What if We Had Bigger Brains? Imagining Minds Beyond Ours By Stephen Wolfram
Bigger brains could hold more complex ideas and understand the world in greater detail. They might be able to navigate different patterns and levels of abstraction that our current brains can’t reach. This would allow for a richer understanding of concepts and computations, expanding what we can think about and discuss.
Highlights
within any system that shows overall computational irreducibility there must inevitably be an infinite number of “pockets of computational reducibility”, in effect associated with “simplifying features” of the behavior of the system. It’s these “pockets of reducibility” that brains exploit to be able to successfully “navigate” the world for their purposes in spite of its “background” of computational irreducibility.
we’ve invented the words we have because they’re what we need to describe the aspects of the world we care about, and want to talk about. There will always be more features of, say, the natural world that we could talk about. It’s just that we haven’t chosen to engage with them. (For example, we could perfectly well invent words for all the detailed patterns of clouds in the sky, but those patterns are not something we currently feel the need to talk in detail about.)
And in terms of overall performance, animals with smaller brains generally seem to react more quickly to stimuli.
So what was it that made brains originally arise in biological evolution? Perhaps it had to do with giving animals a way to decide where to go next as they moved around. (Plants, which don’t move around, don’t have brains.) And perhaps it’s because animals can’t “go in more than one direction at once” that brains seem to have the fundamental feature of generating a single stream of decisions. And, yes, this is probably why we have a single thread of “conscious experience”, rather than a whole collection of experiences associated with the activities of all our neurons. And no doubt it’s also what we leverage in the construction of language—and in communicating through a one-dimensional sequence of tokens.
Most of the activity is much less like “thought” and much more like typical processes in nature, with lots of elements seemingly “doing their own thing”. We might think of this as an “ocean of unconscious neural activity”, from which a “thread of consensus thought” is derived.
One possibility is to go beyond the idea of a single thread of experience, and to consider a multiway system in which threads of experience can branch and merge. And, yes, this is what we imagine happens at a low level in the physical universe, particularly in connection with quantum mechanics.