Wiktionary
n. all the cultural capital that is available to us in the form of tribal legends, folklore, nursery rhymes, books, videotapes, CD-ROMs etc
Wikipedia
Extelligence is a term coined by Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen in their 1997 book Figments of Reality. They define it as the cultural capital that is available to us in the form of external media (e.g. tribal legends, folklore, nursery rhymes, books, videotapes, CD-ROMs, etc.)
They contrast extelligence with intelligence, or the knowledge and cognitive processes within the brain. Furthermore, they regard the ‘complicity’ of extelligence and intelligence as fundamental to the development of consciousness in evolutionary terms for both the species and the individual. ‘Complicity’ is a combination of complexity and simplicity, and Cohen and Stewart use it to express the interdependent relationship between knowledge-inside-one's- head and knowledge-outside-one's-head that can be readily accessed.
Although Cohen's and Stewart's respective disciplines are biology and mathematics, their description of the complicity of intelligence and extelligence is in the tradition of Jean Piaget, Belinda Dewar and David A. Kolb. Philosophers, notably Popper, have also considered the relation between subjective knowledge (which he calls world 2), objective knowledge (world 1) and the knowledge represented by man-made artifacts (world 3).
One of Cohen and Stewart's contributions is the way they relate, through the idea of complicity, the individual to the sum of human knowledge. From the mathematics of complexity and game theory, they use the idea of phase space and talk about extelligence space. There is a total phase space (intelligence space) for the human race, which consists of everything that can be known and represented. Within this there is a smaller set of what is known at any given time. Cohen and Stewart propose the idea that each individual can access the parts of the extelligence space with which their intelligence is complicit.
In other words, there has to be, at some level, an appreciation of what is out there and what it means. Much of this ‘appreciation’ falls into the category of tacit knowledge and social and cultural learning. As an example, a dictionary may contain definitions of many words. But only those definitions that can be understood by the reader.
Usage examples of "extelligence".
Instead, mind is a feedback loop in which intelligence influences extelligence, extelligence influences intelligence, and the combination transcends the capabilities of both.
But it seems much more likely that, unless you had a whole community of machines interacting with each other and evolving, providing the requisite extelligence too, then you wouldn't be actually able to structure the Ant Country of the neural connections of the machine in a way that could generate a mind.
It escaped our control when it became reproductive: extelligence being used to copy (bits of) extelligence.
Prior to written language, extelligence was passed on by word of mouth.
And all the while extelligence resided in human memories, it couldn't grow, because one person can remember only so much.
When you could write things down, extelligence expanded a bit, but there is only so much that you can write down by hand.
You can push things out into the extelligence, but you can't predict what influence they will have.
In some sense it is, but what is actually important is the interface between extelligence and the individual.
If we all responded to the same pool of extelligence in exactly the same way, we would all be the same.
This behaviour is typical of human clusters, until extelligence intervenes.
The dynamic of extelligence is emergent or, to put it another way, we haven't the faintest idea what we'll think of next but it'll probably surprise us.