The intentionality of brain-stored knowledge is moderate the brain does store things we don t necessarily want, but to deliberately learn something, usually requires an act of conscious intention. Finally, through the agency of our arms and legs, and within our scope of abilities knowledge in the brain can affect changes in the outside world. We have found tools developed by primitive peoples from hundreds of thousands of years ago, where the knowledge is still present in the tool. The intentionality of tools is usually high, though it does happen that we develop a tool for one purpose to find that its knowledge can operate in a quite different area. Lastly, the whole reason we as a race have developed tools is to allow modification of the outside world, therefore their capability in this regard is high, but is usually limited to the tool s specific purpose.
Books are quite permanent knowledge stores.
But we also have books, or fragments of books from many thousands of years ago. Typically these faster versions of books start to also achieve the volatility of brains, for reasons I will pursue at a later time. And finally, books, by themselves, have absolutely no capability to affect the world around them. The book might fall off a shelf, hit a candle, set fire to the house, and burn down the city, but that is a function of the book object not the knowledge in the book. For the knowledge in a book to be at all active, it must be transported into one of the other media.