From: jimruttshow8596
The study of artificial intelligence (AI) can offer insights into the nature of human intelligence and its distinctions from other forms of intelligence found in the animal kingdom [01:16:16]. A key question is the apparent large cognitive gap between humans and other animals, despite relatively small genetic differences [01:13:32].
Limitations of Human Intelligence
While often believed to have limitless potential, human brains have demonstrable limitations [00:13:25]. These include constraints on working memory size and the fidelity and persistence of memory [00:12:01]. Working memory, for instance, acts as a bottleneck for practical recursion in language and the chunking size of concepts [00:12:11]. Compared to what is possible, humans might be considered the “stupidest possible general intelligence” [00:12:33]. Evolution is rarely wasteful with its gifts, suggesting that human general intelligence may be just “over the line” from what is minimally required [00:12:40].
Comparing Brain Size and Intelligence in Nature
A perplexing question in nature is why other species with larger brains are not demonstrably smarter than humans [00:28:04].
- Whales and Elephants have larger brains than humans, yet they do not display comparable intelligence levels, despite carrying these brains “for free” due to their large body sizes [00:28:15].
- One speculative hypothesis is that making a system “too smart” can be hard to control [00:28:50]. It’s theorized that “non-autistic elephants meditated themselves out of existence” by understanding their role in the universe and opting for philosophical pursuits over reproduction and societal engagement [00:28:58].
- Dolphins, living underwater, lack the ability to record information due to the lack of stable mediums, potentially limiting the development of intellectual traditions and leading to a society focused on basic interactions [00:29:47]. Their three-dimensional environment, while making navigation easier, might also reduce cognitive challenges related to avoiding collisions in a two-dimensional plane [00:30:08].
- Dogs: There are significant intelligence differences among dog breeds, with herding dogs often being smarter but less controllable and harder to domesticate than companion dogs [01:14:33].
- Neanderthals vs. Homo sapiens: Homo sapiens appears to be a “domesticated human” [01:15:12]. It is speculated that Neanderthals might have been individually smarter, but lacked the capacity for scalable tribes or societies beyond the Dunbar number [01:15:17]. This domestication process in Homo sapiens might have involved a selective “dumbing down” of epistemology, allowing for shared beliefs without proof, which facilitated cooperation at scale [01:15:32]. While the confrontation between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals occurred before operating above the Dunbar number, cooperation is considered a human superpower, enabled by automatic, unthinking coordination [01:16:34].
Key Differentiators of Human Intelligence
Despite a small genetic difference (1% to 1.5%) between humans and chimpanzees [01:14:20], a substantial cognitive gap exists.
- New Cognitive Objects: One theory suggests that humans added a new class of objects into their brains, such as symbols, a language of thought, or a more powerful form of procedural memory capable of conceptualizing multi-part tools [01:13:53].
- Extended Childhood and Training Data: A crucial factor is the significantly longer childhood and maturation period in humans compared to other animals [01:17:09]. This extended period, which can last beyond 18 years in modern society [01:17:33], allows for extensive exploration rather than immediate exploitation of resources [01:17:46]. This prolonged development means more “training data per day” for the brain, leading to better abstractions [01:19:03]. Human infants spend more time learning basic spatial relationships, contrast, object permanence, and social relationships than, for instance, a cat [01:18:14].
- The transition to bipedalism in human evolution might have constrained the size of the birth canal, leading to the delivery of very premature babies with underdeveloped brains [01:20:10]. This necessitated a much longer period for full brain development post-birth, unlike a white-tailed deer which is competent hours after birth [01:20:51].
- Grammatical Decomposition and Symbolic Depiction: Humans possess the ability for grammatical decomposition in language, which distinguishes them from other apes [01:22:46]. For example, elephants can learn to draw but tend to reproduce the same image without generalization or symbolic depiction [01:22:58]. Similarly, while gorillas exposed to human environments can become more human-like, they don’t perform grammatical decomposition; their drawings, like those of Coco, lack the breakdown of objects into parts [01:23:33]. The ability to manipulate “tiny” symbols (like the concept of “dog”) is exponentially more effective than manipulating many images, potentially making the human brain far more effective [01:24:40].
- Brain Size and Architecture: While larger brain size is generally beneficial, it is not the sole deciding factor in intelligence [01:22:20]. People with brains similar in size to a gorilla’s can still be reasonably intelligent and function in society [01:22:07]. The brain’s optimized architecture and the amount of “training data” received during development contribute significantly to human cognitive abilities [01:19:01].
The ability to grasp increasingly abstract concepts varies greatly among humans, and this can be predicted early in their learning process [01:26:05]. This hierarchical understanding of concepts, from variables to closures in computer science, highlights the human capacity for inversion and abstraction [01:26:22].