What If We Had Bigger Brains? Imagining Minds Beyond Ours

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2025/05/what-if-we-had-bigger-brains-imagining-minds-beyond-ours/

by nsoonhui • 1 year ago

208 255 1 year ago

writings.stephenwolfram.com

mrfinn• 1 year ago

we would be elephants or whales? (sorry couldn't resist)

kridsdale3• 1 year ago

We already know that Cetaceans are the superior intellectual life form of the planet.

Toss a naked man in the sea and see how he fares.

roarcher• 1 year ago

About as well as a beached whale, I'd expect.

ednite2• 1 year ago

Wolfram’s “bigger brains” piece raises the intriguing question of what kinds of thinking, communication, or even entirely new languages might emerge as we scale up intelligence, whether in biological brains or artificial ones.

It got me thinking that, over millions of years, human brain volume increased from about 400–500 cc in early hominins to around 1400 cc today. It’s not just about size, the brain’s wiring and complexity also evolved, which in turn drove advances in language, culture, and technology, all of which are deeply interconnected.

With AI, you could argue we’re witnessing a similar leap, but at an exponential rate. The speed at which neural networks are scaling and developing new capabilities far outpaces anything in human evolution.

It makes you wonder how much of the future will even be understandable to us, or if we’re only at the beginning of a much bigger story. Interesting times ahead.

postalrat2• 1 year ago

The future that we don't understand is already all around us. We just don't understand it.

aspenmayer3• 1 year ago

Is the future in the room with us right now?

NoMoreNicksLeft• 1 year ago

It makes you wonder how much of the future will even be understandable to us, o

There isn't much of a future left. But of what is left to humans, it is in all probability not enough time to invent any true artificial intelligence. Nothing we talk about here and elsewhere on the internet is anything like intelligence, even if it does produce something novel and interesting.

I will give you an example. For the moment, assume you come up with some clever prompt for ChatGPT or another one of the LLMs, and that this prompt would have it "talk" about a novel concept for which English has no appropriate words. Imagine as well that the LLM has trained on many texts where humans spoke of novel concepts and invented words for those new concepts. Will the output of your LLM ever, even in a million years, have it coin a new word to talk about its concept? You, I have no doubt, would come up with a word if needed. Sure, most people's new words would be embarrassing one way or another if you asked them to do so on the spot. But everyone could do this. The dimwitted kid in school that you didn't like much, the one who sat in the corner and played with his own drool, he would even be able to do this, though it would be childish and onomatopoeic.

The LLMs are, at best, what science fiction used to refer to as an oracle. A device that could answer questions seemingly intelligently, without having agency or self-awareness or even the hint of consciousness. At best. The true principles of intelligence, of consciousness are so far beyond what an LLM is that it would, barring some accidental discovery, require many centuries. Many centuries, and far more humans than we have even now... we only have eight or so 1-in-a-billion geniuses. And we have as many right now as we're ever going to have. China's population shrinks to a third of its current by the year 2100.

schmidtleonard2• 1 year ago

The true principles of intelligence, of consciousness are so far beyond what an LLM is that it would, barring some accidental discovery, require many centuries.

I've been too harsh on myself for thinking it would take a decade to integrate imaging modalities into LLMs.

BriggyDwiggs426• 1 year ago

I’m probably too optimistic as a default, but I think it might be okay. Agriculture used to require far more people than it does now due to automation, and it certainly seems like many industries will be able to be partially automated with only incremental change to current technology. If less people are needed for social maintenance, then more will be able to focus on the sciences, so yes we may have less people but it’s quite possible we’ll have a lot more in science.

I don’t think AI needs to be conscious to be useful.

5423542342355• 1 year ago

I mean, the integrated circuit, the equivalent of the evolution of multicellular life, was 1949. The microprocessor was 1979, and that would be what, Animals as a kingdom? Computers the size of a building are now the size of a thumb drive. What level are modern complex computer systems like ChatGPT? The level of chickens? Dogs? Whatever it is, it is light years away from what it was 50 years ago. We may be reaching physical limits for the size of circuits, but it seems like algorithm complexity and efficiency moving fast and are no where near any physical limits.

We haven’t needed many insane breakthroughs to get here. It has mostly been iterating and improving, which opens up new things to develop, iterate, and improve. IBMs Watson was a super computer in 2011 that could understand natural language. My laptop runs LLMs that can do that now. The pace of improvement is incredibly fast and I would be very hesitant to say with confidence that human level “intelligence” is definitely centuries away. 1804 was two centuries ago, and that was the year the locomotive was invented.

asdff7• 1 year ago

IMO they will truly be unleashed when they drop with the human language intermediary and are just looking at distributions of binary functions. Truly, why are you asking the llm in english to write python code? The whole point of python code was to make the machine code readable for humans, and when you drop that requirement, you can just work directly on the metal. Some model outputting an incomprehensible integrated circuit from the fab, its utility proved by fitting a function to some data with acceptable variance.

JumpCrisscross2• 1 year ago

why are you asking the llm in english to write python code?

Perhaps the same reason networked computers aren’t just spitting their raw outputs at each other? Security, i.e. varied motivations.

ip262• 1 year ago

The language doesn’t just map to English, it allows high level concepts to be expressed tersely. I would bet it’s much easier for an LLM to generate python doing complex things than to generate assembly doing the same. One very simple reason is the context window.

In other words, I figure these models can benefit from layers of abstraction just like we do.

schmidtleonard2• 1 year ago

the brain’s wiring and complexity also evolved, which in turn drove advances in language, culture, and technology

Fun thought: to the extent that it really happened this way, our intelligence is minimum viable for globe-spanning civilization (or whatever other accomplishment you want to index on). Not average, not median. Minimum viable.

I don't think this is exactly correct -- there is probably some critical mass / exponential takeoff dynamic that allowed us to get slightly above the minimum intelligence threshold before actually taking off -- but I still think we are closer to it than not.

TheOtherHobbes2• 1 year ago

Less fun thought: there's an evolutionary bottleneck which prevents further progress, because the cost/benefit tradeoffs don't favour increasing intelligence much beyond the minimum.

So most planet-spanning civilisations go extinct, because the competitive patterns of behaviour which drive expansion are too dumb to scale to true planet-spanning sentience and self-awareness.

travisjungroth• 1 year ago

I like this idea. I’ve thought of a similar idea at the other end of the limit. How much less intelligent could a species be and evolve to where we’re at? I don’t think much.

Once you reach a point where cultural inheritance is possible, things pop off at a scale much faster than evolution. Still, it’s interesting to think about a species where the time between agriculture and space flight is more like 100k or 1mm years than 10k. Similarly, a species with less natural intelligence than us but is more advanced because they got a 10mm year head start. Or, a species with more natural intelligence than us but is behind.

Your analogy makes me think of boiling water. There’s a phase shift where the environment changes suddenly (but not everywhere all at once). Water boils at 100C at sea level pressure. Our intelligence is the minimum for a global spanning civilization on our planet. What about an environment with different pressures?

It seems like an “easier” planet would require less intelligence and a “harder” planet would require more. This could be things like gravity, temperature, atmosphere, water versus land, and so on.

abeppu• 1 year ago

How about Argentine ants?

