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SilasBarta comments on Boksops -- Ancient Superintelligence? - Less Wrong
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Right, so under the theory that it's the brain mass/body mass ratio that matters, this makes perfect sense: the brains were able to handle the informational load coming from the nervous system, but not do much beyond that.
Sure, elephants probably do beat humans by some measures of brain function (at the very least, the metric "absolute number of neuron firings per second"). It's just that those brain functions aren't the things we associate with intelligence, which makes sense if the brain is all tied up sending signals to the nerves throughout the massive tissue.
Huh? My point was that tiny brains are enough to control bodies much larger than those of elephants so large bodies simply can't need large brains in order to walk.
I was thinking more along the lines of some fairly general learning metrics such as number of patterns of sound that can be retained for 10 years.
But you do need a bigger brain to handle all your body systems AND do "intelligent" things on top of the walking and mating and ...
So, because elephants can store more sounds over longer periods, that means they're really more intelligent than humans, and we're just pandering to our own status-hungry egos when we say they're not (because it's the ratio that matters)?
That doesn't work. Raw storage capacity isn't what we think of as intelligence, at least not the interesting kind we're trying to develop. Is my 300 Gig hard drive, which can store a LOT more patterns of sound over 10 years, intelligent? No. So why would this be a relevant metric for gauging animal intelligence?
Why would the sizes of the systems to do intelligent things and to control the body not just add up linearly?
Among humans, recognition of lots of words is a predictor of ability to do math well. A very good predictor even controlling for environment.