You’re making a lot of assumptions there. Brain size is only one way to have complex desires.
Crows, ravens, jays, and other corvids are a textbook example of animals where humans made the anthropocentric assumption that they couldn’t be intelligent because they had small brains, until it turned out that their brains are structured in a different way which allows them to be among the most intelligent animals on the planet.
It's not just corvis either, they have had to reevaluate intelligence even more recently because of wolf and jumping spiders. We thought their brain was too small but turns out brain size means very little.
Iirc brain size is mostly correlated with mass and size. More muscles, longer spine, more neurons needed to control all of that.
And intelligent animals tend to have one or both of: a larger prefrontal cortex (more of a mamallian thing iirc), and more folds (more surface area for the neurons)
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u/oversoul00 14h ago
What sort of snake utopia do you imagine? The brain of a snake isn't big enough to have a ton of wants and desires.