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I think parrots, crows and Octopus have demonstrated a small brain can still create and execute intelligent ideas. YMMV
by SCAQTony 3y ago
I think parrots, crows and Octopus have demonstrated a small brain can still create and execute intelligent ideas. YMMV
- pierat 3y agoTo be fair, I've seen large brained mammals exhibit (homo walmartus) completely inane and stupid behavior. I have a feeling many others here have also witnessed those actions in their natural environment.
- kristopolous 3y agoIt honestly astonishes me that some people still think "more brain = more smart" or a similar reductionist belief. It's so Victorian - like believing human flight will happen by furtively flapping ones arms connected to giant canvas wings.
- scythe 3y agoI mean, that would be possible, if our shoulder muscles were about ten times as strong as they are, and we built strong enough wings (about ten meters long!). But what's the analogous component for the shoulder muscles in operating a brain?
- kristopolous 3y agoThe point was that systems are multi-faceted, complicated, nuanced, and work by mechanisms and principles that are not obvious. Experts have a really hard time nailing down a working definition of intelligence to begin with, even when given thousands of pages to describe it - the idea that such an elusive thing is simply, directly correlated to the size of an object, is frankly, fairly unbelievable. It used to be used all the time. For instance, to defend the idea that women and asians weren't as intelligent as anglo saxons because they were smaller in stature. There's plenty of other ludicrous nonsense claims that were made based on this supposed principle. We all agree that the conclusions are nonsense but somehow we hold on to the premise.
- SamReidHughes 3y agoWhat is unbelievable is your theory of vestigial brain matter, which you just made up.
- kristopolous 3y agoTotal nonsense. I'm not going to reply to your appeals to group people into "races" and then do phrenology on them to assign them intelligence numbers on this thread either. Have a good evening.
- SamReidHughes 3y ago[flagged]
- dang 3y agoSam....please don't. We need users like you to stick to the standard so others will follow the example. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- kristopolous 3y agoI'm not upset. I just value my time more than your opinions.
- ip26 3y agoAnd yet here we are scaling transformer models.
- kristopolous 3y agoby that logic, the SAGE computer from 1957, being the biggest computer ever built, should be the one to run it on.
- inglor_cz 3y agoThe difference is that in mammals, neurons are approximately the same size, so bigger brains tend to have more connections and exhibit more complexity. (To be sure, that is a correlation, not an iron law.) In computers, the basic building block, an individual transistor, has shrunk by orders of magnitude since 1957. If we, theoretically, built a computer of the size of the SAGE computer from contemporary M2 chips, it would be very computationally powerful indeed.
- kristopolous 3y agoCorrect. You can't use a single number to accurately measure something that takes more than a single number to express. It's reductionist and impossible. All kinds of animals are far better then us at specific core brain functions with way smaller brains. Mantis shrimps are way better at vision than we are and lyre birds are way better at vocalization. (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VjE0Kdfos4Y https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VjE0Kdfos4Y) You can find all kinds of vastly superior aspects of systems in the animal world. Ants, termites and bees for instance, are probably better at socializing. Some supercolonies span thousands of miles with hundreds of millions of ants - rivaling the size of human countries. Ants, 0.25mg brains. So brain size doesn't seem that important in organizing or building complex networks. We're certainly not 5.2 million times better (which is our difference in brain mass) Ants even "farm" with things like aphids and keep those colonies alive. Look it up. It's fascinating what they can do with 0.25mg. We're the only animals that have built rocketships and computers - so there's certainly something there but it's fleeting and complicated. Reducing it to a single measurement is inherently inaccurate in the same way you cannot describe the material, color, shape and volume of 3 dimensional objects with 1 number. Brain size alone cannot be a complete or useful metric.
- SamReidHughes 3y agoBut they are right, and you are wrong. Brain volume is positively correlated with intelligence in humans. In other species, larger brains as a proportion of body size is a sign of selection pressure for intelligence, in ways beyond just size.
