[HN Gopher] What If We Had Bigger Brains? Imagining Minds Beyond...
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What If We Had Bigger Brains? Imagining Minds Beyond Ours
Author : nsoonhui
Score : 32 points
Date : 2025-05-25 13:46 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (writings.stephenwolfram.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (writings.stephenwolfram.com)
| mrfinn wrote:
| we would be elephants or whales? (sorry couldn't resist)
| kridsdale3 wrote:
| 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.
| ednite wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| The future that we don't understand is already all around us.
| We just don't understand it.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| >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 wrote:
| > 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.
| asdff wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > _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 wrote:
| 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.
| ip26 wrote:
| 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.
| asdff wrote:
| It allows these concepts to be expressed legibly for a
| human. Why would an ai model (not llm necessarily) need to
| write say "printf"? It does not need to understand that
| this is a print statement with certain expectation for what
| a print statement ought to behave as in the scope of the
| shell. It already has all the information by virtue of
| running the environment. printf might as well be expressed
| as some n-bit integer for the machine and dispense with all
| the window dressing we apply when writing functions by
| humans for humans.
| schmidtleonard wrote:
| > 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.
| relaxing wrote:
| > 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?
| Permik wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| 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.
| the_d3f4ult wrote:
| 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.
| nssnsjsjsjs wrote:
| We have massively increased our brain by scaling out not up.
| Going from pop. 8M to 8Bn is a 1000x
| loa_in_ wrote:
| Hardly. What's the use if no single component of this brain can
| hold a complex enough idea?
| staunton wrote:
| How complex are the ideas held by a single neuron?
| s1mon wrote:
| It's really mind-boggling to imagine a larger ego than Stephen
| Wolfram's.
| zabzonk wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I believe it's the _Revelation Space_ series of Alastair
| Reynolds novels that mention the Conjoiners.
| relaxing wrote:
| You gotta admire the dedication to shoehorning cellular automata
| into every discipline he encounters.
| bongoman42 wrote:
| 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.
| lapcat wrote:
| Imagine if everyone actually used the brains that they have.
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(page generated 2025-05-28 23:00 UTC)