"By the phaneron I mean the collective total of all that is in any way or in any sense present to the mind, quite regardless of whether it corresponds to any real thing or not. If you ask present when, and to whose mind, I reply that I leave these questions unanswered, never having entertained a doubt that those features of the phaneron that I have found in my mind are present at all times and to all minds."
-Charles Sanders Peirce
Do we have any access to existence or reality in itself or do we only get to perceive reality through the filter of our biology or our limited senses? Limited to seeing only visible light, hearing certain sounds, not a great sense of smell, not very good eyesight compared to a mantis shrimp and each animal processing reality in different ways through different senses. Looking at it this way there is not one objective world, but as many worlds as there are minds that can form an impression of it. Snakes seeing in infra red, eagles looking from a birds eye view and having much better sight, scorpions forming an impression of the environment from sitting still and picking up on tiny vibrations in the sand. Catfish tasting the water to form an impression of their world. Humans using sound vibrations to communicate and develop language, eventually writing it down and taking knowledge outside of our heads, producing language and writing and culture.
Do we see with our eyes or do we see with language? The eyes bringing an impression of the world and presenting it to consciousness in language. If it were not presented as language then it would not be able to categorize and label what it has seen and would not be able to store it as memory. There might be direct perception of the world in the present moment, but beyond instinct and the senses there must be some sort of language, some sort of idea that differentiates things from each other in order to have any memory or imagination beyond the present moment. In this present based mode self and world would not be differentiated until something impresses on the body in some way and causes an instinctive reaction. That instinct or the body knows that there is a difference between the world and oneself, even if the animal consciousness might not be aware of it and seems more present than we are. How does that instinct or that body know it? What is the mode of all those separate knowings? Are they in the individual or outside of them?
This world maybe something different than language, and our 'objective perception' of the world may be just filtered through us to produce an image of it that is accepted as reality, but how much information is filtered out first of all by the limitations of the biology? Not being able to see in infra-red or other parts of the electromagnetic field, having less acute hearing and smell than some animals, all the examples through out nature of certain animals being able to see or hear or taste better than us or having senses that we do not have. So there's the limitation of the senses and the biology of the body you're in first of all, then how much of that information actually flows through the senses? How much are we are aware of? Then how much is lost of that awareness from the senses as it finally bubbles up into consciousness? That is all we know of the objective reality of the world and it seems very limited, information seems to be being filtered out as it comes in and what is presented to consciousness is never the full reality.
I read about this idea of the idios kosmos and the koinos kosmos. Idios kosmos meaning the private world in our own heads and koinos kosmos meaning the shared world that we all have access to. It seems these two overlap and form each other. We might not all have access to the particular parts of the shared or outside world, one person lives in india and has never been to england, another in england and has never been to india. One person might know or have done certain things and another has not or knows something else, but were all in contact with that shared world taking certain things from it storing the memories of it and having it inform and build our own private world. Experience and memory build up the self, but before memory or language took hold the experiencer would be the experience and there would be no division between the outside world and yourself.
If a chimp had an open book before it, it might see black lines with a white background. It might not even be interested by it, something a little more intelligent or with a different perspective could see little abstract shapes and symbols, something entertaining like art, another perspective or intelligence could decipher the symbols and see they have meaning. Another could could see it was language, and still another could read it and see it has meaning. All perspectives would be true or 'the reality' depending on the perspective.
How does a computer understand and process the information put into it? A series of 0 and 1's coming up on the computer screen as images and language, a digital perceptible reality that makes sense and has meaning to us. Using electricity, storing information in matter and code becoming the reality you see on the screen.
The code of the DNA sequence would be much more complicated, but resulting in a form that the code has written. The body storing information and having an electromagnetic field. Interfacing with something greater than it and coming up with a translation of it through the senses.
We see them merging in the body, the electromagnetic field, the matter of the body itself (where information is stored which creates the body) the information encoded in that through DNA and the information or causes before that which created the DNA. Which one of these processes is fundamental or said to be 'you'? Then we have the environment, the earth and the universe and everything that enters consciousness and becomes you. All these hidden selves behind the conscious experience of being yourself, your name, your job, your beliefs and experiences.
Could i be a series of 0 and 1's playing it out oblivious to a higher order, unable to see past the binary of my own biological functioning? Things coming up on the computer screen, thinking that's me and i have control? Reality itself is filtered through like that, from the environment into the human mind, converted to the machine then through the machine converted back into the human. What wrote the code, built the body, the interface, and what is behind it?
We could no more understand the universe or nature than computer binary could understand human language or what it represents, but like the computer code that communicates human language not knowing what it is, the universe and all those hidden selves enable the human experience and are implied in it. All creations walking around blind to themselves trapped in their own coding trying to get out and failing, but every code implies every other code and every code needs an encoder. You can say the code emerges from the sun and the galaxies and the universe but what does that mean? And that itself is ordered and implies a vast intelligence intrinsic within nature and running through all things in the universe. The code of all codes, meaning and existence itself. A reality that can be half glimpsed, but never known.
As the scientists and mathematicians equations seem to equate to or describe reality we marvel that something so abstract, that something that humans have grasped hold of in the world of ideas seems to be at the basis of it all and we have merely tapped into it, but considering that we are an aspect of the universe, contained within it and grown out of it; considering that we are not foreign to it, that it is millions if not billions of years ahead of us. Looking at how all our ideas, our knowledge, or technology are only possible through being in relation to it, understanding it or tapping into things that are pre-existent within it already we should acknowledge that we are reading or relearning nature and that there is nothing we can tap into that it hasn't tapped into already. Being billions of years behind it we are simply trying to catch up or capture it. Finding ourselves in the universe, in a body, in existence and trying to figure out what it is or what it could mean, what its parameters will allow us to create, conceive, grasp or unfold.
Think of the possible advances in technology or knowledge in only a million years time we as a species might make, will we be able to download our consciousness into a computer? Then think about how nature or the universe has a few billion years of a head start on us. If something like that can be tapped into in the future then it could in some subtle or unknowable way be written into existence or reality from the start and once more were merely tapping into a part of the universe. This could bring in the idea of preservation and change our outlook on death. Consciousness could be duplicated, the information and energy could be preserved and you would go on in some way without a body, or with a very different body.
Mathematics seems to describe it, from the laws of nature, the fractals in the landscape and the bodies of living things, but there is something more there than mathematics. There is meaning, consciousness, the sense of self, all the sense information coming into the idios kosmos from the shared world. The feel of sensations, the experience that cant be described. Mathematics might be behind it all but the feel of sun on your face, the taste of salt, the sensations of colour, touch, falling in love or tooth ache don't feel very mathematical or chemical. You could try to describe it or explain it in that way but something would be missing from the description. This conscious idios kosmos, this feeling or experience, this private universe cant be quantified. From these island universes of human minds mathematics emerges and discovers that mathematics was in the universe already. It seems to describe things but it cant quantify itself. As mathematics is in the universe and in human minds there may be an unquantifiable aspect to both. The mind that can conceive, create, describe and contain all these things, and always about itself or its existence it can say nothing provable, sensible, or definitive for it is the ground on which everything else stands and follows.