- kristopolous 3y agoBy intelligence you are probably talking about IQ, and the studies you are talking about probably didn't normalize for things like childhood nutrition availability or economic class background - which lead to both poorer test performance AND smaller sizes and thus smaller brains. You could use any correlated metric then and make the same claim - people with more expensive shoes performed better - or bigger feet. Demonstrating that people who grew up impoverished performed poorer than people who grew up wealthy, by using the proxy of the mass of their heads, isn't very convincing.
- SamReidHughes 3y agoSo you're pretending there's a problem with the research instead of there actually being problems. Have fun playing make believe.
- kristopolous 3y agoNo. You're pretending that 100 year old research from racist eugenicists is valid science. Nutrition correlation? Yes. Access to education? Yes. Low stress from high income and fewer cognitive loads? Yes. These all lead to taller adults that then have "bigger brains" ... and that's it - that's why it's only detectable at all (and that's questionable depending on the metric), at very large population sizes, if any. It's not like people who win the Nobel Prize and Fields Medals are 8 feet tall giants. We also don't see someone that's say 5'0" and 90 lbs and think "they can't possibly have anything intelligent to say! Look at their stature!"
- SamReidHughes 3y ago
- inglor_cz 3y agoIf you reformulate the idea to "more complex brain = more smart", it actually seems to be close to what we observe in mammals. Now birds and octopodes etc. are a completely different story.
- concordDance 3y agoWhy else have humans evolved such giant brains that it puts both mother and baby at serious risk and consumes huge amounts of energy? There's also correlations between brain size and various intelligence metrics, which, while certainly not definitive, is still strong evidence. Of course it's not just a simple matter of size, particularly across species (e.g. a blue whale isn't smarter than a human). But it helps/enables.
- rramadass 3y agoSee also Decreases in Brain Size and Encephalization in Anatomically Modern Humans - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36833133 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36833133
- rramadass 3y agoYou will like this : https://karger.com/bbe/article/96/2/64/821534/Decreases-in-Brain-Size-and-Encephalization-in https://karger.com/bbe/article/96/2/64/821534/Decreases-in-B...
- gerdesj 3y agoA blue whale's brain weighs in at around 15lbs. Mine is roughly 3.3lbs. I suspect size isn't everything. You are unlikely to receive a response from a blue whale. Can you imagine trying to type on a keyboard with As you say, corvids, octopi and others have recently been interacted with in such a way as to be shown to demonstrate unexpectedly complex behaviour. Brain size doesn't seem to be quite as important as you might think. Note my brain is about a fifth the size of a blue whale's brain. Now I am absolutely useless at living within the sea and I have no idea how complicated it is but I suspect that based on our relative brain size, that it can be very complicated compared to what we land lubbers get up to. Evolution doesn't leave rubbish lying around unless it does not impair things.
- localplume 3y ago[dead]
- BurningFrog 3y agoI think most of the brain manages the physical body. This is why it's size is roughly proportional to the body weight. I don'y know how much of the brain is used for "thinking", and I suspect science doesn't either.
- pdonis 3y agoI don't think it's quite that bad. I don't have my copy of Richard Dawkins' The Ancestor's Tale handy, but I remember it discusses research into the relationship between brain size and body size. The two key findings that I remember are: (1) The scaling law. One might think brain size should scale as body size, if the key is simply weight, or number of neurons; or one might think brain size should scale as the 2/3 power of body size, if one takes into account the square-cube law. The research Dawkins describes found that the actual scaling was in between the two: brain size generally scales as the 3/4 power of body size. (2) Differences between groupings of animals. This basically affects the constant that multiplies (body size to the 3/4 power) in the equation for expected brain size. IIRC primates have the largest constant, cetaceans have the second largest, but octopuses and squids also have a fairly high constant. I don't remember seeing any data on corvids.
- Legend2440 3y agoI'd say that "intelligent or not" isn't a binary threshold. Every form of life shows varying amounts of intelligence - even slime molds can solve mazes. I think the whole discussion around intelligence suffers from a lack of clear definitions. And people often tie it to other ideas like consciousness or moral personhood, which only muddies the water further.
- QuantumG 3y agoSize of the neurons matter, but ultimately we don't know enough about biological cognition to say anything about existing animals, let alone long extinct ones.