In the book TotIs, I used a metaphor of bread making to show how the biologically produced antis experience of reality is of a separate class than totIs reality. There is another metaphor that can be used to demonstrate this idea in a simpler manner, which I will describe now.
We begin with a metaphor, employing a large bronze bell, which we will imagine is imbued with the ability to experience its environment. It is suspended in the open air. By its form, materials and nature, the bell’s reaction to its environment is to ring. Each kind of interaction it has will produce a unique type of ring. Raindrops, sand, pebbles, even wind impacting it will produce one kind of ring or another. Even on a mild and still day, when nothing seems to stir, minute changes in temperature and pressure will produce yet other unique rings.
This ringing, though sensitive, is the one and only product created by its interaction with reality; it is what provides the Bell its experience of its world. It is an experience of unique rings in response to unique interactions. The bell relies on its rings as its source of knowledge of its world. They will indicate the type and quality of interactions it is having, whether with a solid, liquid or vapor. From the bell’s perspective, every experience, and all knowledge of the world it lives in is revealed through its ringing. For all intents and purposes, for the bell, its ringing is reality.
But the world is not a ringing. The ring produced by a bell circumscribes neither a pebble’s, nor any other natural entity’s reality. The world is real. Its nature transcends that of the reality experienced by the ringing Bell. Shall we say then, that the Bell’s reality is false? The Bell can rely on it. Its ring provides it a source of knowledge with which to interact and know its world. In this sense it is real. Yet, it is clearly a sub-set of the source reality it interacts with. The Bell relies on a true or ultimate nature of reality to exist, but true reality does not rely on the Bell’s sub-set of reality for its existence.
This metaphor of the Bell shows us that reality exists in two possible classes. There is, what I define as, totIs reality. This is ultimate, or source reality from which all else flows. And there is the Bell’s class of reality, which I define as antIs reality. It is real to an entity, which, through its nature and form, produces a product from its interactions with totIs reality. The Bell’s antIs reality of a ringing world is, in effect, its interpretation of totIs reality. An interpretation is not equal to its source, which means that the bell’s experience, generated from source reality, is not equivalent to the source reality itself. This is what I call the Bell’s Un-equality.
To be clear, the Bell, in this metaphor, has been anthropomorphized, and we are the anthropoids it references. The Bell, and its ringing, is a simplified model of a much more complex system, that of organic, living entities. The antIs reality that the bell’s ringing produces, is observed via its experience of it. AntIs reality and observers go hand in hand. The anthropomorphism in the metaphor allows us to imagine that the Bell can experience the world around it. But the Bell is an inanimate object, and as such experiences nothing. It is a reactive system, equivalent to a mountain, tirelessly ground into sediment, or a star, whose fusion core methodically merges hydrogen into helium. But the conclusion is valid, as we shall see, regarding the existence of antIs and totIs classes of reality, with crucial ramifications for our world and us. Let’s begin by examining that which is central for the metaphor to function, namely, observation. Let’s revisit the nature of observers and observation itself, as laid out in a previous post.
Observation is an act.
To observe requires an observer.
The only observers we know of, capable of observation, are biological organisms.
Manufactured interpretations of reality are unique, to observers alone, in the universe.
Observation is dependent on the organism’s sense-experience, created from interactions with, as well as, its relationship to its environment.
Observation is neither objective, nor is it a property of the universe such as mass, energy or wavelength
The organism’s sense-experience is an internally created, biochemical construct; it is an interpretation of reality and is what I call antIs reality. The input is supplied from processed signals generated by its biochemical/bio-mechanical sensory system. These signals are then further processed by the organism’s central nervous system into this sense-experience, and are what the observer accepts as actual reality.
By its very nature, as a biological interpretive system, the organism’s experience of reality is buffered and insulated from the actual nature of that reality itself.
Contrary to the organism’s experience, neither the signals themselves nor the central nervous system’s processing of those signals IS actual reality. It is a wholly interpreted bio-sensory product.
Observation is wholly dependent on the organism’s interaction with reality, whereas reality is not at all dependent on observation.
In the universe, space-time, matter and energy are not observers.
