How is it that we know anything at all about the world? What is the nature of this knowledge? We have learned and discovered things about our world, like the nature of space-time, the charge of the electron, and the path of planets around their suns. Do these things have knowledge of us ‘observers’ or is our human generated knowledge an attribute of our biology itself?

Our sensory system allows us to interface with the world by supplying information on the attributes of that world. Our central nervous system creates and stores a unified ‘experience’ of the world from the disparate sensory data being supplied. It not only stores, but allows us to recall, and manipulate that information. We observe and learn, through the collection, processing and recollection of our experience with the world, and are able to analyze, make judgments, and gain knowledge of it. If this were not so we would emerge from the womb in complete possession of the knowledge needed, not only to survive in the world, but of ‘truths’, like the electrons charge, as well. For us, as ‘observers’, our interaction with this biological ‘experience’ is critical for knowing anything at all.

We know that the observers perceptual platform is built from 5 main sensory channels: Sight, Smell, Sound, Taste and Touch. In their interactions with totIs reality they produce biological signals, limited both quantitatively and qualitatively, compared to the vast gamut of attributes available in totIs reality. These channels, and the signals they produce, are variable, inaccurate, and prone to malfunction, due to their very nature. Ultimately these signals – which are not, and never were, the same thing as the attribute they are reporting on – are transmitted to our central nervous system, via nerve fibers, for assembly and fabrication into an interpreted representation of the organism’s interactions with totIs reality. This fabricated ‘interpretation’, produced by, and extant in, the neurons within our central nervous system, is our actual, and only, ‘experience’ of, what we believe to be, reality. It appears to be a ‘real’ world, out there, but it is actually completely constituted within our skulls, built of the bio-signal inputs from our 5 sensory channels and interpreted into the world we ‘experience’. This ‘experience’ is our antIs reality, it creates, for us, an antIs world, and is the data source of our knowledge.

Of course the process is much more complicated than the above description. We have other bio-sensory inputs which aid in the function of the organism, kinesthetic inputs, vestibular inputs,  limbic inputs, ’bio-clock’ inputs, the inputs of our various organs, and more. Like the quantum world, the deeper one digs the more complex the structure appears to be. But the fact remains, the organism’s bio-sensory system is a closed loop system that interprets and constructs for us, from our interactions with totIs reality, an ‘experience’ of an antIs world that exists only within the confines of our biology itself. What we ‘experience’ as an out there is created and exists, exclusively, ‘in here’.

All that we experience, our antIs experience, is built on those inputs, and those inputs alone. Much like the ‘investors’ in my earlier post “Reality Beyond Observation”,  this antIs experience and the reality represented by it, is completely dependent on totIs reality. TotIs reality, on the other hand, is neither circumscribed by, nor dependent on, our antIs experience of it. This relationship precludes the use of antIs experiences and the reality represented to us by them to ‘prove’ that they are ‘actual’ reality. At the same time, the identification of two different classes of reality, antIs and totIs, gives us a platform from which to explore the nature of totIs reality itself, free of the constraints we instinctually place on it to conform to our antIs representation. So, the questions we ask about the nature of totIs reality must be free of any reliance on, or expectation that, our antIs experience will dictate the nature of totIs reality. This is an extremely difficult task, it is akin to asking a fish to describe ‘dry’. Its description will be unlike anything it has ever experienced or that it even has vocabulary to describe (if fish could speak).

I started out asking how it is we know anything, and we’ve seen that observation, based on our antis experience of reality, is central to our knowing. So, in our exploration of totIs reality let’s begin by asking, “Is observation, outside of an antIs experience, a property of the totIs universe?” In other words, does matter, energy, and space-time, require or exhibit an attribute called ‘observation’? At first blush it would seem clear that if we were not here to look at the moon, it would still exist. But this perspective still places the moon’s existence in relationship to an antIs ‘observers’ universe. We need to be more exact in asking our question so as to isolate the attribute ‘observation’ from our antIs observer. So let’s ask simply, “Does the Moon observe the Earth? Do the planets observe the Sun? Does an electron observe a proton?” What these questions essentially ask is; “is an interaction that requires neither decision, intent, consent, nor knowledge, between matter, energy and space-time, equivalent to observation?”

