Space, Observer & Information
Perspective, horizons, and the situated knower
Overview
The observer is always spatially situated, and this situation shapes what information is available. A distant galaxy is known only through the light that has traveled across space to reach us; a nearby object is known through direct sensory contact. The observer's spatial location determines their informational horizon — the boundary beyond which information is inaccessible. Perspective, point of view, and the parallax of different spatial positions are all ways in which the observer's location in space constrains and shapes the information they receive.
Central Tension
The tension is between the observer's local spatial position and the aspiration to universal knowledge. Every observer sees the universe from a particular point in space, receiving information filtered by distance, angle, and the physics of signal propagation. No observer has a God's-eye view — a perspective from no particular place that sees all spatial information at once. Whether such a view is possible in principle (theism says yes, finitism says no) determines whether spatial information can ever be known completely.
Key Philosophical Questions
- Does the observer's spatial position fundamentally limit the information available to them, or can technology and theory overcome these limits?
- Is there a "view from nowhere" — a perspective that gathers all spatial information without bias from any particular location?
- How does the observer's embodiment in space affect the quality and character of the information they receive?
- Does the concept of an omnipresent observer (God) make epistemological sense — what would it mean to receive information from everywhere simultaneously?
Schools of Thought
The observer is always spatially situated; information is always received from a perspective. There is no knowledge without a spatial point of view.
All knowledge comes from sensory information gathered at the observer's spatial location; spatial distance limits and shapes what can be known.
Quantum non-locality suggests that information can be correlated across spatial separations, challenging the classical picture of spatially limited observers.
The observer is a node in a spatial information network; knowledge is the information that flows to and through that node from the surrounding space.
God is omnipresent and omniscient, receiving all spatial information simultaneously from every location. Human observers are spatially limited but can access God's universal knowledge through revelation.
Synthesis
Space, observer, and information describe the epistemological situation of any finite knower: located in space, bounded by informational horizons, and dependent on signals that traverse spatial distances. The ideal of a spatially unlimited knower — an observer everywhere at once — is the theological concept of omnipresent omniscience, against which all finite knowing is measured.
Related Dimension Pairs