Not All Size Equals Sophistication | 1min snip from 80,000 Hours Podcast

#198 – Meghan Barrett on challenging our assumptions about insects

80,000 Hours Podcast

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Not All Size Equals Sophistication

Challenging the assumption that larger brains equate to greater intelligence or sentience, the discussion highlights that increased brain size may simply reflect the need to manage a larger body rather than enhanced cognitive functions. For instance, while elephants and blue whales possess significantly more neurons and brain mass than humans, this does not inherently suggest higher levels of sentience. Instead, the additional neurons often serve basic operational functions due to their size, suggesting that the quality and complexity of neural connections are more vital determinants of cognitive abilities than sheer volume.

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Speaker 2

Actually, before we go on, if I can ask one more question about this. I guess the thing I do care about in the context of this, yeah, sentience discussion is, yeah, brain size. It feels like brain size is at least more likely to be tracking the thing that I care about. about whether these very large insects also have very large brains, or if the beetle is mostly like other guts as opposed to brain guts? This

Speaker 1

is a phenomenal question. I appreciate you asking it very much, and it's very interesting to me. So I have a couple of points to make on the brain size piece of this. I guess the first thing I'll say is just that we should ask ourselves if more actually always means better or more sophisticated. So that's an assumption to challenge about our thinking about brains. So for example, elephants have more neurons and more brain mass than you and I do, and yet I don't consider them more likely to be sentient than me. Same thing with blue whales. And that's because we know a lot of those additional neurons are because they're just bigger. And so they have more mass to control, right? They have more touch points they need to be able to integrate and things like that. So more doesn't always mean more sophisticated. It can often just mean more of the same repeat unit, right, that

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