SPACE OF KNOWLEDGE

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*(1). In effect it is the distinction between good or bad representations, between those matching and forwarding reality — and those missing and blocking it.

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.*(2)

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 is 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.

In view of the plurality of spaces mentioned before we may be inclined to speak of a multitude of realities and that we live in a multiverse rather than in one universe. But fact is that always only one space at a time can be real for us. And this space is in no way experienced as being limited. It is endless. And so it is the whole. It is the one and only all-embracing space.

Though in the next moment it will have become history, a limited notion, a narrow view. NOW that we see the whole picture…

Both pictures are real, both lessons are taught by experience: that reality is one, unique, all-embracing — and that there are many different realities.

Here we consciously choose a point of view that brings together seemingly contradictory things. The unity so arising is a dynamic one that goes ahead. Step by step, stage after stage. So it multiplies, inevitably creating a multitude. With contradictions — clamoring for a new uniting point of view.

A lot of what can be done with pictures of reality is not possible in reality itself. A model or a virtual reality is governed by other laws than the actual one. Still, that does not mean that there are no laws there.

Thus the presence of — as far as we can see — universal laws of nature does not indicate that there is actually one unique reality and that something following those laws cannot be virtual as well, on a very deep level. Or that those laws do not depend on the way the world is received and represented.

The opposite is much more likely: that reality is always somehow pictured and virtual.

After all, there is no logical distinction between a virtual and the actual reality.

Every image of the world is actively created. Even the seemingly passive sensory perception is actually active. As well as every scientific measurement. So that all that we know about the world is basically a construction.

All reality is constructed. We make it real.

Knowing relies on conventions of doing. We learn to apply our knowledge rightly: then we have really got it.

Verbal as well as visual expressions of knowledge serve as anchor points that make it easier for us to recapitulate the right actions. Yet, they may become an end in themselves, in case that our business is almost totally about such symbols. In this way complex constructions get built, self-contained artificial worlds.

These virtual realities gather our activity and transmit the resulting energy to everyone functioning as part of them. This makes those artificial realities become real. They provide us with all we need and give us access to all the other levels of reality.

The human reality is determined by social habits and joint activities. It is carried and formed by the language and many other media, which are made, in the main, for human interactivity. Language, knowledge, and, last but not least, reality, are social phenomena.

Whether or not we want to — we are forced to look even at the non-human reality through the eyes that we have got, eyes that are focussed on human relations and interactions.

And, in fact, we can see ourselves reaching much further than expected. The scope of our kinship is much larger than initially realized.

Indentifying ourselves with humanity rather than with more limited concepts like nations or so may already be a step forward; however, in the end it is just as artificial and limited.

Differentiation is characteristic of knowledge as we know it, definitely. But much more of the essence is that what the distinct things have in common. To consolidate this, sometimes differentiation is appropriate — though still remaining just a secondary function, a product, not the very base of knowledge.