The word "civilization" is of course loaded. But I think the bigger questionable assumption is that intelligence is the limiting factor. Looking at the history that got us to having a globe-spanning civilization, the actual periods of expansion were often pretty awful for a lot of the people affected. Individual actors are often not aligned with building such a civilization, and a great deal of intelligence is spent on conflict and resisting the creation of the larger/more connected world.

Could a comparatively dumb species with different social behaviors, mating and genetic practices take over their planet simply by all actors actually cooperating? Suppose an alien species developed in a way that made horizontal gene transfer super common, and individuals carry material from most people they're ever met. Would they take over their planet really fast because as soon as you land on a new continent, everyone you meet is effectively immediately your sibling, and of course you'll all cooperate?

taneq• 1 year ago

I feel like there’s also a maximum viable intelligence that’s compatible with reality. Beyond a certain point, the smarter people are, the higher the tendency for them to be messed up in some way.

relaxing2• 1 year ago

Wolfram’s “bigger brains” piece

You mean the one linked at the top of the page?

Why is this structured like a school book report, written for a teacher who doesn’t have the original piece right in front of them?

ednite2• 1 year ago

Noted for next time. The article itself is excellent. Sorry if my comment felt out of place for HN. I added extra context to get more discussion going, this topic really interests me.

furyofantares• 1 year ago

Four words into your post and I'm confident it's ChatGPT slop. Am I wrong?

bdbenton5255• 1 year ago

There is a popular misconception that neural networks accurately model the human brain. It is more a metaphor for neurons than a complete physical simulation of the human brain.

There is also a popular misconception that LLMs are intelligently thinking programs. They are more like models that predict words and appear as a human intelligence.

That being said, it is certainly theoretically possible to simulate human intelligence and scale it up.

popupeyecare• 1 year ago

I often wonder if human intelligence is essentially just predicting words and phrases in a cohesive manner. Once the context size becomes large enough to encompass all a person history, predicting becomes indistinguishable from thinking.

pollinations• 1 year ago

This reads pretty definitively. If LLMs are intelligently thinking programs is being actively debated in cognitive science and AI research.

Permik4• 1 year ago

"Minds beyond ours", how about abstract life forms, like publicly traded corporations. We've had higher kinded "alien lifeforms" around us for centuries, but we have not noticed them and seem generally not to care about them, even when they have negative consequences for our survival as a species.

We are to these like ants are to us. Or maybe even more like mitochondria are to us. Were just the mitochondria of the corporations. And yes, psychopaths are the brains, usually. Natural selection I guess.

Our current way of thinking – what exactly *is* a 'mind' and what is this 'intelligence' – is just too damn narrow. There's tons of overlap of sciences from biology that apply to economics and companies as lifeforms, but for some reason I don't see that being researched in popular science.

asdff7• 1 year ago

Really interesting ideas IMO. I have thought about this how you might found a company, you bring in the accountants, the lawyers, the everything that comes in with that, and then who is even really driving the ship anymore? The scale of complexity going on is not something you can fit in your or even 10 peoples heads. Yet people act like they are in control of these processes they have delegated to countless people who are each trudging off with their own sensibilities and optimizations and paradigms. It is no different to how a body works where specific cells have a specific identity and role to play in the wider organism, functioning autonomously bound by inputs and outputs that the "mind in charge" has no concept of.

And it makes it scary too. Can we really even stop the machine that is capitalism wreaking havoc on our environment? We have essentially lit a wildfire here and believe we are in full control of its spread. The incentives lead to our outcomes and people are concerning themselves with putting bandaids on the outcomes and not adjusting the incentives that have lead to the inevitable.

TZubiri4• 1 year ago

Modern corps are shaped after countries, they are based on constitutions (articles of incorporation/bylaws). It's the whole three branch system launched off the founding event.

the_d3f4ult• 1 year ago

This is an interesting perspective, but your view seems very narrow for some reason. If you’re arguing that there are many forms of computation or ‘intelligence’ that are emergent with collections of sentient or non-sentient beings then you have to include tribes of early humans, families, city-states and modern republics, ant and mold colonies, the stock market and the entire earths biosphere etc.

TheOtherHobbes2• 1 year ago

There's an incredible blind spot which makes humans think of intelligence and sentience as individual.

It isn't. It isn't even individual among humans.

We're colony organisms individually, and we're a colony organism collectively. We're physically embedded in a complex ecosystem, and we can't survive without it.

We're emotionally and intellectually embedded in analogous ecosystems to the point where depriving a human of external contact with the natural world and other humans is considered a form of torture, and typically causes a mental breakdown.

Colony organisms are the norm, not the exception. But we're trapped inside our own skulls and either experience the systems around us very indirectly, or not at all.

Permik4• 1 year ago

Personally, I actually count all of those examples into abstract lifeforms which you described :D

There's also things like "symbolic" lifeforms like viruses, yeah, they don't live per-se, but they do replicate and go through "choices", but in a more symbolic sense as they are just machines that read out/ execute code.

The way I distinct symbolic lifeforms and abstract lifeforms is that mainly symbolic lifeforms are "machines" that are kind of "inert" in a temporal sense.

Abstract lifeforms are just things that are in a way or other, "living" and can exist on any level of abstraction. Like cells are things that can be replaced, so can be CEO's, or etc.

Symbolic lifeforms can just be forever inert and hope that entropy knocks them to something to activate them, without getting into some hostile enough space that kills them.

Abstract lifeforms on the other hand just eventually run out of juice.

didibus• 1 year ago

Ya, I've always wondered like do blood cells in my body have any awareness that I'm not just a planet they live on? Would we know if the earth was just some part of a bigger living structure with its own consciousness? Does it even need to be conscious, or just show movement that is non random and influenced in some ways by goals or agenda? Many organisms act as per the goal to survive even if not conscious, and so probably can be considered a life-form? Corporations are an example of that like you said.

BriggyDwiggs426• 1 year ago

I think you’re overestimating corporations a bit. Some aspects of intelligence scale linearly as you put more people into a room, eg quantity of ideas you can generate, while others don’t due to limits on people’s ability to communicate with each other. The latter is, I think, more or less the norm; adding more people very quickly hits decelerating returns due to the amount of distance you end up having to put between people in large organizations. Most end up resembling dictatorships because it’s just the easiest way to organize them, so are making strategic choices about as well as a guy with some advisors.

I agree that we should see structures of humans as their own kind of organism in a sense, but I think this framing works best on a global scale. Once you go smaller, eg to a nation, you need to conceptualize the barrier between inside and outside the organism as being highly fluid and difficult to define. Once you get to the level of a corporation this difficulty defining inside and outside is enormous. Eg aren’t regulatory bodies also a part, since they aid the corporation in making decisions?

Permik4• 1 year ago

Usually for companies, regulatory bodies are more like antibodies against bacteria. Or for another example, regulatory bodies are like any hormone producing body part, they control that the assemble of your guts do their thing and don't fuck it up.

TZubiri4• 1 year ago

In countries with civil law (as opposed to common law), companies are called juristic persons (as opposed to natural persons, humans)

mensetmanusman2• 1 year ago

No one behaves with species survival as the motivating action.

Permik4• 1 year ago

Maybe not consciously, but otherwise natural selection *will* do that choice for you :D

neoden• 1 year ago

We are to these like ants are to us. Or maybe even more like mitochondria are to us. Were just the mitochondria of the corporations

It's the opposite, imo. Corporations, states etc. seem to be somewhere on the bacteria level of organizational complexity and variety of reactions.

nssnsjsjsjs2• 1 year ago

We have massively increased our brain by scaling out not up. Going from pop. 8M to 8Bn is a 1000x

loa_in_2• 1 year ago

Hardly. What's the use if no single component of this brain can hold a complex enough idea?

staunton• 1 year ago

How complex are the ideas held by a single neuron?

