5 ms·

Here's my understanding/interpretation - if I get any details wrong, I hope someone will correct me! Brains are very expensive and, for our body size, we have

Here's my understanding/interpretation - if I get any details wrong, I hope someone will correct me! Brains are very expensive and, for our body size, we have very large brains; evolution had to build a brain that could operate within the calorie constraints imposed by our ecological niche - presumably a hunter-gatherer niche. If you graph adult body volume relative to gestation time across the placental mammals, there's a good correlation, but humans are an anomaly; for our body volume we should take more than 9 months. So we are kind of born prematurely - the reason? So our heads can fit through the birth-canal. Significantly bigger brains would have likely entailed altering our walking gate, thus potentially sacrificing our ecological niche (and guaranteed source of those much needed calories!). Most of this was taken from Pinker ([0]). Bostrom ([1]) brings up another interesting point - anything smarter than us would have probably taken longer to evolve than us. So it might not be inaccurate to think of ourselves as the dumbest species that could build an interplanetary species. My suspicion is that things much smarter than us are very possible; my reasoning is, it just seems so strange to me that the peak of feasible intelligence just so happens to correspond with what can be fed by a hunter-gatherer diet and fit through a birth-canal which fits into the constraints of an upright primate. It seems more likely to me that we're a local optimum - we're probably close to the optimal design for something as smart as us, in our ecological niche. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_the_Mind_Works https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_the_Mind_Works [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superintelligence:_Paths,_Dangers,_Strategies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superintelligence:_Paths,_Dang...

YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
>> My suspicion is that things much smarter than us are very possible; my reasoning is, it just seems so strange to me that the peak of feasible intelligence just so happens to correspond with what can be fed by a hunter-gatherer diet and fit through a birth-canal which fits into the constraints of an upright primate. I think you're understimating the intelligence required to survive as a hunter-gatherer, individual or species, in a world that keeps wanting to kill you, where the number of things that want to make it easy for you to eat them is exactly 0 (not counting fruit, which is made to be eaten by birds, not humans) and the numer of things that want to eat you is ...very big. If you think about it, the amount of brainpower needed to survive as a primitive human in the savannah is exactly as much as required to develop modern technology. We got were we are today because our ancestors were smart enough to not be eaten by lions etc. Of course I'm not saying that smarter things than us aren't possible. There's an element of luck involved in evolution. Maybe we 're not the most powerful intelligence that could have evolved on Earth; but we're certainly the one that did.
tormeh 9y ago
Very interesting! I happen to know of some other problems: Heat and cross-brain communication time. Bird brains are much smarter than we are per weight and volume. Not a little bit, but a lot. I think part of the reason they can do that is that they have much better cooling because their heads are small. Having a bigger brain than we do means that it would need to have a lower activity level because of cooling constraints. There's also diminishing returns from size because the interconnects from one point in the brain to another have longer latency. One response to this is to fold the brain, as we do. Regardless, at some point adding more volume stops making sense.
- joshmarlow 9y ago
  I read once that bird brains (or some part of them) are more modular and consist of densely connected components - any idea/references about that? Also, this blog-post (and associated links) may interest you - http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=6116 http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=6116
erikpukinskis 9y ago
The question isn't whether something could exist that's smarter than every human The question is whether something could exist that's smarter than every group of humans is Humans are social, so the social group, and in fact groups of social groups are the highest form of intelligence on the planet. That's the bar to beat, not an individual Homo Sapiens in a observation room.

YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago

>> My suspicion is that things much smarter than us are very possible; my reasoning is, it just seems so strange to me that the peak of feasible intelligence just so happens to correspond with what can be fed by a hunter-gatherer diet and fit through a birth-canal which fits into the constraints of an upright primate. I think you're understimating the intelligence required to survive as a hunter-gatherer, individual or species, in a world that keeps wanting to kill you, where the number of things that want to make it easy for you to eat them is exactly 0 (not counting fruit, which is made to be eaten by birds, not humans) and the numer of things that want to eat you is ...very big. If you think about it, the amount of brainpower needed to survive as a primitive human in the savannah is exactly as much as required to develop modern technology. We got were we are today because our ancestors were smart enough to not be eaten by lions etc. Of course I'm not saying that smarter things than us aren't possible. There's an element of luck involved in evolution. Maybe we 're not the most powerful intelligence that could have evolved on Earth; but we're certainly the one that did.

tormeh 9y ago

Very interesting! I happen to know of some other problems: Heat and cross-brain communication time. Bird brains are much smarter than we are per weight and volume. Not a little bit, but a lot. I think part of the reason they can do that is that they have much better cooling because their heads are small. Having a bigger brain than we do means that it would need to have a lower activity level because of cooling constraints. There's also diminishing returns from size because the interconnects from one point in the brain to another have longer latency. One response to this is to fold the brain, as we do. Regardless, at some point adding more volume stops making sense.

joshmarlow 9y ago
I read once that bird brains (or some part of them) are more modular and consist of densely connected components - any idea/references about that? Also, this blog-post (and associated links) may interest you - http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=6116 http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=6116

erikpukinskis 9y ago

The question isn't whether something could exist that's smarter than every human The question is whether something could exist that's smarter than every group of humans is Humans are social, so the social group, and in fact groups of social groups are the highest form of intelligence on the planet. That's the bar to beat, not an individual Homo Sapiens in a observation room.