biological emotions and laughing goldfish

Lisa Feldman Barrett, psychology professor at Northeastern University, reduces the emotional states of being into four categories, in her book, How Emotions Are Made (Pan Macmillan, 2017). These four proto-emotions are, in essence, the messages your brain derives from your nervous system, the pure biological pulses that ultimately guide our relationship with the world around us:

Pleasantness
Unpleasantness
Arousal
Calmness

Everything else, from happiness to sadness to disgust and so on, says Barrett, are learned reactions. Passion is culturally transmitted.

In identifying these raw materials of emotion, we might draw a closer understanding of the experience of that-which-is-not-human, even perhaps that-which-is-not-mammal, as pleasant — even mildly arousing — is the notion that this may be an indication of some broader universality.

——

Here is one of my favorite Chuang Tzu stories, which for me settles any argument over the existence of universal experience, and imparts the listener to "trust their gut" on this matter. Our relationship with the world around us is much tighter than we tend to consciously acknowledge:

Two old friends were crossing a bridge over a pond. One paused to look down, and noticed a school of goldfish swimming below. "Look, how those goldfish are playing and laughing!" His friend glanced down, nodded, and then replied, "How is it you know these fish are experiencing some form of happiness? Maybe they are simply swimming in the fashion that such fish swim, not happy, but neutral, and that you are imagining their emotion? You can never ask a fish! Does it not seem foolish to you to ascribe human feelings to simple creatures?"

His friend thought about this for a little while, peered one more time at the fish below, and then, waving his friend forward on their walk mentioned, "I know those fish are happy because I, too, have known happiness."

——

I used this story to put the 26 forms of cognitive bias into context, as well, "Cognitive Bias and the Laughing Goldfish."

As I click "publish" on this post, two blue jays are squealing in the flower box outside my window. They sound aroused!

The Need for Roots

Labor and human rights activist, Simone Weil, working in London with the French Resistance to the Nazi occupation of France, training towards becoming a Special Operations Executive which would return her to Paris, whilst suffering a bout of tuberculosis which would prove her death, wrote a large book titled, The Need for Roots. It is a wide-spanning work, investigating the common needs of humanity, the universal morality of feeding the hungry, the uprootedness of modern urban and rural life, collectivism, nationalism, and ultimately suggesting a plan for France upon victory in the War.

An example from its pages; I find an interesting rationale for the rule of law, and the effects of justice served, as a question of social morality:
"Just as the only way of showing respect for somebody suffering from hunger is to give him something to eat, so the only way of showing respect for somebody who has placed himself outside the law is to reinstate him inside the law by subjecting him to the punishment ordained by law."

She also declared eight spiritual needs for the human soul:

Order
societal, to minimize individual encounters with conflicting obligations
Liberty
uninfringed
Obedience
with consent
Responsibility
usefulness
Equality
more power equates to higher standard of conduct

Hierarchism

looking up to symbols

Honour

a measure of conduct
Punishment
to prevent one's falling to vice, to allow for integration, post-
Freedom of Opinion
free expression
Security
freedom from fear and terror
Risk
to protect us from boredom
Private Property
a home, and one's tools
Collective Property
everyone shares

Truth

sacred

Twelve Food Groups

The nuts and beans and cereals are the Seed. Given no other food, you stand to get along on Seed alone. Your disposition may turn grouchy, however.

One of the great delights of living is Fruits, the many styles of flesh in which nature wraps the Seed. Flowers are included. Most fruit appear only briefly, annually, a gift of the seasons. Spicy, sweet, sometimes bitter. That fruit Eve enjoyed in the first story of the Bible makes so much sense on so many levels.

Vegetables are all of the other parts of the Plants. Leaf-Stem-Root. Mushrooms get to be vegetables. Sugar is a vegetable. So are aspirin and quinine, because those come from bark.

Meat is Animals. There is a big difference between the terrestrial and aquatic fleshes, but those remain subcategories of this food group.

Our own fingernails, lips and skin, licked blood and other parts of ourselves and our close friends that we swallow should probably be in their own food group. We'll keep it classic, and call it People.

Insects are Bugs. Shrimp should arguably fall into this category.

Minerals include salt, and the other kinds of dirt people eat.

Water is a food, I guess, if dirt gets to be a food.

