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What If We Had Bigger Brains? Imagining Minds Beyond Ours

• mrfinn 1y ago
  we would be elephants or whales? (sorry couldn't resist)
  • kridsdale3 1y 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 1y ago
      About as well as a beached whale, I'd expect.
• ednite 1y 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.
  • postalrat 1y ago
    The future that we don't understand is already all around us. We just don't understand it.
    • aspenmayer 1y ago
      Is the future in the room with us right now?
      • postalrat 1y ago
        It is the room! And everything in it.
        • aspenmayer 1y ago
          This house has people in it! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_House_Has_People_in_It https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_House_Has_People_in_It Alan Resnick seems to be of a similar mind as I am, and perhaps also as you? My favorite of his is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_Forever_as_You_Are_Now_with_Alan_Resnick https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_Forever_as_You_Are_Now_wi...
  • NoMoreNicksLeft 1y 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.
    • schmidtleonard 1y 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.
    • BriggyDwiggs42 1y 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.
  • asdff 1y 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.
    • JumpCrisscross 1y 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.
      • asdff 1y ago
        That is a little bit of an appeal to precedent I think. Networked computers don't spit their raw output at eachother today because so far, all network protocols were written by humans using these abstracted languages. In the future we have to expect otherwise as we drop the human out of the pipeline and seek the efficiencies that come from that. One might ask why the cells in your body don't signal via python code and instead use signalling mechanisms like concentrations of sodium ion within the neuron to turn your english language idea of "move arm" into an actual movement of the arm.
        • JumpCrisscross 1y ago
          > One might ask why the cells in your body don't signal via python code and instead use signalling mechanisms Right. They don't just make their membranes chemically transparent. Same reason: security, i.e. the varied motivations of things outside the cell compared to within it.
          • asdff 1y ago
            I don't think using a certain language is more secure than just writing that same function call in some other language. Security in compute comes from priviledged access from some agents and blacklisting others. The language doesn't matter for that. It can be a python command, it can be a tcp packet, it can be a voltage differential, the actual "language" used is irrelevant. All I am arguing is that languages and paradigms written in a way to make sense for our english speaking monkey brain is perhaps not the most efficient way to do things once we remove the constraint of having an english speaking monkey brain being the software architect.
  • schmidtleonard 1y 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.
    • TheOtherHobbes 1y 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.
      • BriggyDwiggs42 1y ago
        I seriously doubt it, honestly, since humans have anatomical limitations keeping their heads from getting bigger quickly. We have to be able to fit through the birth canal.
        • tbrownaw 1y ago
          > We have to be able to fit through the birth canal. Or at least we used to, before the c-section was invented.
          • BriggyDwiggs42 1y ago
            Indeed, but it hasn’t been around for long enough. We might evolve into birth by c-section, if we assume that humans won’t alter themselves dramatically by technological means over hundreds of thousands of years.
  • relaxing 1y 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?
    • ednite 1y 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 1y ago
    Four words into your post and I'm confident it's ChatGPT slop. Am I wrong?
  • bdbenton5255 1y 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 1y 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.
      • gchamonlive 1y ago
        The body also has memory and instinct. It's non-hierarchical, although we like to think that the mind dominates or governs the body. It's not that it's more or less than predicting, it's a different activity. Humans also think with all their senses. It'd be more or less like having a modal-less or all-modal LLM. Not sure this is even possible with the current way we model these networks.
      • michaelhoney 1y ago
        And not just words. There is pretty compelling evidence that our sensory perception is itself prediction, that the purpose of our sensory organs is not to deliver us 1:1 qualia representing the world, but more like error correction, updates on our predictions.
      • bluefirebrand 1y ago
        Maybe, but I don't think this is strictly how human intelligence works I think a key difference is that humans are capable of being inputs into our own system You could argue that any time humans do this, it is as a consequence of all of their past experiences and such. It is likely impossible to say for sure. The question of determinism vs non-determinism has been discussed for literal centuries I believe
• Permik 1y 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.
  • asdff 1y 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.
    • TZubiri 1y 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.
