Page 13 - Boundedness Revisited

2. Because both cases are unbounded, neither has priority.

Although the case which is, is so without exception, there is no
way to establish a reason for it being so rather than its opposite.
Any such prior “cause” is impossible because only the bounded
can be said to “depend upon” what is outside it. (Of course, since
boundaries are fictional, the relationship goes both ways.) This
aspect of the unbounded renders meaningless the metaphysical
questions of ultimate necessity and the a priori; they cannot be
applied to the unbounded without denying the principle of
boundedness. The “highest” necessity is simply the statement of
the two cases of the unbounded, and that one and only one of
those cases must, without exception, be the case.

3. Any inside establishes the case of any inside and its
outside.
The “actual” case of unboundedness is established by the
principle of boundedness. Given any inside, that principle
immediately gives the outside of that inside. Any boundary-making
event thus has significance for unboundedness. The reverse is just
as true: the principle of boundedness is “metaphysically”
dependent upon being given any inside by the inside-and-its-
outside case of unboundedness.

. . . . .

Addendum (2017)

A consequence of the principle of boundedness not fully
developed in the original essay is briefly touched on in sections
I.A.3 (closed insides) and II.C (philosophy of science). It is the
compound illusion of three-dimensional reality and nonfictional
boundaries displayed in such unsupportable beliefs as “free will”
and “the present.”

Reification of purely spatial objects existing independently of
time, an unclosed boundary violation, leads to a host of errors.
The arbitrariness of correctly-bounded four-dimensional objects,
including sub-atomic events as well as activities of the human

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