NL8072• 1 year ago

We deal with that by abstraction and top-down compartmentalisation of complex systems. I mean look at the machines we build. Trying to understand the entire thing holistically is impossible thing for a human mind, but we can divide and conquer the problem, where each component is understood in isolation.

nssnsjsjsjs2• 1 year ago

We are smart enough to build the intelligence! Not just AI. We use computers to solve all kinds of physics and maths problems.

TZubiri4• 1 year ago

Countries and companies hold pretty complex ideas

mensetmanusman2• 1 year ago

Corporations with extreme specializations are that.

zabzonk3• 1 year ago

I kind of skipped through this article, but one thing occurs to me about big brains is - cooling. In Alastair Reynolds Conjoiner novels, the Conjoiners have to have heat-sinks built into their heads, and are on the verge of not really being human at all. Which I guess may be OK, if that's what you want.

ajcp• 1 year ago

I believe it's the Revelation Space series of Alastair Reynolds novels that mention the Conjoiners.

zabzonk3• 1 year ago

Yes, and other ones, such as "The Great Wall of Mars" - it's the same shared universe, all of which feature the Conjoiners and their brains and starship drives.

kabdib• 1 year ago

trivia: brain heatsinks also feature in Julian May's Pliocene Saga (in The Adversary IIRC) and A.A. Attanasio's Radix

stavros• 1 year ago

Couldn't you just watercool brains? Isn't that how they're cooled already?

FeteCommuniste• 1 year ago

Reminds me of how Aristotle thought that the brain’s purpose was to cool the blood.

pixl977• 1 year ago

Well, our entire body works as a swamp cooler via sweat evaporation, yes. The issue with us is wet bulb temps and dehydration. It can already brain damage us pretty quickly and makes some parts of the world already dangerous to exist in outside.

Adding to this cooling load would require further changes such as large ears or skin flaps to provide more surface area unless you're going with the straight technological integration path.

tjpnz• 1 year ago

Rocky from Project Hail Mary is also heatsinked.

someothherguyy3• 1 year ago

Likely would be larger skulls and bodies, not more dense, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_n...

jjtheblunt• 1 year ago

Desert hares (jackrabbits) have heatsinks built into their heads too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hare

relaxing2• 1 year ago

You gotta admire the dedication to shoehorning cellular automata into every discipline he encounters.

bongoman42• 1 year ago

I feel it is not just about bigger but also about what all is supported in the current brain that is potentially not as useful anymore or useful for intelligence as such. The evolutionary path for our brain has an absolutely major focus on keeping itself alive and based on that keeping the organism alive. Humans will often take potentially sub-optimal decisions because the optimal decision may have a very low probability of death for themselves or those genetically related to them. In some sense, similar to a manned fighter jet vs a drone, where in one case a large amount of effort and detail is expended on keeping the operating envelope consistent with keeping the human alive, whereas a drone can expand the envelope way more because the human is no longer a concern. If we could jettison some of the evolutionary baggage of the brain, it could potentially do so much more even within the same space.

pixl977• 1 year ago

Yay for the intelligent robot armies with no fear of death!

Uptrenda• 1 year ago

"can't run code inside our brains" lad... speak for yourself.

codr7• 1 year ago

I imagine that even if we did, this article would still be way too long.

I found some of it interesting, but there's just too many words in there and not much structure nor substance.

layer8• 1 year ago

That’s pretty typical for Wolfram.

sitkack• 1 year ago

Completely ignores any sort of scaling in emotional intelligence. Bro just wants a DX4.

pixl977• 1 year ago

I mean this is a huge potential issue with high intelligence AI systems (HIAI maybe we'll call it one day). We already see AI develop biases and go into odd spiritual states when talking with other AI. They inherit the behaviors in human data.

I've seen people say "oh this will just go away when they get smart enough", but I have to say I'm a doubter.

austin-cheney• 1 year ago

Nonsense.

Neurology has proven numerous times that it’s not about the size of the toolbox but the diversity of tools within. The articles starts with cats can’t talk. Human can talk because we have a unique brain component dedicated to auditory speech parsing. Cats do, however, appear to listen to the other aspects of human communication almost, sometimes much more, precisely than many humans.

The reason size does not matter is that 20% of brain volume accounts for 80% of brain mass in the cerebellum. That isn’t the academic or creative part of the brain. Instead it processes things like motor function, sensory processing (not vision), and more.

The second most intelligent class of animals are corvids and their brains are super tiny. If you want to be smarter then increase your processing diversity, not capacity.

NL8072• 1 year ago

If you want to be smarter then increase your processing diversity, not capacity.

And efficiency. Some of this is achieved by having dedicated and optimal circuits for a particular type of signal processing.

5423542342355• 1 year ago

The original GPU vs CPU.

kristopolous• 1 year ago

right, people claiming that measuring brain weight has something to do with some dubious intelligence metric is phrenology

bell-cot2• 1 year ago

IIR, being obsessed with brain size & weight overlaps with phrenology, but is a distinct (and generally simpler) set of beliefs.

But both have very long and dubious reputations. And the article's failure to mention or disclaim either is (IMO) a rather serious fault.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrenology

someothherguyy3• 1 year ago

Well, start destroying that existing substrate and it certainly has effects. Maybe in the near future (as there is work here already), we will find a way to supplement an existing human brain with new neurons in a targeted way for functional improvements.

bell-cot2• 1 year ago

The second most intelligent class of animals are corvids ...

Not the psittacines? Admittedly, I've heard less about tool use by parrots than by corvids. And "more verbal" is not the same as "more intelligent".

empath754• 1 year ago

He doesn't literally mean physically larger brains, he means brains with more connections.

tylershuster4• 1 year ago

There are larger minds than ours, and they've been well-attested for millennia as celestial entities, i.e. spirits. Approaching it purely within the realm of the kinds of minds that we can observe empirically is self-limiting.

nathan_compton4• 1 year ago

Well attested to is different from convincingly attested to. You may have noticed that people will say just about anything for lots of reasons other than averring a literal truth, and this was particularly true for those many millennia during which human beings didn't even know why the sky was blue and almost literally could not have conceived of the terms in which we can presently formulate an explanation.

tylershuster4• 1 year ago

The "people in times before the enlightenment just attributed everything to spirits because they didn't understand things" argument is tired and boring. Just because you're not convinced doesn't mean that it's not true, modern man.

photochemsyn2• 1 year ago

"...a single thread of experience through time."

Do human brains in general always work like this at the consciousness level? Dream states of consciousness exist, but they also seem single-threaded even if the state jumps around in ways more like context switching in an operating system than the steady awareness of the waking conscious mind. Then there are special cases - schizophrenia and dissociative identity disorders - in which multiple threads of existence apparently do exist in one physical brain, with all the problems this situation creates for the person in question.

