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Extelligence is a term coined byIan Stewart andJack Cohen in their 1997 bookFigments of Reality. They define it as thecultural capital that is available to us in the form of external media (e.g. triballegends,folklore,nursery rhymes,books,videotapes,CD-ROMs, etc.)
They contrast extelligence withintelligence, or theknowledge and cognitive processes within thebrain. Furthermore, they regard the 'complicity' of extelligence and intelligence as fundamental to the development ofconsciousness inevolutionary terms for both thespecies and theindividual. '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 arebiology andmathematics, their description of the complicity of intelligence and extelligence is in the tradition ofJean Piaget, Belinda Dewar andDavid A. Kolb. Philosophers, notablyPopper, 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 thesum of human knowledge. From the mathematics ofcomplexity andgame theory, they use the idea ofphase 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 oftacit knowledge[1] and social and cultural learning.[2] As an example, adictionary may contain definitions of manywords, but only some subset of those definitions might be understood by any particular reader.
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