Dairy and honey and any other animal secretions people deem to consume are the Luxury food group. The ability to catch a mother of another species and suckle from her, and gather the lactations and, mix with them, and let them get funky and oddly delicious, or freeze them, etc., is an outstanding achievement — not to mention how we have industrialized it! Truly, diabolically, luxurious.

Alcohol and Vinegar are specially processed from Seeds, Vegetables and Fruits. Fermentation is up there with lactation harvesting and the internet in terms of our specie's defining achievements. There are other processed foods outside the Luxury food group, but they mostly fall into the next category.

Chemicals are non-traditional, excessively modified foods or food-like substances.

Toxins and straight-up Poison, are the anti-food group. Since this category exists as a catch-all to make the overall list all-inclusive, then it includes everything from paint thinner to chunks of radioactive stuff to hot lava. Shards of glass are not included in this anti-food group, but rather (scrunch!) a Mineral: Man Eats Glass.

The Blossom of the Eight Emotions

Robert Plutchik created this wheel of emotions in 1980. Each of the eight spokes, or pedals, is an essential emotion, at its most intense near the center, and to lesser degrees, moving out. Opposites lie across the center from each other. The combination of any two, adjacent pedals generates the so-called advanced emotions, requiring some construction.
Consider the implications of the arrangement. Rage is the opposite of terror. Aggressiveness is a combination of interest and annoyance, and positioned between optimism and contempt.
Love, likewise, is that thing between optimism and submission. 

Nicely poetic, a symmetrical play structure for words.


Click on it, so you can get a closer look:

Thank you, Indexed, for a post that brought this to WhoDooWooWei's attention, and for developing an intriguing, original, expanded conceptual framework for the wheel.

Check it out, the emotion wheel was originally a flower bud shape, closed on both ends:

The Six Turing Primitives

Computer memory, unengaged, sits motionless, gathering dust like an unused library. Developing means by which to manipulate the contents of computer memory is, in essence, the job of the computer programmer and electronic engineer. 
Alan Turing (1912 - 1954), luminary of computer science, reduced the functions of manipulating computer memory into six primitive actions. Using only these tools, an unlimited variety of more complex functions may be built, from addition and subtraction, to guessing what kind of movies you might like to stream tonight. Any computational device capable of these six functions can perform the work of any other similar device, no matter how complicated — however, computation run times may vary. Indeed, a Timex Sinclair, programmed to do so, can render the same computations as the XBox. This is because, at the root, they are both doing these same six things:

Right:  move the machine head to the right

Left:  move the machine head to the left

Print:  place a symbol into the current cell

Scan:  identify any symbols in the current cell

Erase:  erase any symbols in the current cell

Halt: do nothing

Rays of Light

An optical glory at An Teallach, Scotland,

from the wiki commons. 

Glory of the Altar of the Chair of St. Peter, at St. Peter's Basilica,

designed by Gian Lorenzo Bernini in the mid-17th Century.

"Sometimes a kind of glory lights up the mind of a man. It happens to nearly everyone. You can feel it growing or preparing like a fuse burning toward dynamite. It is a feeling in the stomach, a delight of the nerves, of the forearms. The skin tastes the air, and every deep-drawn breath is sweet. Its beginning has the pleasure of a great stretching yawn; it flashes in the brain and the whole world glows outside your eyes. A man may have lived all of his life in the gray, and the land and trees of him dark and somber. The events, even the important ones, may have trooped by faceless and pale. And then - the glory - so that a cricket song sweetens his ears, the smell of the earth rises chanting to his nose, and dappling light under a tree blesses his eyes. Then a man pours outward, a torrent of him, and yet he is not diminished. And I guess a man's importance in the world can be measured by the quality and number of his glories."
 - John Steinbeck
East of Eden (thank you, whiskeyriver)

The 64 Arts of Krishna

Confucious had his Six Arts.  Roberta Smith identified six forms of contemporary installation art.  Krishna has them both beat, more than ten times over, with the Kalā, a Hindu catalog of the 64 arts.  As extensive as they come.

The Goddess Meenakshi is the upasana murthi, or Hindu patron deity of the fine arts.  Her little parrot knows each of the 64 Kalā and can recite them for you.

I have generated the following custom list from several web sources.  They each have specific Hindi names, but here we list them in English.


