The act of knowing (as described before) is central and fundamental and has impacts on everything based upon it. It affects the structure of knowledge, making it fundamentally dynamic.
So, what does this mean? Is there no stable structure at all?
Well, initially it says that the elements of every structure emerge from activity and actually are activity, in their deepest inside, as one might say.
Yet, we have found out some more, namely that there is also always a spatial structural component, such as a net of relations and a field of tension. Thus we can redescribe the act of knowing so that a spatial structure concentrates and reduces to one thing.
This thing is a thing only because it represents a repeatedly observable regularity, that is, because it muliplies. So it constitutes a particular structure of its own, established by its appearances. Seen in this light, the central act of knowledge is the passing from one structure to another.
Hence activity is not only enclosed in the elements that form the structures of knowledge, but the deformations and reorganisations of the structures themselves are in effect the same activity.
The very essential parts of knowledge-structures, their true elements, are their alterations!
The elements of knowledge structures mentioned before are exactly that what we have elsewhere called the objects or bodies or particles of knowledge. Nowadays we may primarily think of data, but every other representation of some knowledge (or information, as one might sometimes say) is also implied; it merely must be reproducible and somehow uniformly applicable so that it has kind of constant meaning. Like a mathematical formula, for example. Or a description of a plant. That means that these elements or objects or things may have quite different forms, some of them very complex. Still, in a way each of them is one thing. “One” just means that it may be duplicated as a whole, One is the base of every plurality. And seen in this light every such thing is — in spite of all possible complexity — simple. This is no magic, but sheer logic.
The act of knowing always takes place in a non-empty space. Every search for knowledge tries to discover a stable pattern — in examining a pre-existing structure. Even the pattern itself is in a sense already existing.
Nevertheless something is created: exposing the new means changing the existent. The pattern becomes a thing that has not been so before. It solidifies, becomes concrete, graspable. So that something new arises being more than simply a new arrangement. The crux is its creation which does not happen once and for all, but ever anew, whenever the new thing appears. The fact that this happens habitually or automatically does not mean that no activity is needed.
Where there is knowledge, there is activity, too. Only so it can come into being. It manifests itself in activity. In doing so it gives form to activity.
On this basis the probably most general definition of knowledge may be given, as counterpart of activity, so to speak. Thus, while activity stands for change, knowledge means sameness and steadiness.
The preceding definition of knowledge is in accordance with the common tacit assumption that the laws of nature, for example, hold timelessly universally. And not only the laws, but also the involved terms or rather the notions or ideas these refer to. A proposition accepted as true may proove false, but the concept of truth as such always remains unaffected. The value of a certain quantity may change, but not the respective number itself, such as the three, or that what it stands for, its meaning, the idea of three.
And so we may realize a constancy we always rely on, the constancy of certain elements of our theories and sciences, mental entities that serve as foundations of all our systems, even those of mathematics and logic. Viewed is this light our definition first of all just features clearly that constancy, giving it a name. We now call it “knowledge” — which is certainly not all-too farfetched.
Although each of us has to learn the laws of nature before knowing them — and maybe forgetting them again — these themselves are wholly timeless. They exist, in a manner of speaking, irrespective of whether we know and see them or not. They may come into focus — and disappear from it again. Still this does not alter them in any way.
And so are all those things existing only in our mind or psyche or so, that means all notions, conceptions and so on. They are not bound to any restrictions of time or the like, which are so typical for physically real things. This freedom makes them remain everlasting and untouchable, on one hand, but as well, on the other hand, pure fiction without any substance. What they are lacking is definitely the interaction with the real material world; which leaves them unverifiable.
At least, that is how they are frequently viewed.
But here we say that this world, seemingly independently existing (and therefore seemingly not really existing), this world of knowledge is in fact permanently connected with acivity — and thus to all the other things, through mutual influence. For even knowledge can never be without activity. And this is true not in spite of its immovability, but rather because of it. Activity is the complement of knowledge, a logical necessity. We cannot have one without the other.