Our purpose here is to widen the notion of knowledge so that it embraces all kinds of reflections of reality.
This implies that we hold every reality to be ultimately sort of knowledge, for all reality coming into appearance is always already reflected.
Sometimes we will also say: everything that exists has knowledge.
Everything has knowledge and consciousness. The true nature of every thing is knowledge. This is the real substance all things consist of. The core of matter.
In order to come to such conclusions we have to highlight certain properties of what is usually called “knowledge”, while rather ignoring others. So that, in the end, the usual knowledge appears to be a special case of our generalized notion of knowledge.
For us an essential characteristic of knowledge is that it expresses constant relations between different things. It establishes a relationship among them and holds this relationship.
Knowledge fixes, so to speak, different things to distinct places of the same shared space.
Naturally, this pattern is to be found everywhere: it’s what we are looking for. That’s what we want to know, all that we can know: certain stable relations, representable, reproducible, computable.
So reality is always a certain arrangement of things — which themselves may be subject to a similar analysis. And so on and so forth.
The relationships between material things are not less real than those things themselves. They are often formulated as so-called “laws”, in physics as laws of nature, for example.
Some of these laws are far from being obvious. It takes time to discover them; making use of them has to be learned, often bound up with special technical skills and equipment. Others, however, are grasped intuitively. We act in accordance with them naturally, long before they are recognized as regular patterns and formulated as laws.
We all have sort of innate knowledge, not learned, but inherited. It is stored in our genes, so to speak, and materialized in our body. In that sense every living organism is embodied knowledge.
Yet, we are even going to go one step further and regard every material thing as stored knowledge.
Even in the enhanced sense developed here knowledge is not the whole thing. It is everywhere, everything is knowledge, but to be really real it needs more.
What is missing is activity.
Activity causes change. As such it is a constant threat to knowledge, the fixed order, where everything has its well-defined place. For all eternity.
Activity can play havoc with everything. In a moment’s notice.
Activity rarely causes something totally different, mostly it is movement in the known.
Actually, it’s always possible to find a point of view where all is known — as well as another one where all is getting new.
Activity is always both. Every step may be seen as leaving the old and entering the new — or, as well, as simply moving from one spot to another of the same overall space.
Things that move change their location, while the space that comprises all possible locations remains unchanged. The space does not change, but it can become another, pass into a different one. There is a plurality of distinct spaces.
So (each) space can stay the same forever and represent unchangeable knowledge we can rely on.
A space represents the entirety of a thing’s possible locations or states. It is constituted by the various appearances of the thing.
In order to appear at different points, the thing has to move, activity is needed. Looked at that way, the space is the potential result of all possible movements, the abstract embodiment of the needed activity.
The spaces, as they are described here and of which there exists a plurality, represent constant relations and thus are spaces of knowledge. But that’s not the end of the story. Not at all are they purely mental constructions, but instead full of inner activity. That makes them real.
They are reality. And reality is nothing else.