1. singing  2. playing instruments  3. dancing  4. theater  5. painting  6. body-painting  7. rice and floral decoration  8. making a flower blanket  9. personal grooming  10. jewelry  11. bedmaking  12. creating music woth water  13. splashing water  14. color mixing  15. garland-making  16. coronets  17. dressing for bed  18. tragus decoration  19. aromatics  20. applying ornament  21. juggling  22. secret mantras  23.  magic and illusions  24. food preparation  25. beverage prepartation  26. weaving and cloth-mending  27. embroidery  28. the lute and small drum  29. making and solving riddles  30. tongue twisters  31. recitation of books  32. enacting short plays  33. solving enigmatic verse  34. preparation of shield, cane and bow and arrows  35. thread spinning  36. carpentry  37. engineering  38. silver  39. metallurgy  40. sexual arts  41. mineralogy  42. medicine  43. lamb and cock fighting  44. maintaining conversation between men and women  45. perfumes  46. combing hair  47. communication with the hands  48. impersonation  49. knowledge of dialects  50. prediction  51. mechanics  52. use of amulets  53. conversation  54. composing and reciting verse from memory  55. training parrots and mynas to speak  56. shrine-building  57. lexicography  58. concealment with clothing  59. gambling  60. the dice game, akarsha  61. mastery of children's toys  62. personal etiquettte  63. understanding of dharma 64. awakening the master with music at dawn

rhythmical discharges from subcortial structures

Three different words for three different kinds of gibberish, a simple path to primordial pasts, perhaps a link to the divine:

lalation: "ga ga goo goo gaa ga"

(babytalk)

embolalia: "um...uh...um....errr..."

(meaningless syllables)

glossolalia: "ehbu ondu wan akka rar"

(speaking in tongues, and similar phenomenon)

"And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. / And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. / And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them. / And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance."
-- Holy Bible, King James, The Acts of the Apostles, 2:1-4

"It is, then, this pattern of essential ingredients, the strong cognitive imperative of religious belief in a cohesive group, the induction procedures of prayer and ritual, the narrowing of consciousness into a trance state, and the archaic authorization in the divine spirit and in the charismatic leader, which denotes this phenomenon as another instance of the general bicameral paradigm and therefore a vestige of the bicameral [pre-speaking] mind."
-- Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976. 

The Nine Roles for Management Teams

British administrative researcher and management theorist Meredith Belbin described nine archetypes for the roles played by members of project teams. Belbin's 1981 book, Management Teams, describes this model in depth, and later publications revised it.
A good management team generally contains at least one person for each role; however, there are particular tasks for which other combinations work better.  Incidentally, Belbin denies that these roles can be cross referenced directly to Jungian or enneagram personality types.

• Plant: A creative, imaginative, unorthodox team-member who solves difficult problems. They sometimes situate themselves far from the other team members, and return to present their 'brilliant' idea.
• Resource Investigator: The networker. Whatever the team needs, the Resource Investigator is likely to have someone in their address book who can either provide it or know someone else who can provide it.
• Chairman or Co-ordinator: Ensures that all members of the team are able to contribute to discussions and decisions of the team. Their concern is for fairness and equity among team members.
• Shaper: Loves a challenge and thrives on pressure. This member possesses the drive and courage required to overcome obstacles.
• Monitor-Evaluator: A sober, strategic and discerning member, who tries to see all options and judge accurately. Contributes a measured and dispassionate analysis and, through objectivity, stops the team committing itself to a misguided task.
• Team Worker: Ensures that interpersonal relationships within the team are maintained. Sensitive to atmospheres and may be the first to approach another team member who feels slighted, excluded or otherwise attacked but has not expressed their discomfort.
• Company Worker or Implementer: A practical thinker who can create systems and processes that will produce what the team wants.
• Completer Finisher: The detail person, possessing a good eye for spotting flaws and gaps and for knowing exactly where the team is in relation to its schedule.
• Specialist: In 1988, Belbin appended a ninth team role, the "Specialist", a person who brings 'specialist' knowledge to the team.

Ancient Chinese Animal Taxonomy

Ancient Chinese science is abundant with five-point taxonomies, based upon an evaluation of and categorization based upon inherent essence, or Qi. In each case, disparate phenomenon are grouped together and considered interrelated because of their similar Qi-based traits, with certain qualities corresponding portably across systems. Zou Yan, a scholar from the 3rd Century BCE, is sometimes attributed with the first catalog of this kind.

Here is the classification of animals, with their correlations to the elements, seasons, compass directions, and colors.