Understanding that not a single part of the process of the observers bio-chemically created experience of reality (the source of antIs reality) IS reality is fundamental for our ability to separate the prime, totIs reality, from its unequal and dependent, antIs reality. The fabricated antIs reality and the observations made from it are very different from the nature of totIs reality. In the metaphor, it is the Bell’s ringing, in its relationship to totIs reality that creates the antIs reality the Bell will experience. The Bell’s ringing, as the metaphor describes, gives it an observer status that identifies and defines its very being. What is it that gives us our observer status? What is our metaphoric ringing?
As an experience, being occurs at that instantaneous fulcrum where manifest reality resides, riding time’s movement, away from the past and into the future. We existed in the past and we will exist in the future, but the only point of existence we actually experience is in a now moment of manifest reality. It seems to be the only place in space-time where we observers connect to reality. Let’s take a closer look at this now moment.
It seems to be the only place in the observer’s experience of time where, we might say, the organism is in sync with reality, but this is not so. Everything about the sensory input loop conspires to keep the organism out of sync with totIs reality. Described simply, it takes a discrete amount of time for the impulses, generated by our sensory system’s interaction with totIs reality, to reach the brain for processing, and a discrete amount of time for the processing, experiencing, and observing of the unfolding interpretation. What we experience as now has already happened. The now experience of the observer, an experience inseparable from its very being, is, in actuality, part and parcel of the biochemical process of stimulus propagation, interpretation, and representation. This is the ring of biology. The only now an observer ever partakes of is an antIs now, created for it through its antIs process. This now moment is a creation of biology itself. Such a now would not exist, in this antIs form, as an attribute of totIs reality, just as the antIs ring experience of the bell, from its interaction with the pebble, does not describe the actual, totIs, nature of that pebble or reality.
That the Bell, in our metaphor, will experience its entire antIs universe as a ringing, and that it will believe it to be equal to totIs reality, highlights the fact that it has no other method or input to do otherwise. Correspondingly, the observer experiences its entire universe through its antIs now moment. It defines and animates its antIs universe as a place of flowing time. It is important to understand that the biological process that produces an antIs experience for an observer is absolute. There is no single place on the continuum of antIs reality where the fabricated experience jumps off the tracks of its own process and exists on par with totIs reality. There is no, single, unique individual, by whose antIs experience, we can claim this IS reality. The entire gamut of antIs experiences, and the realities they create, lie along a single continuum, forever separate from the reality they interact with. AntIs reality and the observer are an inseparable and self-sustaining pair, the creation of a process of a bio-sensory interpretation of its interactions with totIs reality.
Once one acknowledges the truth of this idea it becomes obvious how the observers perspective animates and is animated by its antIs experience. It is the a-priori ground from which all investigation and analysis is performed, and to which all results must be made to finally comport in order to be considered real. It is in this sense that observation, through antIs experience, is absolute. Without this perspective, antIs and totIs reality remain commingled into one, universal reality, with antIs given prime significance and authority by the observer, when such is unwarranted.
To illustrate the subtlety of this, let’s see how this works in physics by looking at Professor Hilary Putnam’s paper “Time and Physical Geometry” (The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 64, No. 8 (Apr. 27, 1967), pp. 240-247)
In his paper, Professor Putnam gives a logical proof, based on special relativity, that all objects and events are real, that is, they do not require a now moment relative to an I-now reference frame, to be actually real. They are shown to be equally real in all past and future now moments, regardless of the relativistic I-now, you-now, or anyone-now reference frame they occupy. One sentence stands out in his paper on page’s 246-247:
“And, if we allow all physical systems (even electromagnetic fields, etc.) as “observers” (as why should we not?) and allow observers to use coordinate systems in which they are not at rest, then there are certainly “enough observers.”
In this sentence, Professor Putnam has effectively anthropomorphized all physical systems to comport with what we observers experience. This is an anthropocentric view of reality. His technical reason for doing so is to create enough observers in relative motion to one another so that these observers can then become the source of the now moments throughout the relativistic reference frames of space-time. This is necessary in order to allow all, relative, past and future occurrences equal reality to the one we experience in our own I-now space-time reference frame. All nows become equally real and no now is central in the universe. As a technique it works well. As an example of the entanglement of the observer with the absolute nature of antIs reality, and so, the observers equating antIs with totIs reality, it is unequivocal. The nows that Professor Putnam creates by allowing for all physical systems to be observers, are, by default, equivalent to the very now he, and we all, experience as real, unquestioningly, every moment of our conscious existence. A now has no other reality for us, other than the one we experience, and it is this now that the physical systems will exhibit for us as well.
