals like dolphins, apes and elephants have some minor capacities (proto-self-conscious), but we adult humans, with our culture, language and explicit knowledge systems have radically greater capacities for self-consciousness. It seems essentially inconceivable to me that spiders would have any form of self-relfective consciousness.
This brings me to my second question, which is that of moral value and its relationship to spiders and other animals. This issue has been in the news lately because a researcher in the rain forest stumbled across a relatively rare giant spider, and, for research purposes, killed it and brought it back to the lab. Fellow PT blogger Mark Bekoff and others strongly objected to this act. (Apparently, some people actually sent death threats to the researcher for doing this!). Bekoff’s position is that all animals have intrinsic moral value and thus the killing of this spider was morally wrong
I am inclined to disagree with Bekoff on the issue of the spider. For me and my value system, and for folks like Sam Harris (see The Moral Landscape), the moral value of beings is tied to their conscious experience. That is, if a being has no sentience, no experiential awareness, and no capacity to genuinely feel pleasure or pain has limited to no moral value. To the extent it has moral value, it is contextual, meaning the extent to which its existence connects to the existence of other creatures. You can see this clearly with plants. Although a celery stalk is alive, eating a celery stalk is not a moral issue because a celery stalk has no moral value and it has no moral value because is has no more of a conscious experience than this chair I am sitting on.
It is worth noting that Bekoff begins his blog discussing a mass killing of wolves, which from the perspective offered here, is a very different "beast" at the moral level than the killing of a single exotic spider for research purposes. I admit that I don’t know for certain if the massive spider killed had any conscious experience or not. I don’t know if the houseflies I kill in my house have any conscious experience or not. I have good reason to believe their conscious experience is extremely limited, if present at all. And because they annoy me, and I see them as not having much in the way of mental experience, I kill houseflies with little remorse (interestingly, I generally try to take spiders and other creatures like lady bugs outside without killing them). In contrast, I have every reason to believe that wolves or my dog Maggie do have a (relatively) rich experiential mental lives. As such, from this frame, killing Maggie is a much more “morally charged” issue than killing a house fly.
My final point is a bit of a confessional. I am a meat eater. From the stand point of my system, eating pigs, chickens and cows is a moral value issue. I do try to buy open range meats and I am of the opinion that so long as the animals—who almost certainly have sentience in the way we mean it here—live lives in general comfort and relatively free of suffering, I am ok with eating them. However, speaking personally I know sometimes I am eating the meat of an animal that likely has suffered and that does leave me with a sense of guilt.