SCALEY (fish and reptiles) • Wood • Spring • East • Green/Blue

FEATHERED (birds) • Fire • Summer • South • Red

NAKED (humans) • Earth • Late Summer • Center • Yellow

HAIRY (mammals) • Metal • Autumn • West • White

ARMORED (terrapin) • Water • Winter • North • Black

Nine Taxonomical Universals

Each human culture develops its own set of categories and classifications for the natural world. Linnaeus classified the raccoon, for instance, as a bear, placing it in the genus Ursus. The raccoon was later moved to its own genus, Procyon, which means "dog-like" though many people think of them as rodents, more closely associated with a badger, opossom or weasel. Before European contact, some groups of Native Americans understood the raccoon to be a cousin of Man.

It is appropriate, here, to distinguish between folk taxonomies and scientific taxonomy inasmuch as our current scientific classifications are the result of broad consensus amongst current practitioners of the art of naming (not without controversy, of course). But what is interesting is that, independent of this formal body of knowledge, we automatically and naturally make associations and categorize things around us.

We all agree, scientist and non-scientist, that a raccoon is a mammal. Everyone on Earth, it turns out, makes the mammalian distinction, just as we all agree that if it has fins and swims in the sea, it's a fish (in most cases).

Cecil Brown, a linguistic anthropologist at Northern Illinois University, and expert in lexical acculturation, language universals, and the comparative study of Mayan languages, has researched folk taxonomies in 188 languages, and concluded that there are nine universal classifications for living things.

Fish

Birds

Snakes

Mammals

Wugs (aka worms and insects)

Trees

Vines

Herbs

Bushes

Carol Yoon recently published a fascinating account of the history of taxonomy titled, Naming Nature: The Clash Between Science and Instinct, (W.W. Norton & Co., 2009).

Leary's Eight Circuits of Consciousness

Timothy Leary theorized eight functionally distinct circuits in the nervous and neurological system. I interpret them through Robert Anton Wilson from a site sent by Magoo.

Not surprisingly, Leary was quite specific regarding which drugs (and, to be fair, other mind-altering activities) one can take to achieve consciousness of these separate "mind-circuits." Safe bet he was under the influence when he cooked up this taxonomy.

Compare this scheme with Howard Gardner's Theory of Eight Intelligences.

BIO-SURVIVAL

Basic Fear and Desire, as well as Object recognition.

Opiates give one a taste of this circuit.

EMOTIONAL

Territorialism, Aggression, Submission, and Cooperation.

Alcohol stimulates brain #2.

DEXTERITY-SYMBOLISM

Tool-making, Conceptual Thought, and Logic.

Caffeine, of course!

CULTURE

Cross-generational Transmission of Tribal and Cultural Norms.

Hormones, especially pubescent hormones, develop this brain.

NEUROSOMATIC

All-encompassing Sensory Space, Mystical experience.

Cannabis is the gateway to this circuit, as well as yoga.

NEUROELECTRIC

Meta-awareness, Trans-species Communication, preparation for meeting other Intelligent Lifeforms in the Cosmos.

Peyote, LSD, and Aleister Crowley (who is now aptly classified as a drug) will help the user communicate with aliens.

NEUROGENETIC

Collective Subconscious, preparation for Immortality.

LSD and magic mushrooms raise the neurogenetic consciousness.

NEUROATOMIC

Out-of-body Consciousness.

Ketamine, a dissociative anesthetic (--not Calamine!), lifts a user out of their body.

Leary also charted eight particular interpersonal behaviors and personalities, which might relate to the second circuit of the mind.

Thirteen Virtues of Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin kept a notebook of charts throughout his life in which he recorded his daily transgressions of thirteen virtues. His discipline included the choice of one virtue each week, upon which to focus his energies during his daily business. The record shows that he had trouble when it came to Silence and Order. We know he failed Chastity later in life; and a reputation accompanied by gout would indicate he frequently backslid on Temperance. Of course, his Industry is legendary.

