No Stupid Questions
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
view the rest of the comments
Most of the things you mentioned like insects and spiders don't have a mind. Their brains are too small for anything resembling a mind. It's all instinct, learnt responses based on stimuli.
Something like a cat or a dog is smart enough to have some kind of internal concept of the world around them, but still very limited. It's hard to say how much of a mind they have, but it's much simpler than the one humans have. There are simply cognitive tests one can do on small children, which most animals fail. Although cats are notoriously hard to test in these kinds of things, because they don't give a fuck and if they don't feel like cooperating they just won't.
But humans are unique in this aspect, the way we have minds is something no other animal has. It's the unique trait that has made us masters of this planet (for better or worse, probably worse). Perhaps some animals like dolphins and some apes can come closer, but their mind would be similar to a very young child at best.
Jumping spiders have an interesting amount of cognition, more than I would've thought, and especially for their size.
Yeah definitely, they are some of the smartest spiders out there.
I would recommend the book series Children of Time, which heavily plays with this concept and is an overall good time.
It's hard to say if they actually have mind tho. I guess it would depend on the definition of what actually is a mind. And then you quickly get down into metaphysical stuff. We also like to frame stuff in terms of human concepts (which makes sense, being human), where the mind of an animal (especially something like an octopus with it's more distributed intelligence) might be so foreign or alien it doesn't even compare.