The Science of Discworld Revised Edition

little bit of mind in a lot of other creatures.
    Mind is a
process
, or a network of processes, going on inside the brain. It needs a certain amount of interaction with other minds in order to get anywhere. There isn’t an evolutionary feedback loop that would train an incipient mind and make it develop
unless
it was getting somewhere. So where does such a loop occur? Human beings are part of a reproductive system – there are a lot of us, and we keep breeding new ones. In consequence, a large part of the environment of any human being is other human beings. In many ways this is the most important part of our environment, the part we respond to most deeply. We have all sorts of cultural systems, such as education, that exploit exactly this feature of our environment to develop the kind of mind that fits into the existing culture and helps to propagate it. So the context for an individual mind, as it evolves, is not that mind – it’s lots of other minds. There is a complicit feedback loop between the entire collection of minds, and that of each individual.
    Human beings have taken this process to such an extreme that part of that feedback loop has escaped from our control and is now outside us. In a sense, it has a mind of its own. This is extelligence, and we can’t do without it. A lot of what makes us human is
not
passed on genetically – it is passed on culturally. It is passed on by the tribe, it is passed on through rituals, by teaching, by things that link brain to brain, mind to mind. Your genetics may make it possible for you to
do
this, it may make you better or worse at it than others, but genes don’t actually encode the information that gets passed on. This process is the ‘Make-a-Human-Being-Kit’. Each culture has devised a technique for putting into the minds of the next generation what it is that will make them put it into the minds of the generation after that – a recursive system that keeps the culture going. Lies-to-children often feature prominently.
    We are running into problems doing this today, because old-style tribal cultures, even national cultures, are becoming intermingled with an international culture. This leads to clashes between what used to be separate cultures, triggering their breakdown. Go into any city in the world and you see adverts for Coca-Cola. Global commerce has put things into various cultures that are different from what they would have developed of their own accord. Coca-Cola does not have a huge influence on the Make-a-Human-Being-Kit, though, so it’s acceptable to most cultures. On the whole, you don’t find religious fundamentalists complaining about the existence of a Coca-Cola bottling factory in their country (well, you
do
, but generally because it’s just a way of saying ‘USA out!’) However, if some fast-food chain in Islamic or Jewish countries was trying to sell porkburgers, there’d be plenty of protests.
    Extelligence has become so powerful and so influential that nowadays one generation’s culture may be radically different from the previous generation’s culture. Second-generation immigrants often have an even worse problem, a culture clash. They’ve grown up in the ‘new’ country, and they’ve absorbed how that country works. They speak the language far more fluently than their parents ever can, but they’ve still got to
please
their parents. When they’re at home, they have to behave in the manner of their original culture. But when they’re at school, they have to live in the new culture. This makes them feel distinctly uncomfortable, and that can break the cultural feedback loop. Once the loop is broken, parts of the culture cease to be transmitted to the next generation: they drop out of the Make-a-Human-Being-Kit.
    In this sense, extelligence is out of our control. It escaped our control when it became reproductive: extelligence being used to copy (bits of) extelligence.
    The key step was the invention of printing. Prior to written language, extelligence was passed on by word of mouth. It still lived in people’s minds: it was what the wise men and women of the village, the old people, knew. 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. And it can’t spread very far. So mostly you get things like the Egyptian monuments –