Where the Mind Ends and the World Begins: Thinking Like a Spider

Where the Mind Ends and the World Begins:

Thinking Like a Spider

There’s an old tale told among the Ashanti of West Africa about Anansi, the trickster spider-god who brought stories to the world. He wasn’t just a weaver of webs but of narratives, connections, understanding. Anansi knew what modern science is only beginning to articulate: that cognition doesn’t live in the head alone—it dances outward, entangled in the world, strung through fibers of context, culture, and sensation.

So let me ask you this: Where does your mind end? And where does the world begin? Try answering that as if you were a spider.

Now imagine:
You are a spider.
You do not merely live on the web.
You are the web.

Neal Stephenson once wrote:

“Spiders can tell from the vibrations what sort of insect they have caught, and hone in on it. There is a reason why the webs are radial, and the spider plants itself at the convergence of the radii. The strands are an extension of its nervous system.”

Neal Stephenson’s observation—“Spiders think with their webs”—is not a metaphor. It’s a statement of extended cognition. The radial design of a spider’s web isn’t just architecture—it’s a nervous system externalised. The tension, the subtle pull of thread, the vibratory language of the caught fly: it all forms a sensory-motor feedback loop.

This idea echoes the work of philosopher Andy Clark, who co-authored The Extended Mind with David Chalmers. They argue that our tools, notes, smartphones, and even our environments are part of our thinking apparatus. Just like a spider’s web, a notebook or a webpage is not outside the mind—it is the mind, spread across the world like dew on silk.

So, where does the mind end?

It doesn’t.

It trails off like gossamer into the trees, the city, the code, the cosmos.

The Digital Web of Thought

If Anansi wove stories, and spiders weave cognition, what are we weaving in the hyperlinked architectures of the web?

Think about it:
Every hyperlink you click is a strand of attention.
Every thought externalized in a blog post, tweet, or digital garden is a node in your extended nervous system.
Every AI co-pilot, every open tab, every Craft doc or Roam graph is a radial line in your silk-bound soul.

You don’t just surf the web—you inhabit it.
You don’t just read through the net—you think through it.

The World Wide Web is not a metaphor for the mind.
It is the mind.
A planetary brain spun from silicon and story.

In animist and hermetic traditions, there is no hard boundary between the mind and the world. The alchemists believed in the doctrine of correspondence: as above, so below; as within, so without. The world is psychoactive—responsive, symbolic, alive.

And this belief finds its strange resonance in quantum physics and cognitive science. Quantum entanglement suggests that particles are mysteriously connected across distance. Extended cognition suggests the self is a system distributed across skin, screen, and society.

So perhaps the more accurate question is not where the mind ends and the world begins—but how we experience their interbeing.

Because when you place your hand on a tree, and feel something stir,
when you walk through a city and feel its pulse in your chest,
when you sit down to write and the words feel not yours but drawn from a collective ether—
You are the spider.
And the world is vibrating.

Entangled Intelligence

A Practice for the Web-Thinker

If we take this idea seriously—not just as a poetic conceit, but as a mode of being—we might begin to:

The Spider’s Answer

So, where does the mind end and the world begin?

The spider smiles.

It never does.

Soulcruzer

Soulcruzer