    • southernplaces7 1y ago
• nssnsjsjsjs 1y ago
  We have massively increased our brain by scaling out not up. Going from pop. 8M to 8Bn is a 1000x
  • loa_in_ 1y ago
    Hardly. What's the use if no single component of this brain can hold a complex enough idea?
    • staunton 1y ago
      How complex are the ideas held by a single neuron?
      • loa_in_ 1y ago
        There's so many barriers between individual humans. Neurons on the other hand are tightly intertwined.
    • NL807 1y 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.
      • LeifCarrotson 1y ago
        Look at that in the organizations - businesses, nonprofit, and governmental systems we build. No one person can build even a single modern pencil - as Friedman said, consider the iron mines where the steel was dug up to make the saws to cut the wood, and then realize you have to also get graphite, rubber, paints, dyes, glues, brass for the ferrule, and so on. Consider the enormous far greater complexity in a major software program - we break it down and communicate in tokens the size of Jira tickets until big corporations can write an operating system. A business of 1,000 employees is not 1,000 times as smart as a human, but by abstracting its aims into a bureacracy that combines those humans together, it can accomplish tasks that none of them could achieve on their own.
• s1mon 1y ago
  [flagged]
  • maxwell_smart 1y ago
    By age 17, he published 10 peer-reviewed manuscripts in quantum field theory and particle physics. At 19 he got his PhD in particle physics from Caltech. Age 21, youngest ever recipient of what they used to call the MacArthur "genius" grant. Then struck it rich founding a mathematical software company. So, to be fair, he's done ok for himself.
    • kristopolous 1y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease
    • layer8 1y ago
      That may explain why he has a huge ego, but doesn’t excuse it.
    • Uptrenda 1y ago
      Stephen lad, its a bit obvious, don't you think?
  • rxtexit 1y ago
    [flagged]
• zabzonk 1y 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 1y ago
    I believe it's the Revelation Space series of Alastair Reynolds novels that mention the Conjoiners.
    • zabzonk 1y 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 1y ago
    trivia: brain heatsinks also feature in Julian May's Pliocene Saga (in The Adversary IIRC) and A.A. Attanasio's Radix
  • stavros 1y ago
    Couldn't you just watercool brains? Isn't that how they're cooled already?
    • FeteCommuniste 1y ago
      Reminds me of how Aristotle thought that the brain’s purpose was to cool the blood.
      • zabzonk 1y ago
        You know this, but it just shows that geniuses like Aristotle can be completely wrong - most of our body is trying to cool the brain!
• relaxing 1y ago
  You gotta admire the dedication to shoehorning cellular automata into every discipline he encounters.
• bongoman42 1y 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.
  • pixl97 1y ago
    Yay for the intelligent robot armies with no fear of death!
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• Uptrenda 1y ago
  "can't run code inside our brains" lad... speak for yourself.
• codr7 1y 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 1y ago
    That’s pretty typical for Wolfram.
• sitkack 1y ago
  Completely ignores any sort of scaling in emotional intelligence. Bro just wants a DX4.
  • pixl97 1y 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 1y 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.
  • NL807 1y 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.
    • 542354234235 1y ago
      The original GPU vs CPU.
  • kristopolous 1y ago
    right, people claiming that measuring brain weight has something to do with some dubious intelligence metric is phrenology
    • bell-cot 1y 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrenology
  • 1y ago
• tylershuster 1y 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_compton 1y 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.
    • tylershuster 1y 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.
      • nathan_compton 1y ago
        That isn't my assertion. I actually think people in the past probably did not seriously subscribe to so-called supernatural explanations most of the time in their daily lives. Why I am saying is that its quite reasonable to take a bunch of incoherent, often contradictory and vague, accounts of spiritual experiences as not having much epistemological weight.
        • tylershuster 1y ago
          Then we disagree about the basic assumption. I do think that people throughout history have attributed many different things to the influence of spiritual entities. I’m just saying that It just was not a catch-all for unexplained circumstances. They may seem contradictory and vague to someone who denies the existence of spirits, but if you have the proper understanding of spirits as vast cosmic entities with minds far outside ours, that aren’t bound to the same physical and temporal rules as us, then people’s experiences make a lot of sense.