Temperance:
eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation

Silence:
speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation

Order:
let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time

Resolution:
resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve

Frugality:
make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; i.e., waste nothing

Industry:
lose no time; be always employ'd in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions

Sincerity:

use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and, if you speak, speak accordingly

Justice:

wrong none by doing injuries, or omitting the benefits that are your duty

Moderation:

avoid extremes; forbear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve

Cleanliness:

tolerate no uncleanliness in body, clothes, or habitation

Tranquility:

be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable

Chastity:

rarely use venery but for health or offspring, never to dullness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another's peace or reputation

Humility:

imitate Jesus and Socrates

Enneagram of Personality

Oscar Ichazo, Claudio Naranjo, his student, Robert Ochs, and G. I. Gurdjieff separately offered developments to this model for the nine archetypical forms of human personality. The Enneagram, below, maps these personalities according to their relationships to each other.

1. Reformers, Judges, Perfectionists
2. Helpers, Givers, Caretakers
3. Achievers, Performers, Status Seekers
4. Romantics, Individualists, Aesthetes
5. Experts, Thinkers, Investigators
6. Loyalists, Heroes and Rebels, Defenders
7. Enthusiasts, Adventurers, Sensationalists
8. Bosses, Mavericks, Challengers
9. Mediators, Peacemakers, Preservationists

Each personality type has its advantages and disadvantages, and, it is said, true spiritual enlightenment comes with mastery over the nine types and an understanding of their inter-relationships.

The Eight Intelligences

According to education researcher Howard Gardener and those who have followed his lead, each of us is a collection of eight independent intelligences.

Linguistic : sensitivity to the spoken word
Logical-mathematical : capacity to analyze and determine patterns
Musical : performance, composition and appreciation
Bodily-kinesthetic : problem-solving with the body
Spatial : recognition of patterns of wide-openess and confinement
Interpersonal : understanding of the intentions of others
Intrapersonal : understanding oneself
Natural : utilization of the environment

Eleven Strata

from Outer Atmosphere to Ocean Deep

Magnetosphere -- wisps of magnetic pull
Exosphere -- the air is evanscent, atoms of it almost never bump
Thermosphere -- radiation, ionization, electrification, and a constant humming
Mesosphere -- atmospheric tides and gravity surf
Stratosphere -- calm and cool
Troposphere -- all the winds in all the leaves of all the trees and grasses

+++ Planetary Boundary +++

Epipelagia -- the pellucid upper lappings of the waters
Mesopelagia -- a flickering of light, flickering of shadows
Bathypelagia -- shining, esurient creatures in the eddies of the Void
The Abyss Zone -- the steady falling crumbs from all Life from above
The Hadal Zone -- the innuminous bottom pelf slowly shifting into magma

cognitive bias and the laughing goldfish

A friend submitted this list of cognitive biases. Following the list is my imperfect retelling of a favorite Chuang Tzu tale.

1. Bandwagon effect - the tendency to do (or believe) things
because many other people do (or believe) the same. Related
to groupthink, herd behaviour, and manias. Carl Jung pioneered
the idea of the collective unconscious which is considered by
Jungian psychologists to be responsible for this cognitive bias.
2. Bias blind spot - the tendency not to compensate for one’s
own cognitive biases.
3. Choice-supportive bias - the tendency to remember one’s
choices as better than they actually were.
4. Confirmation bias - the tendency to search for or interpret
information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions.
5. Congruence bias - the tendency to test hypotheses exclusively
through direct testing.
6. Contrast effect - the enhancement or diminishment of a weight
or other measurement when compared with recently observed
contrasting object.
7. Déformation professionnelle - the tendency to look at things
according to the conventions of one’s own profession, forgetting any
broader point of view.
8. Disconfirmation bias - the tendency for people to extend critical
scrutiny to information which contradicts their prior beliefs and uncritically
accept information that is congruent with their prior beliefs.
9. Endowment effect - the tendency for people to value something more
as soon as they own it.
10. Focusing effect - prediction bias occurring when people place too
much importance on one aspect of an event; causes error in accurately
predicting the utility of a future outcome.
11. Hyperbolic discounting - the tendency for people to have a stronger
preference for more immediate payoffs relative to later payoffs, the closer
to the present both payoffs are.
12. Illusion of control - the tendency for human beings to believe they
can control or at least influence outcomes which they clearly cannot.
13. Impact bias - the tendency for people to overestimate the length or
the intensity of the impact of future feeling states.
14. Information bias - the tendency to seek information even when it
cannot affect action.
15. Loss aversion - the tendency for people to strongly prefer avoiding
losses over acquiring gains (see also sunk cost effects)
16. Neglect of probability - the tendency to completely disregard
probability when making a decision under uncertainty.
17. Mere exposure effect - the tendency for people to express undue
liking for things merely because they are familiar with them.
18. Omission bias - The tendency to judge harmful actions as worse,
or less moral, than equally harmful omissions (inactions).
19. Outcome bias - the tendency to judge a decision by its eventual
outcome instead of based on the quality of the decision at the time it
was made.
20. Planning fallacy - the tendency to underestimate task-completion
times.
21. Post-purchase rationalization - the tendency to persuade oneself
through rational argument that a purchase was a good value.
22. Pseudocertainty effect - the tendency to make risk-averse choices
if the expected outcome is positive, but make risk-seeking choices to
avoid negative outcomes.
23. Selective perception - the tendency for expectations to affect
perception.
24. Status quo bias - the tendency for people to like things to stay
relatively the same.
25. Von Restorff effect - the tendency for an item that “stands out like
a sore thumb” to be more likely to be remembered than other items.
26. Zero-risk bias - preference for reducing a small risk to zero over a
greater reduction in a larger risk.

