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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Reality, is it always a reflected? — Well, we cannot know any other.
Whether it still exists, whether reality is there, independent of being experienced — that is a matter of opinion and of belief rather than of knowledge.
What is certain is that nothing exists without interacting with others in some way. If it is something, it exerts effects on other things. In these effects it comes into appearance. So it mirrors itself in the other.
We are not used, however, to attributing “knowledge” and “experience” to something other than human. And even this might not have been enough in former times, before it was commonly realized and accepted that all humans are essentially equal.
The essential question here is how we see ourselves (and accordingly the other), whom or what we identify with.
Sometimes a distinction is made between the reality — and all that we know or perceive of it, the (mental) representation of reality. But such a distinction, though sometimes making perfect sense, is far from being considered absolute.
On the one hand, every representation of reality is real by itself; on the other hand, all that we regard as real at some time, eventually turns out to be just a representation.
So this distinction plays an important role specifically in the advance of knowledge (which is always paired with practical changes, changed habits or so). In effect it is the distinction between good or bad representations, between those matching and forwarding reality — and those missing and blocking it.
It definitely makes sense to introduce space here as a fundamental notion. And it has far reaching implications.
“Space” refers to a principal indetermination and openness: Much more is possible than appears at first sight. And things change, through permanent (inter-)activity. Linear representations of this activity soon reach their limits, since everything gets much too complex.
In this situation the notion of space may simplify a lot. It comprises, it comprehends the whole.
But it is also logically simpler, coming before any linearity — if we understand space as the embodiment of activity as such.
Particular linear (inter-)actions are manifestations of this potentiality, tracks rutted through continual repetition, dug into space, structuring it, channelling the activity.
Mechanical devices are, in the main, constructed linearly. The force is transmitted from one component part to the next, wherefore an appropriate connection has to exist.
With computers, things are fundamentally different: the activity is allowed to make almost unlimited jumps. It is conducted and controlled by the program, to be sure, but the program itself can pick from an embarrassment of riches. For that very reason it is capable of being so exact, of reacting on even the finest nuances, of searching its way past all obstacles.
Each particular way may pretty well be called “linear” — its base, however, is not linear, but rather spatial.