Inner And Outer Worlds

The Hierarchy of Intelligences

You are a conscious intelligent living being, yet you are more than an individual being, since you are an entire living compound made of distinct living beings, all forming you, all contributing to your unique life and existence. Because you are your trillions of living cells, composing your body one after another. And with each cell, you are a zillion subcellular components forming you one molecule at a time and one cell near another, designing or creating your life one fulfilment at a time and one moment of existence after another, animating you from within in this manner, from the smallest subcellular level. Since this is who you are only at the physical, objective level, while all living beings generate, sustain, and coordinate continuously a multitude of intelligent modulations throughout the physical brain and entire body, forming your entire cognition, living intelligent impulses associated to your mind, consciousness, awareness, and intelligence. From the physical perspective of your body, these are simple encoded impulses within your neurons and therefore within your entire mind, and everybody has them, capable to sustain entire inner cognitive instances forming together your cognitive system, your entire mind, in all its thoughts, awareness, feelings, and reactions. But then, from an inner, cognitive perspective, all these physical impulses become alive, making everything possible throughout your mind, organism, life, and entire world, in a living intelligent manner, since these are your intelligences. All your intelligences are aware, conscious, and certainly intelligent, and through their own consciousness and intelligence, they give you your entire mind in all its cognitive abilities, becoming everything that you truly are. More precisely, your intelligences form your mind altogether, since the human mind is their living world, while your intelligences perform the entire cognitive activity within, just for you and for the entire organism. And now, their continuous existence is your life, while their purpose becomes your meaning, achievement, learning, and subsistence. Since among all your intelligences, you are the conscious intelligence yourself, specialized in the coordination of the entire organism in the outside world while fulfilling its needs, or while fulfilling your needs, since it is the same. Because your intelligences have their own specialized tasks and needs, together forming not only your mind, but your entire life, in its entire existence. Yet these are only your own intelligences, the human intelligences, while throughout this book, we focus on all intelligences of the wider world, including these. This book studies all intelligences, from living, cognitive, interconnective, and existential perspectives, throughout a comprehensive classification of everything alive and intelligent, helping you understand yourself, life, intelligence, consciousness, the world, and your conscious place, meaning, and fulfillment in life and in the world.

Transformation

Milieus of Minutiae

The long history of tiny matter(s) in the sciences, thought, and culture From catastrophic weather and steady warming caused by the accumulation of carbon particles in the Earth’s atmosphere to societies brought to a standstill by microscopic viruses, the new millennium has reminded us of how the minutest of phenomena can have outsized effects. This notion is one that has preoccupied the European and Anglo-American cultural imaginary since at least early modernity. Milieus of Minutiae brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to investigate various forms and appearances of minutiae prior to and beyond the advent of magnification. The collection illuminates connections between the empirical practices and technologies with which minutiae have come to be associated and the broader, more diffuse discourses—from the philosophical to the artistic—that have attended theories of smallness before and after Hooke’s Micrographia. Placing essays on Renaissance poetry, Romantic fiction, and matters of punctuation alongside essays on early modern germ theory and the optics of microscopic technology, this rigorously framed volume extends from sixteenth-century pathology to twentieth-century architectural theory, natural science to literature and art.