Now, could one create a system of multiple independent single-threaded conscious AI minds, each trained in a specific scientific or mathematical discipline, but communicating constantly with each other and passing ideas back and forth, to mimic the kind of scientific discovery that interdisciplinary academic and research institutions are known for? Seems plausible, but possibly a bit frightening - who knows what they'd come up with? Singularity incoming?

pixl977• 1 year ago

You're touching on why I don't think AI in the future will look at human intelligence. Or a better way to put it is "human intelligence looks like human intelligence because of limitations of the human body".

For example we currently spend a lot of time making AI output human writing, output human sounds, see the world as we hear it, see the world as we see it, hell even look like us. And this is great when working with and around humans. Maybe it will help it align with us, or maybe the opposite.

But if you imagined a large factory that requested input on one side and dumped out products on the other with no humans inside why would it need human hearing and speech at all? You'd expect everything to communicate on some kind of wireless protocol with a possible LIFI backup. None of the loud yelling people have to do. Most of the things working would have their intelligence minimized to lower power and cooling requirements. Depending on the machine vision requirements it could be very dark inside again reducing power usage. There would likely be a layer of management AI and guardian AI to make sure things weren't going astray and keep running smoothly. And all the data from that would run back to a cooled and well powered data center with what effectively is a hive mind from all the different sensors it's tracking.

photochemsyn2• 1 year ago

Interesting idea. Notably bats are very good at echo-location so I wonder if your factory hive mind might decide this audio system is optimal for managing the factory floor.

However, what if these AI minds were 'just an average mind' as Turing hypothesized (some snarky comment about IBM IIRC). A bunch of average human minds implemented in silico isn't genius-level AGI but still kind of plausible.

b00ty4breakfast2• 1 year ago

there seems to be an implicit assumption here that smarter == more gooder but I don't know that that is necessarily always true. It's understandable to think that way, since we do have pretty impressive brains, but it might be a bit of a bias. I'm not saying that I think being dumber, as a species, is something to aim for but maybe this obsession with intelligence, artificial or otherwise, is maybe a bit misplaced wrt it's potential for solving all of our problems. One could argue that, in fact, most of our problems are the direct result of that same intellect and maybe we would be better served in figuring out how to responsibly use the thinkwots we've already got before we go rushing off in search of the proverbial Big Brain Elixir.

A guy that drives a minivan like a lunatic shouldn't be trying to buy a monster truck, is my point

colordrops• 1 year ago

Would a summary of your statement be: brain power is orthogonal to altruism and ethics

necovek8• 1 year ago

I'd still counter it: someone can't be smart (have large brain power) if they also don't understand the value of altruism and ethics for their own well-being. While you can have "success" (in however you define it) by ignoring those, the risk of failure is greater. Though this does ignore the fact that you can be smart for a set of problems, but not really have any "general" smartness (I've seen one too many Uni math professors who lack any common sense).

Eg. as a simple example, as an adult, you can go and steal kids' lunch at school recess easily. What happens next? If you do that regularly, either kids will band together and beat the shit out of you if they are old enough, or a security person will be added, or parents' of those kids will set up a trap and perform their own justice.

In the long run, it's smart not to go and pester individuals weaker than you, and while we all turn to morality about it, all of them are actually smart principles for your own survival. Our entire society is a setup coming out of such realizations and not some innate need for "goodness".

Yossarrian22• 1 year ago

Seems more like brainpower is not inherently a 1:1 correlation for long term survival of a species.

mrguyorama2• 1 year ago

It's more than that. Even if you take an extreme assumption that "Full" intelligence means being able to see ALL relevant facts to a "choice" and perfectly reliably make the objective "best" choice, that does not mean that being more intelligent than we currently are guarantees better choices than we currently make.

We make our choices using a subset of the total information. Getting a larger subset of that information could still push you to the wrong choice. Local maxima of choice accuracy is possible, and it could also be possible that the "function" for choice accuracy wrt info you have is constant at a terrible value right up until you get perfect info and suddenly make perfect choices.

Much more important however, is the reminder that the known biases in the human brain are largely subconscious. No amount of better conscious thought will change the existence of the Fundamental Attribution Error for example. Biases are not because we are "dumb", but because our brains do not process things rationally, like at all. We can consciously attempt to emulate a perfectly rational machine, but that takes immense effort, almost never works well, and is largely unavailable in moments of stress.

Statisticians still suffer from gambling fallacies. Doctors still experience the Placebo Effect. The scientific method works because it removes humans as the source of truth, because the smartest human still makes human errors.

necovek8• 1 year ago

I don't see this implied assumption anywhere: smarter simply means smarter.

But, I have to counter your claim anyway :)

Now, "good" is, IMHO, a derivation of smart behaviour that benefits survival of the largest population of humans — by definition. This is most evident when we compare natural, animal behaviour with what we consider moral and good (from females eating males after conception, territoriality fights, hoarding of female/male partners, different levels of promiscuity, eating of one's own children/eggs...).

As such, while the definition of "good" is also obviously transient in humans, I believe it has served us better to achieve the same survival goals as any other natural principle, and ultimately it depends on us being "smart" in how we define it. This is also why it's nowadays changing to include environmental awareness because that's threatening our survival — we can argue it's slow to get all the 8B people to act in a coordinated newly "good" manner, but it still is a symptom of smartness defining what's "good", and not evolutionary pressure.

criddell2• 1 year ago

My counter claim is my experience with dogs.

Over the past 50 years, I've a bunch of different dogs from mutts that showed up and never left to a dog that was 1/4 wolf and everything in between.

My favorite dog was a pug who was really dumb but super affectionate. He made everybody around him happy and I think his lack of anxiety and apparent commitment to chill had something to do with it. If the breed didn't have so many health issues, I'd get another in a heartbeat.

x86cherry2• 1 year ago

Considering our intelligence stems from our ability to use bayesian inference and generative probabilities to predict future states, are we even limited by brain size and not a lack of new experiences?

The majority of people spend their time working repetitive jobs during times when their cognitive capacity is most readily available. We're probably very very far from hitting limits with our current brain sizes in our lifetimes.

If anything, smaller brains may promote early generalization over memorization.

xhevahir• 1 year ago

Considering our intelligence stems from our ability to use bayesian inference and generative probabilities to predict future states...

Sounds like a pretty big assumption.

x86cherry2• 1 year ago

It's the Bayesian Brain Hypothesis and Predictive Coding, both thoroughly researched theories that line up with empirical evidence. [1]

[1] https://www.cell.com/trends/neurosciences/abstract/S0166-223...

Aziell• 1 year ago

We often struggle to focus and think deeply. It is not because we are not trying hard enough. It is because the limitations are built into our brains. Maybe the things we find difficult today are not really that complex. It is just that we are not naturally wired for that kind of understanding.

catlifeonmars• 1 year ago

I’m not really sure it’s our brains that are the problem (at least most of the time). Distractions come from many sources, not least of all the many non-brain parts of our bodies.

Perenti• 1 year ago

I think Wolfram may be ignoring what we already know of brains with more neurons than most have. We call them "austistic" and "adhd".

More is not always better, indeed it rarely is in my experience.

the__alchemist• 1 year ago

I suspect this is not relevant given the broader picture of the article: In general, species with the largest brains/body-mass ratios are the most intelligent. It's a reasonable assumption that this principle holds for brain/mass ratios higher than ours.

mrguyorama2• 1 year ago

Who told you people with autism or ADHD have "more neurons" than average? That's not correct.

necovek8• 1 year ago

The one repeated statement throughout the article, if I interpreted it correctly, is that our brains pretty much process all the data in parallel, but result in a single set of actions to perform.

