What If We Had Bigger Brains? Imagining Minds Beyond Ours

Brain Size, Intelligence, and Biological Constraints

• Several comments challenge the idea that “bigger brains = smarter.”
• Cited counterexamples: corvids with small brains but high intelligence, elephants and whales with larger brains but no visible “civilization,” and possibly larger-brained Neanderthals.
• Emphasis on wiring, diversity of specialized circuits, and efficiency over raw volume; comparisons to GPU vs CPU specialization.
• Biological limits discussed: birth canal constraints (partly relaxed by C‑sections), cooling/heat dissipation, energy cost, and signal “commute time” across larger brains.
• Some argue human cognition may already be near an evolutionary optimum or “minimum viable intelligence” for global civilization, with both upper and lower viable bounds.

AI, LLMs, and Minds Beyond Ours

• Strong disagreement on whether current LLMs are “intelligent thinking programs” or just advanced word predictors/oracles.
• Skeptics argue LLMs lack agency, self-awareness, out-of-distribution generalization, and abilities like inventing genuinely new concepts/words.
• Others note rapid hardware/software progress and warn against confidently asserting that human-level AI is “centuries away.”
• Debate over whether future systems should drop human-language intermediaries and operate over binary or latent protocols; counterpoints stress benefits of abstraction layers and reuse of existing software ecosystems.
• Some propose consciousness as a biologically cheap “consensus mechanism” to solve large-scale communication/selection in big neural systems.

Collective and Abstract Minds

• Corporations, states, markets, ant colonies, and even the biosphere are framed as “abstract lifeforms” or higher-order minds composed of humans.
• Analogies to cells in bodies, with regulation as hormones or immune systems; worries that capitalism as an emergent system may be beyond human control.
• Others caution that organizations often hit coordination limits and behave more like a single fallible leader plus bureaucracy than a superintelligence.

Consciousness, Parallelism, and Embodiment

• Debate over whether conscious experience is truly single-threaded or just appears that way; references to skill learning, sports, music, juggling, dreams, split-brain cases, and internal “subpersonalities.”
• Some endorse Bayesian/predictive-coding views of the brain; others say these remain controversial.
• Embodied cognition advocates argue that focusing only on the brain misses the role of body, hormones, environment, and action loops in shaping mind.

Ethics, Emotion, and Augmentation

• Multiple comments question the assumption that “smarter = better” or more ethical; intelligence is seen as orthogonal to altruism and species survival.
• Social intelligence and emotional regulation are highlighted as missing from “bigger brain” speculation.
• Concerns raised about future neural implants creating an arms race and a stratified society of enhanced vs “natural” humans.