Page 14 - Boundedness Revisited

brain, has two unavoidable implications emotionally difficult to
accept.

First, any possible real inside is unique as well as arbitrarily or
conventionally defined. Because it is fictionally separated from
what it is not (its outside), it is not correct to assert that one such
imagined object “causes” another. To do so interposes a
nonfictional boundary between them. It is correct only to
conclude that any proposed division of reality establishes mere
contiguity or continuity within the mass-energy monist substance.
And since the advent of relativity theory in physics, one can
establish a prior and subsequent relationship between hypothetical
events (valid four-dimensional insides) only from the viewpoint of
an observer (another valid object); absolute time as well as space
have been rejected. Empiricism—and personal experience—give
us expectations with varying degrees of probability that one cluster
of perceived characteristics will be followed by another. But that is
not causality.

Further, the absence of real boundaries (equivalent to the
necessity that every inside has an outside) means that every
supposed real event or object extends through time as well as
space. “Free will” requires a nonfictional boundary between past
and future, a discontinuity justifying a wide range of emotions and
judgements; the alternative runs counter to the way most of us
make sense of experience. Logic, in this implication of the
principle of boundedness, permits a description of reality one may
call “acausal determinism.” As observers serially aware of our own
thoughts, we imagine that we are always at the crest of a temporal
wave, willing without antecedent what should be our next thought
or action. But “consciousness” is simply an internally-generated
voice the brain has learned to distinguish from everything else it
hears or sees. Its sources, although unconscious, are as subject to
the continuum of antecedents as any other real phenomena. The
illusion of autonomy resembles the dualist metaphysics of
theology: the unmoved mover, the discarnate animator surviving
physical disintegration. It is not coincidental that the negative
form of existentialism arose in the same era as relativity physics
and logical empiricism.

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