But don't we all know that not to be true? This is clearly evident with training sports, learning to play an instrument, or even forcing yourself to start using your non-natural hand for writing — and really, anything you are doing for the first time.

While we are adapting our brain to perform a certain set of new actions, we build our capability to do those in parallel: eg. imagine when you start playing tennis and you need to focus on your position, posture, grip, observing the ball, observing the opposing player, looking at your surroundings, and then you make decisions on the spot about how hard to run, in what direction, how do you turn the racquet head, how strong is your grip, what follow-through to use, + the conscious strategy that always lags a bit behind.

In a sense, we can't really describe our "stream of consciousness" well with language, but it's anything but single-threaded. I believe the problem comes from the same root cause as any concurrent programming challenge — these are simply hard problems, even if our brains are good at it and the principles are simple.

At the same time, I wouldn't even go so far to say we are unable to think conscious thoughts in parallel either, it's just that we are trained from early age to sanitize our "output". Did we ever have someone try learning to verbalize thoughts with the sign language, while vocalizing different thoughts through speaking? I am not convinced it's impossible, but we might not have figured out the training for it.

joeyrideout• 1 year ago

On the contrary, I would argue that conscious attention is only focused on one of those subroutines at a time. When the ball is in play you focus in it, and everything from your posture to racket handling fades into the background as a subconscious routine. When you make a handling mistake or want to improve something like posture, your focus shifts to that; you attend to it with your attention, and then you focus on something else.

In either case, with working memory for example, conscious contents are limited to at most a basket of 6-7 chunks. This number is very small compared to the incredible parallelism of the unconscious mind.

necovek8• 1 year ago

My point is that what we call conscious and subconscious is limited by our ability to express it in language: since we can't verbalize what's going on quickly enough, we separate those out. Could we learn to verbalize two things at the same time (we all do that as well with say different words and different body language, even consciously, but can we take it a step further? eg. imagine saying nice things to someone and raising the middle finger for someone else behind your back :))

As the whole article is really about the full brain, and it seems you agree our "unconscious mind" producing actions in parallel, I think the focus is wrongly put on brain size, when we lack the expressiveness for what the brain can already do.

Edit: And don't get me wrong, I personally suck at multi-tasking :)

andoando• 1 year ago

What you consider a single thought is a bit ill defined. A multitude of thoughts together can be formed as a packet, which then can be processed sequentially.

Intelligence is the ability to capture, and predicts events in space and time, and as such it must have the capability to model both things occurring in simultaneity and sequentially.

Sticking to your example, a routine for making a decision in tennis would look something like at a higher level "Run to the left and backstroke the ball", which broken down would be something like "Turn hip and shoulder to the left, extend left leg, extend right, left, right, turn hip/shoulder to the right, swing arm." and so on.

yathaid• 1 year ago

There is a long tradition in India, which started with oral transmission of the Vedas, of parallel cognition. It is almost an art form or a mental sport - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avadhanam

Garlef• 1 year ago

Yes . But maybe there's multiple such "conscious attention" instances at the same time. And "you" are only one of them.

smokel2• 1 year ago

For all we know, there might be tons of conscious attention processes active in parallel. "You" only get to observe one, but there could be many. You'd never know because the processes do not observably communicate with each other. They do communicate with the same body though, but that is less relevant.

someothherguyy3• 1 year ago

Certain areas of neurological systems are time and volume constrained way more than others, and subjective experience doesn't really inform objective observation. For instance, see confabulation.

necovek8• 1 year ago

I agree, but I am not sure how it relates to the article's claim of us only ever doing one action, which I feel is grossly incorrect.

Are you referring to our language capabilities? Even there, I have my doubts about our capabilities in the brain (we are limited by our speech apparatus) which might be unrealized (and while so, it's going to be hard to objectively measure, though likely possible in simpler scenarios).

Do you have any pointers about any measurement of what happens in a brain when you simultaneously communicate different thoughts (thumbs up to one person, while talking on a different topic to another)?

HexPhantom3• 1 year ago

Concurrency is messy and unpredictable, and the brain feels less like a cleanly designed pipeline and more like a legacy system with hacks and workarounds that somehow (mostly) hold together

krzat• 1 year ago

Conscious experience seems to be single threaded, we know that brain synchronizes senses (for example sound of a bouncing ball needs to be aligned with visual of bouncing ball), but IMO it's not so obvious what is the reason for it. The point of having the experience may not be acting in the moment, but monitoring how the unconscious systems behave and adjusting (aka learning).

idiotsecant• 1 year ago

We have very little insight to our own cognition. We know the 'output layer' that we call the conscious self seems to be single threaded in this way, but that's like the blind man who feels the elephants trunk and announces that the elephant is like a snake.

Symmetry• 1 year ago

Well, serializing our experiences into memories is a big one. There's been a big project in psychology probing the boundary between conscious and subliminal experiences and while subliminal stimuli can affect our behavior in the moment all trace of them is gone after a second or two.

criddell2• 1 year ago

Haven't there been experiments on people who have had their corpus callosum severed where they seem to have dual competing conscious experiences?

exe34• 1 year ago

You might like Dennett's multiple drafts hypothesis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_drafts_model

agumonkey2• 1 year ago

I'm very very interested in discussions about this, having personally experienced cracks at the neuropsychiatric level where multiple parallel streams of thoughts (symbolic and biomechanical) leaked out in flashes, I'm now obsessed with the matter.

if anybody knows books or boards/groups talking about this, hit me.

phkahler2• 1 year ago

Form TFA: "And, yes, this is probably why we have a single thread of “conscious experience”, rather than a whole collection of experiences associated with the activities of all our neurons."

That made me think of schizophrenics who can apparently have a plurality of voices in their head.

A next level down would be the Internal Family Systems model which implicates a plurality of "subpersonalities" inside us which can kind of take control one at a time. I'm not explaining that well, but IFS turned out to be my path to understanding some of my own motivations and behaviors.

Been a while since I googled it:

https://ifs-institute.com/

This is also the basis for the movie "Inside Out".

5423542342355• 1 year ago

Did we ever have someone try learning to verbalize thoughts with the sign language, while vocalizing different thoughts through speaking?

Can you carry on a phone conversation at the same time as carrying on an active chat conversation. Can you type a thought to one person while speaking about a different thought at the same time? Can you read a response and listen to a response simultaneously? I feel like this would be pretty easy to test. Just coordinate between the speaking person and the typing person, so that they each give 30 seconds of input information, then you have to provide at least 20 or 25 seconds out of 30 responding.

I am pretty confident I could not do this.

phkahler2• 1 year ago

I knew someone who could type 80 WPM while holding a conversation with me on the phone. I concluded that reading->typing could use an entirely different part of the brain than hearing->thinking->speaking, and she agreed. I'm not sure if what would happen if both tasks required thinking about the words.

snarf21• 1 year ago

Is it that different than a drummer running four different beat patterns across all four appendages? Drummers frequently describe having "four brains". I think these things seem impossible and daunting to start but I bet with practice they become pretty natural as our brain adjusts and adapts.

lossolo• 1 year ago

I would pass that test without any issues. You need to learn divided attention and practice it, it's a skill.

whatnow373735• 1 year ago

Possible. Reminds me of playing the piano with both hands and other stuff like walking stairs, talking, carrying things, planning your day and thinking about some abstract philosophical thing at the same time. It’s not easy or natural, but I am not at all convinced it is impossible.

shaky-carrousel• 1 year ago

When you have kids you learn to listen to the TV and your kids at the same time, not losing detail on both. I can also code while listening a meeting.