The ringing that the Bell experiences when a pebble strikes it, cannot be equated with the actual and true nature of that pebble, or the system it exists within. An interpretation of a thing is not equal to the thing itself. But the observer will seek to use and authenticate antIs experience as totIs reality, not because it chooses to but because it has no other choice. The now moment we experience as biology is part of our created antIs reality, and is not of the same class as totIs reality. In totIs, a now will have a very different nature than in antIs. Its nature is not circumscribed by our experience of it. In that sense, from a totIs perspective, such an antIs now would not even exist as the basis of its actual nature. This shows us why, in this and every case, we should not allow all physical systems as observers. It also describes why the observers perspective is a limited sub-set of totIs reality, and how the very act of observation is made from a perspective inaccessible to totIs reality.
It should be noted that for an observer to accede that they “don’t know everything” or “there is more to reality than I can know” is not enough to mitigate the observers inability to experience actual totIs reality, using their antIs experience. For observers, antIs experience is the genesis and basis of their reality, and their being, so such pronouncements are in relation to antIs reality only, leaving it as the prime reality, so totIs reality would continue to be fully occluded.
For an observer, to experience the world through an antIs now moment, with its associated flow of time, is akin to viewing the opaque surface of a hidden dimension and mistaking it for reality. No matter how carefully we probe and describe that surface, it remains an illusion. As observers we are unable to transcend the nature of our antIs experience and the reality it engenders, but being able to conceptually separate antIs and totIs reality gives us a platform from which we might be able to make further investigation and discussion possible, and so, to probe beyond this opaque surface that antIs reality creates.
To us, as biology in the process of living, our experience of being is the most real thing there is. Roses are red, the blue sky is up, sugar is sweet, I was, I am, I will be. This is the world we experience and know, and it is as real to us as can be. And because it is so unquestioningly real, we automatically imbue all of nature with these qualities that our experience of being creates. But as we have now seen, this is antIs reality. It is created by and for the benefit of our biology itself, and our consciousness, as observers, is at the center of this creation. The nature of space-time, matter and energy are not constrained by our experiences of them. That red we see is our brains interpretation of the signals from retinal cells reporting on something that has interacted with them. Neither you nor I have ever actually seen a photon. This goes for all of our bio-senses. We make sense of our world through our experience of it and automatically project that sensed reality onto everything around us. This is the anthropocentrism that occludes the actual nature of reality and the universe, and we cannot use our senses to transcend it. If anything, our senses only serve to validate the veracity of the reality they create. We experience reality, the matter and forces of the universe do not experience anything, they simply are. There is no big or small, simply a range of scales, no hot or cold, simply a range of temperatures. Red, blue, up, down, left, right, hard, soft, each of these attributes is a creation of our biology. By defining the antIs process and showing that even just one part of our experienced reality is a purely processed interpretation, it then follows for the entirety of our experienced reality as well, and that includes our experience of a past, a future and a now.
The implications of these ideas are significant, and include the possibility that actual, totIs, reality is un-observable outside of an antIs experience. It also calls into question the very nature of knowledge, or more specifically, the nature of the unknown, since observation and knowledge are inextricably linked, and the known must emerge from its source, the unknown. Does an unknown exist? Is it an attribute of totIs reality? These questions are born of our antIs experience. The totIs universe may be neither observable nor un-observable, but of a different state completely, an anobservable state. For the unknown, a similar situation could exist, as regards its being neither knowable nor un-knowable, an aknowable state. Additionally, in a universe where time’s attributes no longer comport with our experience of it, questions of age, size, distance, speed, causality and separateness itself, become problematic. Moreover, questions of pre-determinism and free will attain new relevance in the face of this reevaluation of time’s nature. In an anobservable and aknowable universe, being is not constrained by time or place. The universe IS, in absolute terms; was and will be is our antIs experience. If this is so, is-not takes on an absolute nature as well. The fate of not a single particle in the totIs universe is in question. In totIs reality there are no hypotheticals, no hidden variables and no unknown. Such a state would auto-annihilate the very antIs experience biology might try to create of it, along with its coincident observer, as the very totIs nature of being would eclipse any notions of separateness in either space or time as we experience them.
