Like individual systems, collective systems can also be divided into intelligent ones and non-intelligent ones. Collective intelligence adapts to its environment and works with insufficient knowledge and resources, just like an individual system. The difference here is that sometimes the members are not fully coordinated in actions.
During the adaptation process of a collective intelligence, its goals, actions, and beliefs go through self-organization processes similar to that of an individual system. When a community becomes stable enough, the common goals, beliefs, and actions become its "culture", which works as an "external heredity".
Science is common knowledge accepted by a large number of members in the society. For this purpose, scientific science must be expressed in a communication language, and its content must be consistent with the beliefs of many members in the society.
Science summarizes the experience of a community, for it to achieve its goals by taking proper actions. For this purpose, a scientific theory as a whole must be instructive, in the sense of telling the systems what to do in various situations.
A scientific theory is not an arbitrary collection of widely accepted instructions. Instead, the knowledge in a theory is harmonize, generalized, abstracted, condensed, and structured. It summarizes a large amount of concrete experience into a form that is highly efficient for communication, education, and application.
Every scientific theory has its scope, in terms of the phenomena the it tends to explain, the predictions it tends to make, and the goals it can achieve. Due to the resource restriction in the intelligent systems using the theory, no theory can be about everything. When an object is described by several theories at different levels, the one at a lower level usually provides more information about the internal structure of the object, while the one at a higher level usually provides more information about the external relation of the object.
For a given domain, due to the difference in motivation, experience, background, and so on, different theories may be built. They compete with each other in their descriptions about the domain and their predictions about future situation. Usually, in a debate all parties have some "truth" in their arguments, since they are viewing the situation from different angels, and no one is absolutely correct, though it does not mean that all the competing theories are equally good. The conflicts among theories usually cannot be solved by merging them together into a "summarized theory", because their conceptual systems are very often incompatible. For the same reason, the people in different schools often cannot solve their difference by debate. In complex domains, it is unlikely to find a "decisive test" that can settle the competition once for all, and succeeds and failures are often temporary.
A scientific theory of intelligence should give the notion "intelligence" a proper clarification, so that the theory will make unique contribution to science that is not provided by other existing theories.
Such a theory should explain the observations in human intelligence, animal intelligence, and community intelligence. Therefore, it should be consistent with our knowledge in human psychology, though it is not an attempt to replace psychology. Instead, it should separate the human-specific aspects of intelligence from its human-independent aspects. Similarly, this theory should be consistent with the general principles generalized from the study of linguistics, logic, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, education, and other related domains. This theory should allow alien intelligence as a possibility.
Such a theory should provides guideline for the development of artificial intelligence. It should explain the successes and failures in the history of AI, and propose solutions for the pending theoretical problems. Even so, this theory cannot fully replace a theory of "computer intelligence", which especially targeting the AI field by taking computer-specific properties into consideration.
The theory presented in this E-book is such an attempt.