The only way we know if an interaction has taken place is through our own observations. This is exemplified when we see that the above questions could not have been asked until very recently, as concepts such as planets revolving around suns, etc, had no existence in our past reality. These modern concepts did not exist, until humanity, through observation and the ‘knowledge’ it afforded, ‘discovered’ these ‘truths’ about the observable universe. Through observation we obtain knowledge of what was previously unknown, be it the danger of a mother bear with her cubs just beyond us or the value of the electrons charge.

But does the mother bear need to be observed before she exists? Does the electron need the same? More to the point, do the planets have to observe gravity before an interaction can, or is able, to take place? These questions are meaningless in as much as the interactions we’re discussing require nothing more than that the matter and energy simply exist. Being, nothing more, is all that is requisite for the systems to function. They neither require nor exhibit observation or knowledge in their functioning. The only way we can aver that they do exhibit such attributes is if we imbue them with this ability ‘by hand’, that is, to impose such attributes on them, to anthropomorphize them. It is only the ‘observer’, experiencing an antIs reality, for whom ‘observation’ and ‘discovery’ is possible.

We can not equate the description “the electron interacts with the proton” with “the electron observes the proton”. To substitute the word ‘observe’ for ‘interact’ anthropomorphizes the electron and makes it an erroneous and misleading description. Observation can not be equated with the interactions between matter and energy. The totIs universe is neither ‘observable’ nor ‘unobservable’, its very nature contains no attribute relating to observation at all. Neither can we discover what the universe ‘looks like’ from the vantage point of matter and energy as, from their vantage point and nature, observations do not exist. What we do, instinctually, is to imagine what the interactions ‘would look like’ if we were the particle, observing them. We mentally interject an antIs observer into a totIs framework and believe we can observe totIs reality. This is mere anthropomorphism and does not let us glimpse totIs reality at all. Observation itself exists solely within the framework of an antIs experience and is relegated solely to biological organisms. We could change the meaning of interaction to mean ‘observe’, but then we are using semantics to force totIs reality to conform to our antIs experience of it. Up until now, with antIs and totIs reality conflated, that is exactly what has been happening.

With ‘observation’ confined to biological entities and antIs experience, how does ‘knowledge’ fit into the totIs universe? As mentioned at the very beginning of this post, observation and  knowledge are inextricably linked. From whence comes this knowledge? It must emerge from the ‘unknown’. The observed world, which our experience makes so real and vast to us, emerges from a boundless unknown whose breadth and depth itself is unknown. Is the unknown itself a feature or property of the totIs universe, or like observation, is it simply a function of antIs experience in relation to totIs reality?

As observation requires an observer, so the known requires a knower. The observer and the knower are one and the same entity. We’ve seen that the observers antIs experience of reality in relation to the gamut of possible inputs available from totIs reality is selective, restricted, fallible and prone to error and malfunction. Even for the most efficiently functioning bio-sensory system available to an observer, the gamut of information in totIs reality that is unavailable to that observer comprises a vast and measureless expanse of unknowns that dwarf anything the observer may know. The observers very experience of being, bifurcates totIs reality into an observable known, emerging from a fathomless unknown. To ask whether the unknown is a feature or attribute of totIs reality is a meaningless question. Every question the observer asks about reality is actually a question about the information that is unavailable to their antIs experience. Is there a single ‘problem’ we can pose, leaving aside meaningless and nonsensical ones, that will not be ‘solved’ in totIs? No. The fate of not a single particle in the totIs universe is in question. In totIs reality there are no hypotheticals, no ‘missing’ information and no unknowns. This is a major part of the definition of totIs itself. This is the ‘Is’ in ‘tot-Is’, a reality of being, beyond our ability to experience or know.

To imagine that matter and energy ‘observe’ anything is to imagine that our experience of antIs reality is equivalent to totIs reality. We instinctually overlay or interject our experience of antIs reality onto the totIs universe, and believe that matter and energy ‘experience’ the same universe we experience, and thus, ‘observe’ it as well. Observation, knowledge, our very biologically created experience of reality, that is, antIs reality, separates us from and occludes the actual nature of totIs reality. As conscious observers, we exist in an inferior and dependent relationship to totIs reality. It, literally, can neither be ‘observed’, nor can it be ‘known’ in an antIs way. What we observe and what we discover are artifacts of antIs reality. As you can imagine, this raises serious questions about the nature of what it is we have discovered as human beings. All of our discoveries and theories, from the myriad ancient and modern fallacies we once believed true, up to and including the profound theories of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, have, at their cores, an ‘observer’. If totIs reality can not be observed, then what are we looking at?