• photochemsyn 1y 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?
  • pixl97 1y 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.
    • photochemsyn 1y ago
• b00ty4breakfast 1y 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 1y ago
    Would a summary of your statement be: brain power is orthogonal to altruism and ethics
    • necovek 1y 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".
      • b00ty4breakfast 1y ago
• x86cherry 1y 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 1y 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.
    • x86cherry 1y 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/S0166-2236(04)00335-2 https://www.cell.com/trends/neurosciences/abstract/S0166-223...
      • suddenlybananas 1y ago
        It's a popular view but it's massively controversial and far from being a consensus view. See here for a good overview of some of the problems with it. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22545686/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22545686/ (You should be able to find the PDF easily on scihub or something)
• Aziell 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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.
  • mrguyorama 1y ago
    Who told you people with autism or ADHD have "more neurons" than average? That's not correct.
  • the__alchemist 1y 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.
• necovek 1y 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 1y 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.
    • necovek 1y ago
• stronglikedan 1y ago
  Imagine how hungry we'd be.
• Elaris 1y 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?
• Elaris 1y 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 1y ago
    Maybe a better brain is a better problem solver and ALSO happier than all of us.
  • bee_rider 1y 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)
  • 542354234235 1y 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.
• efitz 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 1y ago
    Convenient for your hypothesis, some research claims that Neanderthals had brains larger than our present day average.
• fuckAutomata 1y 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 1y 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-the-mind https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/60500189-journey-of-t... https://saigaddam.medium.com/consciousness-is-a-consensus-mechanism-2b399c9ec4b5 https://saigaddam.medium.com/consciousness-is-a-consensus-me... https://saigaddam.medium.com/conscious-is-simple-and-ai-can-have-it-d51dcec709e7 https://saigaddam.medium.com/conscious-is-simple-and-ai-can-... https://saigaddam.medium.com/the-greatest-neuroscientist-youve-never-heard-of-17c61b654a3e https://saigaddam.medium.com/the-greatest-neuroscientist-you...
• keiferski 1y 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/ 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 1y 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 1y 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?
• mickey475778 1y ago
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• sahil_sharma0 1y ago
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• voxelghost 1y 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 1y ago
    For sure you won't see them write heavy tomes about new kinds of science...
    • dreamcompiler 1y ago
      Hmmm... It was black coffee; no adulterants. Might work. Are keyboards dishwasher-proof?
    • xandrius 1y ago
      Maybe if we had stopped where the elephants are, we would feel happier, we'd never know. Not enough neurons unfortunately.
  • PartiallyTyped 1y 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 1y ago
      > I've read around that the overwhelming majority is used to balance / movement and perception. Just like humans. /s
  • RachelF 1y 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.
• zw123456 1y 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 1y 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.
    • empath75 1y ago
      And also _whales don't have hands_
• benrutter 1y 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 1y 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.
  • glenstein 1y 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.
• mickey475778 1y ago
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• amelius 1y ago
  What if our brains lived in a higher dimensional space, and there was more room for neuron interconnectivity and heat dissipation?
  • HexPhantom 1y ago
    That's a sci-fi rabbit hole I'd gladly fall into
    • cwmma 1y ago
      Iain M. Banks "The Culture" does this, it's how the Minds work, discussed in Look to Windward and Consider Phoebus iirc.
• HexPhantom 1y ago
  Makes me wonder if "bigger brains" would feel more like software-defined minds than just smarter versions of ourselves
• Klaus_ 1y ago
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• Cebul1234 1y ago
  > What If We Had Bigger Brains? Nothing. Elephants have bigger brains, but they didn't create civilization.
• empath75 1y 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 1y 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 1y ago
  3 other posters with the same link. Why this one blows up?
• 11235813213455 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach
• JoeAltmaier 1y 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 1y 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 1y ago
  I've often felt like this is one of the most serious issues faced by modern society: very small brains...
• teslaberry 1y ago
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