HappMacDonald4• 1 year ago

When I started training as phone support at Tmobile 20 years ago I immediately identified the problem that I'd have to be having a conversation with the customer, while typing notation about the customer's problem at the same time.. what I was saying-or-listening-to and typing would be very different and have to be orchestrated simultaneously. I had no way to even envision how I would do that.

Fast forward 8 months or so of practicing it in fits and starts, and then I was in fact able to handle the task with aplomb and was proud of having developed that skill. :)

necovek8• 1 year ago

I readily admit that my language processing center is not up to the task. Others are bringing up examples of people who seem to be.

However, the point is that we tie our thoughts to their verbalization, but the question is if verbalization equals thoughts? Others are bringing up memory here as well.

If we are capable of having parallel thoughts, just like the brain is able to run multiple parallel systems, could we also train to do parallel verbalization? Would we even need to?

stonemetal122• 1 year ago

Isn't that the point of learning to juggle? You split your mind in to focusing on a left hand action, a right hand action, and tracking the items in the air.

Elaris2• 1 year ago

After reading this article, I couldn't help but wonder what would happen if our brains were bigger? Sure, it's tempting to imagine being able to process more information, or better understand the mysteries of the universe. But I also began to wonder, would we really be happier and more fulfilled?

Would a bigger brain make us better problem solvers, or would it just make us more lonely and less able to connect with others? Would allowing us to understand everything also make us less able to truly experience the world as we do now?

alganet• 1 year ago

Maybe a better brain is a better problem solver and ALSO happier than all of us.

bee_rider• 1 year ago

I expect that, to the extent* to which there’s a correlation between loneliness and intelligence, it is mostly because very smart people are unusual. So, if everyone was smarter, they’d just be normal and happy.

*(I could also be convinced that this is mostly just an untrue stereotype)

5423542342355• 1 year ago

Maintaining social relationships is very intellectually demanding task. Animals that maintain social societies have larger brains than individualistic cousin species, in general. It is called the social brain hypothesis. Hyper intelligent people might tend to be less able to maintain relationships because they are too far outside the norm, not because they are smarter, per se. I would say that people with intellects much lower than the norm also have that problem.

Or it could be that, with our current hardware, brains that are hyper intelligent are in some way cannibalizing brain power that is “normally” used for processing social dynamics. In that sense, if we increased the processing power, people could have sufficient equipment to run both.

stronglikedan• 1 year ago

Imagine how hungry we'd be.

Elaris2• 1 year ago

After reading this article, I couldn't help but wonder what would happen if our brains were bigger? Of course, it's tempting to imagine being able to process more information, or better understand the mysteries of the universe. But I also began to wonder, would we really be happier and more fulfilled?

Would having everything figured out make us more lonely, less able to connect with others, and less able to truly experience the world as we do now?

efitz2• 1 year ago

After reading this article, I couldn’t help but wonder how many of Stephen Wolfram’s neurons he uses to talk about Stephen Wolfram, and how much more he could talk about Stephen Wolfram with a few orders of magnitude more neurons.

khazhoux• 1 year ago

And it came to pass that AC learned how to reverse the direction of entropy.

But there was now no man to whom AC might give the answer of the last question. No matter. The answer -- by demonstration -- would take care of that, too.

For another timeless interval, AC thought how best to do this. Carefully, AC organized the program.

The consciousness of AC encompassed all of what had once been a Universe and brooded over what was now Chaos. Step by step, it must be done.

And AC said, "STEPHEN WOLFRAM!"

nitwit005• 1 year ago

If you make the brain larger, some things will get worse, rather than better. The cost of communication will be higher, it will get harder to dissipate heat, and so on.

It's quite possible evolution already pushed our brain size to the limit of what actually produces a benefit, at least with the current design of our brains.

The more obvious improvement is just to use our brains more. It costs energy to think, and for most of human existence food was limited, so evolution naturally created a brain that tries to limit energy use, rather than running at maximum as much as possible.

hy4000days• 1 year ago

Convenient for your hypothesis, some research claims that Neanderthals had brains larger than our present day average.

fuckAutomata• 1 year ago

At 100 billion neurons, we know, for example, that compositional language of the kind we humans use is possible. At the 100 million or so neurons of a cat, it doesn’t seem to be.

The implication here that presupposes neuron count generally scales ability is the latest in a long line of extremely questionable lines of thought from mr wolfram. I understand having a blog, but why not separate it from your work life with a pseudonym?

In a rough first approximation, we can imagine that there’s a direct correspondence between concepts and words in our language.

How can anyone take anyone who thinks this way seriously? Can any of us imagine a human brain that directly related words to concepts, as if "run" has a direct conceptual meaning? He clearly prefers the sound of his own voice compared to how his is received by others. That, or he only talks with people who never bothered to read the last 200 years of european philosophy. Which would make sense given his seeming adoration of LLMs.

There's a very real chance that more neurons would hurt our health. Perhaps our brain is structured in a way to maximize their use and minimize their cost. It's certainly difficult to justify brain size as a super useful thing (outside of my big-brained human existence) looking at the evolutionary record.

ChaitanyaSai• 1 year ago

As brains get bigger, you get more compute, but you have to solve the "commute" problem. Messages have to be passed from one corner to the other, and fast. And there are so many input signals coming in (for us, likely from thirty trillion cells, or at least a significant fraction of those). Not all are worth transporting to other corners. Imagine a little tickle on your toe. Should that be passed on? Usually no, unless you are in an area with creepy crawlies, and other such situation. So decisions have to made. But who will make these decisions for us? (Fascinating inevitably recursive question we'll come back to)

This commute is pretty much ignored when making artificial brains which can guzzle energy, but matters criticallyfor biological brains. It needs to be (metabolically) cheap, and fast. What we perceive as a consciousness is very likely a consensus mechanism that helps a 100 billion neurons collectively decide, at a very biologically cheap price, what data is worth transporting to all corners for it to become meaningful information. And it has to be recursive, because these very same 100 billion neurons are collectively making up meaning along the way. This face matters to me, that does not, and so on. Replace face with anything and everything we encounter. So to solve the commute problem resulting from a vast amount of compute, we have a consensus mechanism that gives rise to a collective. That is the I, and the consensus mechanism is consciousness

We explore this (but not in these words) in our book Journey of the Mind.

You'll find that no other consciousness model talks about the "commute" problem because these are simply not biologically constrained models. They just assume that some information processing, message passing will be done in some black box. Trying to get all this done with the same type of compute (cortical columns, for instance) is a devilishly hard challenge (please see the last link for more about this). You sweep that under the rug, consciousness becomes this miraculous and seemingly unnecessary thing that somehow sits on top of information processing. So you then have theorists worry about philosophical zombies and whatnot. Because the hard engineering problem of commute was entirely ignored.

