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Notes -
The “dumbest possible species” claim is mostly a soundbite and truism, but the basic idea would be (1) that we see increasing encephalisation (especially in the neocortex) and increasing behavioural sophistication in the Hominins all the way up to Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis, and (2) a small minority of the very smartest humans in very recent history (the last 1000 years out of the 300,000 or so of our species) were required to make the necessary move from agrarian societies to industrial society. Of course they were building on indispensable social, political, and economic foundations, but if you drop the IQ of Europe by 1SD for the second millennium AD I think it’s unlikely we’d get the Industrial Revolution at all.
Regarding the idea of Bayesian limits to intelligence, that applies well to cases where the dimensionality is fairly constrained, notably perception. The space of cognition (“possible good ideas”) by contrast is much more open-ended, and applies at multiple levels of scale and abstraction (because we need heuristics to deal with any large scale system). I don’t see any reason to think we’re even close to “topping out” in cognition, and the outsize contribution of the smartest humans compared to merely very smart humans provide some evidence in this regard.
I will admit that the emergence of AI may finally give some interesting answers and maybe closure to philosophical questions about how introspective and abstract philosophy and mathematics are. As much as (some) math claims to be proof pulled from the ontological ether, can the concept of, say, prime numbers be explained to an intelligence with no real-world sensory inputs? Does the notion of counting make sense in an absence of things to count?
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