+

Two old friends were crossing a bridge over a pond. One paused to look down, and noticed a school of goldfish swimming below. "Look, how those goldfish are playing and laughing!" His friend glanced down, nodded, and then replied, "How is it you know these fish are experiencing some form of happiness? Maybe they are simply swimming in the fashion that such fish swim, not happy, but neutral, and that you are imagining their emotion? You can never ask a fish! Does it not seem foolish to you to ascribe human feelings to simple ceatures?"

His friend thought about this for a little while, peered one more time at the fish below, and then, waving his friend forward on their walk mentioned, "I know those fish are happy because I, too, have known happiness."

+

The Chuang Tzu story places hope in the idea that there is a Universality about which we all relate.
The list of biases, on the other hand, proves it ain't always so easy.

a certain Chinese encyclopedia

animals are divided into:
(a) belonging to the Emporer
(b) embalmed
(c) tame
(d) sucking pigs
(e) sirens
(f) fabulous
(g) stray dogs
(h) included in the present classification
(i) frenzied
(j) innumerable
(k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush
(l) et cetera
(m) having just broken the water pitcher
(n) that from a long way off look like flies.

~ Borges

The Encyclopedia of the Brethren of Purity

The Encyclopedia of the Brethren of Purity, written by a mysterious band of philosophers in 10th Century Basra in what is now Iraq. It is generally considered the original encyclopedia.

"...to shun no science, scorn any book, or to cling fanatically to no single creed. For [their] own creed encompasses all the others and comprehends all the sciences generally. This creed is the consideration of all existing things, both sensible and intelligible, from beginning to end, whether hidden or overt, manifest or obscure . . . in so far as they all derive from a single principle, a single cause, a single world, and a single Soul."
- from the Ikhwan al-Safa, or Encyclopedia of the Brethren of Purity; Rasa'il IV

The Brethen divided the sciences into three categories, outlined here, with help from Professor De Callataÿ at the Institure of Ismaili Studies in London.

Propaedeutic Science: the sciences of education, which serve the quest of subsistence and for the goodness of the living in this world, including: writing and reading, language and grammar, calculation and operations, poetry and prose, auguries and auspices and the like, magic, talismans, alchemy, tricks and the like, professions, crafts, sale and purchase, trades, cultivation, breeding, biographies and histories.

Religious and Conventional Science: the sciences of the healing of souls and for the quest of the hereafter, including: science of revelation, science of interpretation, narratives, reports, jurisprudence, norms and laws, recollection, exhortations, asceticism and mysticism, interpretation of dreams.

Philosophical Sciences:
Mathematics: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music
Logic: poetics, rhetorics, topics, analytics, sophistics
Natural Sciences: science of corporal principles, science of the heaven and the world, science of coming-to-be and passing-away, science of atmospheric events, science of minerals, science of plants, science of animals
Metaphysics: knowledge of the Creator, science of spiritual beings, science of psychic beings, science of politics (with 5 subdivisions: prophetic, royal, public, domestic, private), science of the Return

Nobody said anything about the blogosphere

The geosphere includes all the lifeless things of the universe. The dust, rocks, fireballs, and icycles.

The biosphere refers to those things in the cosmos that are living. It is said that the geosphere gives rise to the biosphere.

The noosphere is the realm of the human mind. It suggests a topography of human reason and belief, complete with the graceful beaches and rocky coastlines in between.