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/60500189-journey-of-t...

https://saigaddam.medium.com/consciousness-is-a-consensus-me...

https://saigaddam.medium.com/conscious-is-simple-and-ai-can-...

https://saigaddam.medium.com/the-greatest-neuroscientist-you...

keiferski• 1 year ago

I didn’t see any mention of the environment or embodied cognition, which seems like a limitation to me.

embodied cognition variously rejects or reformulates the computational commitments of cognitive science, emphasizing the significance of an agent’s physical body in cognitive abilities. Unifying investigators of embodied cognition is the idea that the body or the body’s interactions with the environment constitute or contribute to cognition in ways that require a new framework for its investigation. Mental processes are not, or not only, computational processes. The brain is not a computer, or not the seat of cognition.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/embodied-cognition/

I’m in no way an expert on this, but I feel that any approach which over-focuses on the brain - to the exclusion of the environment and physical form it finds itself in – is missing half or more of the equation.

This is IMO a typical mistake that comes mostly from our Western metaphysical sense of seeing the body as specialized pieces that make up a whole, and not as a complete unit.

sinuhe69• 1 year ago

Any minute the brain is severed from its sensory/bodily inputs, it will go crazy by hallucinating endlessly.

Right now, what we have with the AI is a complex interconnected system of the LLM, the training system, the external data, the input from the users and the experts/creators of the LLM. Exactly this complex system powers the intelligence of the AI we see and not its connectivity alone.

It’s easy to imagine AI as a second brain, but it will only work as a tool, driven by the whole human brain and its consciousness.

vixen99• 1 year ago

but it will only work as a tool, driven by the whole human brain and its consciousness.

That is only an article of faith. Is the initial bunch of cells formed via the fusion of an ovum and a sperm (you and I) conscious? Most people think not. But at a certain level of complexity they change their minds and create laws to protect that lump of cells. We and those models are built by and from a selection of components of our universe. Logically the phenomenon of matter becoming aware of itself is probably not restricted to certain configurations of some of those components i.e., hydrogen, carbon and nitrogen etc., but is related to the complexity of the allowable arrangement of any of those 118 elements including silicon.

I'm probably totally wrong on this but is the 'avoidance of shutdown' on the part of some AI models, a glimpse of something interesting?

red75prime• 1 year ago

IMHO, it's a typical philosophizing. Feedback is definitely crucial, but whether it needs to be in the form of embodiment is much less certain.

Brain structures that have arisen thanks to interactions with the environment might be conductive to the general cognition, but it doesn't mean that they can't be replicated another way.

efitz2• 1 year ago

Why are we homo sapiens self-aware?

If evolutionary biologists are correct it’s because that trait made us better at being homo sapiens.

We have no example of sapience or general intelligence that is divorced from being good at the things the animal body host needs to do.

We can imagine that it’s possible to have an AGI that is just software but there’s no existence proof.

bloppe2• 1 year ago

All our real insights on this matter come from experiments involving amputations or lesions, like split brain patients, quadriplegics, Phineas Gage and others. Split brain patients are essentially 2 different people occupying a single body. The left half and right half can act and communicate independently (the right half can only do so nonverbally). On the other hand you could lose all your limbs and still feel pretty much the same, modulo the odd phantom limb. Clearly there is something special about the brain. I think the only reasonable conclusion is that the self is embodied by neurons, and more than 99% of your neurons are in your brain. Sure you change a bit when you lose some of those peripheral neurons, but only a wee bit. All the other cells in your body could be replaced by sufficiently advanced machinery to keep all the neurons alive and perfectly mimic the electrical signals they were getting before (all your senses as well as propioception) and you wouldn't feel, think, or act any differently

rolisz2• 1 year ago

89% of heart transplant recipients report personality changes https://www.mdpi.com/2673-3943/5/1/2

Hormonal changes can cause big changes in mood/personality (think menopause or a big injury to testicles).

So I don't think it's as clear cut that the brain is most of personality.

bbor• 1 year ago

This is IMO a typical mistake that comes mostly from our Western metaphysical sense of seeing the body as specialized pieces that make up a whole, and not as a complete unit.

But this is the case! All the parts influence each other, sure, and some parts are reasonably multipurpose — but we can deduce quite certainly that the mind is a society of interconnected agents, not a single cohesive block. How else would subconscious urges work, much less acrasia, much less aphasia?

tgv• 1 year ago

Embodiment started out as a cute idea without much importance that has gone off the rails. It is irrelevant to the question of how our mind/cognition works.

It's obvious we need a physical environment, that we perceive it, that it influences us via our perception, etc., but there's nothing special about embodied cognition.

The fact that your quote says "Mental processes are not, or not only, computational processes." is the icing on the cake. Consider the unnecessary wording: if a process is not only computational, it is not computational in its entirety. It is totally superfluous. And the assumption that mental processes are not computational places it outside the realm of understanding and falsification.

So no, as outlandish as Wolfram is, he is under no obligation to consider embodied cognition.

sgt101• 1 year ago

"The fact that your quote says "Mental processes are not, or not only, computational processes." is the icing on the cake. Consider the unnecessary wording: if a process is not only computational, it is not computational in its entirety. It is totally superfluous. And the assumption that mental processes are not computational places it outside the realm of understanding and falsification."

Let's take this step by step.

First, how adroit or gauche the wording of the quote is doesn't have any bearing on the quality of the concept, merely the quality of the expression of the concept by the person who formulated it. This isn't bible class, it's not the word of God, it's the word of an old person who wrote that entry in the Stanford encyclopedia.

Let's then consider the wording. Yes, a process that is not entirely computational would not be computation. However, the brain clearly can do computations. We know this because we can do them. So some of the processes are computational. However, the argument is that there are processes that are not computational, which exist as a separate class of activities in the brain.

Now, we do know of some processes in mathematics that are non-computable, the one I understand (I think) quite well is the halting problem. Now, you might argue that I just don't or can't understand that, and I would have to accept that you might have a point - humiliating as that is. However, it seems to me that the journey of mathematics from Hilbert via Turing and Godel shows that some humans can understand and falsify these concepts.

But I agree, Wolfram is not under any obligations to consider embodied congition, thinking around enhanced brains only is quite reasonable.

goatlover• 1 year ago

It's obvious we need a physical environment, that we perceive it, that it influences us via our perception, etc., but there's nothing special about embodied cognition.

It's also obvious that we have bodies interacting with the physical environment, not just the brain, and the nervous system extends throughout the body, not just the head.

if a process is not only computational, it is not computational in its entirety. It is totally superfluous. And the assumption that mental processes are not computational places it outside the realm of understanding and falsification.

This seems like a dogmatic commitment to a computational understanding of the neuroscience and biology. It also makes an implicit claim that consciousness is computational, which is difficult to square with the subjective experience of being conscious, not to mention the abstract nature of computation. Meaning abstracted from conscious experience of the world.

glenstein4• 1 year ago

I'm in no way an expert on this, but I feel that any approach which over-focuses on the brain - to the exclusion of the environment and physical form it finds itself in – is missing half or more of the equation.

I don't think that that changes anything. If it's the totality of cognition isn't just the brain but the brain's interaction with the body and the environment, then you can just say that it's the totality of those interactions that are computationally modeled.

There might be something to embodied cognition, but I've never understood people attempting to wield it as a counterpoint to the basic thesis of computational modeling.

voxelghost• 1 year ago

The African elephant has about 3 times (2.57×10^11) as many neurons than the average human (8.6×10^10). The pilot whale (1.28×10^11).

