h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Of course individuals learn from experience, though that process can be painful. I remember that when I was a little girl, I came running along a path in our garden and jumped down a step. Unfortunately, my father had left a piece of wood with a nail in it under the step, and the nail went right into my foot. My father got a telling off for that, but I bet I never jumped down that step again.

However, the learning we get from reading or watching films about other people's experience is of a different kind. It lacks the same immediacy. We might watch an affecting film about the suffering caused by war, for example, and think 'I'm sorry for those poor people.' But, if our nations call on us to go to war, we might think 'Well, war is terrible, but we're not likely to suffer like those people in the film. The situation is different and we're not the same race/colour/class/gender.'

If some people didn't learn from imagined narratives, there would be absolutely no point in writing them. Or in telling stories, which humans have been doing for as long as anyone can remember. But it's obvious that a lot of people think like that these days.

May I recommend a documentary film called 'Hiding Halina'? I found it on Amazon Prime, your streaming services may vary. Halina Irving is an amazing lady. In the film, she tells her first-person account of surviving the Holocaust with her family. Her memories go back to three years old. It was almost like being there, the way she told it. (She is a therapist.)

Still trying to grasp Akashic records. Is it shared heritage? is there anything that is *not* part of the Akashic records?

I can remember decades of trying to cultivate an ability to relate to anyone on some level. We all breathe (if we didn't we'd be in trouble). If there's a smell of chocolate cake baking, we can all smell it (well, almost all. I knew a woman with a brain injury who couldn't. And Covid-19 sometimes steals people's ability to taste and smell).

Gosh, it's a lot of work trying to come up with universals.

It does remind me of the intelligence versus extelligence point Terry Pratchett is trying to make in "The science of discworld", where extelligence stands for all the knowledge we have as a group. Without it, we would have to invent the wheel over and over again.

Extelligence seems to have been coined in a 1997 book "Figments of reality" by Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen. And, yes, your definition matches theirs. Cohen then wrote "Science of discworld" with Pratchett.

I think you are right about that.

I learned a new word today: extelligence.