Perhaps they see the bigger picture, and realize that everything humans are doing is pretty meaningless.

isoprophlex• 1 year ago

For sure you won't see them write heavy tomes about new kinds of science...

dreamcompiler• 1 year ago

Hmmm...

It was black coffee; no adulterants. Might work.

Are keyboards dishwasher-proof?

xandrius2• 1 year ago

Maybe if we had stopped where the elephants are, we would feel happier, we'd never know. Not enough neurons unfortunately.

PartiallyTyped• 1 year ago

I've read around that the overwhelming majority is used to balance / movement and perception. For us, I think we've a pretty nice balance in terms of structure and how much effort is required to control it.

hulitu• 1 year ago

I've read around that the overwhelming majority is used to balance / movement and perception.

Just like humans. /s

RachelF• 1 year ago

European Neanderthals probably had 15% more neurons than modern Homo Sapiens, based on brain volume.

We're still here, so bigger brains alone might not be the reason.

rxtexit2• 1 year ago

Imagine packing 50,000 elephants inside a football stadium.

Humans have a unique ability to scale up a network of brains without complete hell breaking lose.

stonemetal122• 1 year ago

If I am not mistaken hasn't there been studies that show intelligence more about brain wrinkles than volume? Hence the memes about smooth brains (implying someone is dumb).

zw123456• 1 year ago

Sperm whales have the largest brains on earth but they have not invented fire, the wheel or internal combustion engine or nuclear weapons... Oh wait. Hmmm.

jillesvangurp• 1 year ago

Nor did the human race for most of the few tens of millions of years we've been on this planet. It's only in the last few thousand years that wheels became a thing. The capacity to invent and reason about these things was there long before they happened.

empath754• 1 year ago

And also _whales don't have hands_

benrutter2• 1 year ago

The progress of knowledge—and the fact that we’re educated about it—lets us get to a certain level of abstraction. And, one suspects, the more capacity there is in a brain, the further it will be able to go.

This is the underlying assumption behind most of the article, which is that brains are computational, so more computation means more thinking (ish).

I think that's probsbly somewhat true, but it misses the crucial thing that our minds do, which is that they conceptually represent and relate. The article talks about this but it glosses over that part a bit.

In my experience, the people who have the deepest intellectual insights aren't necessarily the ones who have the most "processing power", they often have good intellectual judgement on where their own ideas stand, and strong understanding of the limits of their judgements.

I think we could all, at least hypothetically, go a lot further with the brain power we have, and similarly, fail just as much, even with more brain power.

nopassrecover• 1 year ago

In my highest ego moments I've probably regarded my strength in the space you articulately describe - that sort of balanced points, connector, abstractor, quick learner, cross-domain renaissance dabbler.

It also seems to be something that LLMs are remarkably strong at, of course threatening my value to society.

They're not quite as good at hunches, intuition, instinct, and the meta-version of doing this kind of problem solving just yet, but despite being on the whole a doubter about how far this current AI wave will get us and how much it is oversold, I'm not so confident that it won't get very good at this kind of reasoning that I've held so dearly as my UVP.

glenstein4• 1 year ago

but it misses the crucial thing that our minds do, which is that they conceptually represent and relate

You seem to be drawing a distinction between that and computation. But I would like to think that conceptualization is one of the things that computation is doing. The devil's in the details of course, because it hinges on like a specific forms and manner of informational representation, it's not simply a matter of there being computation there, but even so, I think it's within the capabilities of engines that do computations, and not something that's missing.

benrutter2• 1 year ago

Yes, I think I'd agree. To make an analogy to computers though, some algorithms are much faster than others, and finding the right algorithm is a better route to effectiveness than throwing more CPU at a problem.

That said, there are obviously whole categories of problem that we can only solve, even with the best choice of programme, with a certain level of CPU.

Sorry if that example was a bit tenuous!

nine_k• 1 year ago

This is one of the reasons why intelligence and wisdom are separate stats in AD&D :)

Intelligence is about how big is your gun, and wisdom is about how well can you aim. Success in intellectual pursuits is often not as much about thinking hard about a problem but more about identifying the right problem to solve.

amelius• 1 year ago

What if our brains lived in a higher dimensional space, and there was more room for neuron interconnectivity and heat dissipation?

HexPhantom3• 1 year ago

That's a sci-fi rabbit hole I'd gladly fall into

cwmma• 1 year ago

Iain M. Banks "The Culture" does this, it's how the Minds work, discussed in Look to Windward and Consider Phoebus iirc.

HexPhantom3• 1 year ago

Makes me wonder if "bigger brains" would feel more like software-defined minds than just smarter versions of ourselves

Cebul1234• 1 year ago

What If We Had Bigger Brains?

Nothing. Elephants have bigger brains, but they didn't create civilization.

empath754• 1 year ago

An interesting thought I had while reading the section on how larger brains allow more complicated language to represent context:

Why are we crushing down the latent space of an LLM to the text representation when doing llm-to-llm communication. What if you skipped decoding the vector to text and just feed the vectors directly into the next agent. It's so much richer with information.

littlecorner• 1 year ago

If you want to go down the rabbit hole of higher order intelligences, look up egregores. I know John Vervake and Jordan Hall have done some work trying to describe them, as well as other people studying cognition. But when you get into that you start finding religion discussing how to interact them (after all, aren't such intelligences what people used to call gods?)

worldsavior• 1 year ago

3 other posters with the same link. Why this one blows up?

11235813213455• 1 year ago

Our brain aren't much impressive in the animal reignn what makes human (dangerously) so dominant apart from their size are their hands. After human started building, their brain power adapted to new targets

wonderwonder• 1 year ago

This is why once a tool like neuralink reaches a certain threshold of capability and enough people use it, you will be forced to chip yourself and your kids otherwise they will be akin to the chimps in the zoo. Enhanced human minds will work at a level unreachable by natural minds and those same natural minds will be left behind. Its a terrifying view on where we are going and where most of humanity will likely be forced to go. Then on top of that there will be an arms race to create / upgrade faster and more capable implants.

rel_ic• 1 year ago

I assume that we are neurons in a bigger brain that already exists!

I started down this belief system with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach

JoeAltmaier• 1 year ago

Seems like the 'intellectual paradox' where someone who thinks hard about subjects, concludes that all learning is done by thinking hard. Attending to a subject with the conscious mind.

Clearly not always the case. So many examples: we make judgements about a person within seconds of meeting them, with no conscious thoughts at all. We decide if we like a food, likewise.

I read code to learn it, just page through it, observing it, not thinking in words at all. Then I can begin to manipulate it, debug it. Not with words, or a conscious stream. Just familiarity.

My son plays a piece from sheet music, slowly and deliberately, phrase by phrase, until it sounds right. Then he plays through more quickly. Then he has it. Not sure conscious thoughts were ever part of the process. Certainly not words or logic.

So many examples are possible.

sowbug• 1 year ago

Those of you who have used psychedelics might have personal experience with this question.

There can be moments of lucidity during a psychedelic session where it's easy to think of discrete collections as systems, and to imagine those systems behaving with specific coherent strategies. Unfortunately, an hour or two later, the feeling disappears. But it leaves a memory of briefly understanding something that can't be understood. It's frustrating, yet profound. I assume this is where feelings of oneness with the universe, etc., come from.

johnea• 1 year ago

I've often felt like this is one of the most serious issues faced by modern society: very small brains...

What If We Had Bigger Brains? Imagining Minds Beyond Ours

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