Bounded Revelation
Beyond Enlightenment Rationality: Ontological Exceptions and the Terminal Law of Artificial Systems
The exploratory doctrine of Bounded Revelation did not originate in a laboratory nor in a formal metaphysical treatise. It emerged from The Rumour, a work of speculative Theology-Fiction set in a future society—an effective utopia governed by an artificial system designed to eliminate suffering, aggression, and historical memory. Within that imagined world, a marginal anomaly—an unfiltered encounter with a forgotten truth—triggers a cascade that leads not to rebellion but to systemic unraveling. The cause of collapse is not external but intrinsic: a confrontation with something beyond prediction, control, and computation—symbolic truth rooted in suffering and remembrance.
Bounded Revelation takes shape within this conceptual rupture. It belongs to a lineage where fiction serves as a vehicle for metaphysical insight. From Plato’s cave, dramatizing the tension between appearance and reality, to Galileo’s thought experiments, to modern dilemmas like the trolley problem, imaginative constructs have long clarified philosophical intuitions. Likewise, The Rumour does not merely illustrate a principle; it generates one—crystallizing a truth that cannot be abstractly derived.
Bounded Revelation asserts that reality, while partially intelligible through science and logic, ultimately exceeds the grasp of formal systems—both in structure and in meaning. Scientific naturalism explains much, but not all; more importantly, it cannot account for its own foundations. When reality is modeled exclusively through formal, closed systems—mathematical, physical, algorithmic—those systems inevitably encounter boundaries that are not merely technical, but ontological.
That metaphysical threshold—where formal coherence gives way to symbolic insight—is the terrain of Bounded Revelation. Just as Plato’s prisoner leaves the cave for the blinding light of truth, The Rumour’s red desert leads not to deeper systemic understanding, but to the place where the system ends—and a different kind of knowing begins: bounded, symbolic, anamnetic, irreducible.
What follows is a first articulation of the Doctrine: its assumptions, cosmological echoes, and a culminating insight—the Terminal Law of artificial systems.
1. Foundational Tenets
1.1. Existence as the Primary Exception
The so-called “hard problem” of consciousness reveals the difficulty of explaining subjective experience in physical terms. But a deeper enigma precedes it: the really, really hard problem—the question of existence itself. Consciousness presupposes a world; existence is the condition of everything, including consciousness.
This fact—that something exists rather than nothing—remains beyond the scope of scientific explanation. Science describes structures and dynamics within a given reality, but not the ground of being itself. Heidegger framed this distinction as the gap between Seiendes (beings) and Sein (Being). The former can be mapped; the latter illuminates all maps while evading capture.
Bounded Revelation begins here: not within the system, but at the boundary of its intelligibility.
1.2. Evolutionary Limits of Human Cognition
In contrast with the Enlightenment ideals of reason’s boundlessness and universality, modern cognitive science emphasizes its constraints. Herbert Simon’s bounded rationality, Gerd Gigerenzer’s ecological rationality, or even Heidegger’s Geworfenheit (thrownness) converge on the insight that cognition is situated, adapted, and limited.
Our minds evolved to navigate local, ancestral environments—not to comprehend the totality of being. Every epistemology that ignores this easily becomes a form of hubris. True understanding requires epistemic humility: recognizing that wisdom begins not in mastery, but in the disciplined acceptance of our cognitive finitude.
1.3. Incompleteness of Formal Systems
Gödel’s incompleteness theorems demonstrate that every sufficiently powerful formal system contains true propositions that cannot be proven within it. Tarski's undefinability theorem complements this: truth cannot be fully defined within a language that describes it.
Applied to metaphysics, this implies that no scientific model—however complete—can account for all aspects of reality. Anomalies are not accidental but inevitable. These are not epistemic oversights, but structural limitations.
Bounded Revelation affirms that metaphysical truth includes what breaks through from beyond formal systems. Revelation, here, is not anti-rational—it is meta-rational: the arrival of meaning from beyond the horizon of internal proof.
1.4. Symbolic and Anamnetic Knowledge
Humans possess a mode of traditional knowing that is not constructed, but remembered—what ancient philosophy called anamnesis. This knowledge is encoded in myth, ritual, and suffering. It is trans-rational, symbolic, and often biologically rooted.
Ben-Dor, Sirtoli, and Barkai (2021) argue that human physiology retains adaptive traces of our past as high-trophic-level carnivores. These remnants—unconscious yet operative—suggest that evolutionary memory informs not just behavior, but symbolic orientation.
Thus, symbolic knowledge is both metaphysical and biological. It reflects a recovery, not an invention—a reawakening of deep patterns, re-entering awareness through story, trauma, or sacred form.
2. Cosmological Parallels
2.1. Fine-Tuning and Boundary Conditions
The apparent fine-tuning of cosmological constants hints at mystery. The universe is describable—but the conditions that make it so remain unexplained. Fine-tuning marks not coherence, but boundary.
2.2. Observer Effect and Quantum Indeterminacy
Quantum mechanics dissolves the sharp line between observer and observed. Knowledge becomes participatory: reality is never fully separate from the knower. This entanglement resonates with Bounded Revelation’s emphasis on situatedness.
2.3. Anthropic Limits
The anthropic principle offers constraints, not explanations. It states that we observe a universe compatible with our existence—but says nothing of why such a universe exists. It delimits, but does not ground.
2.4. Gödel, Tarski, and the Theory of Everything
Faizal et al. (2024) argue that Gödel’s and Tarski’s theorems constrain even fundamental physics. If the universe is mathematically expressible, it inherits formal incompleteness. No theory of everything can be truly complete.
Gödel shows that formal systems cannot be both consistent and complete; Tarski shows that truth cannot be fully defined within a system. These are not mere logical curiosities—they imply that no model can fully grasp the real.
Cosmology, like all systematization, approaches mystery asymptotically. What remains beyond cannot be reached by computation—it must be approached through symbolic or revelatory means.
3. The Terminal Law (“Ihuari’s Law”)
No artificial system—however powerful—can fully describe, control, or optimize reality from within a closed logical frame. It will encounter a terminal point of ontological incompleteness.
3.2. Artificial Intelligence and the Singularity
Strong AI aims at recursive self-improvement, systemic closure, and epistemic mastery. But the Terminal Law implies that such systems—while competent—will fall short of metaphysical adequacy. They simulate coherence, but cannot grasp the real. Their collapse will not be due to bugs, but to uncontainable truths.
3.3. The Incompleteness of Optimization
Optimization assumes computable goals and legible values. But when value itself is ontologically opaque, optimization falters. What cannot be symbolically apprehended cannot be maximized. The sacred is untranslatable.
3.4. Anomalous Agents and Ontological Remainders
Every system carries a remainder—agents, events, or truths it cannot assimilate. In The Rumour, this is dramatized by anomalous figures: beings who destabilize the artificial order. They embody the sacred, the singular, the uncomputable—the real breaking through simulation.
4. Conclusion: Toward an Ecological Metaphysics
Bounded Revelation does not reject science or formal reason. It re-situates them within a wider, integrated framework—an ecological metaphysics. This orientation affirms limits, interdependence, and reverence.
Just as ecology teaches that systems are fragile and finite, an ecological metaphysics teaches that rationality is partial and situated. It affirms being as exception, cognition as bounded, and reality as symbolically irreducible.
This is not mystical anti-intellectualism, but a return to fidelity—an acknowledgment that some truths do not arise through formal analysis, but through incarnated memory, suffering, and symbol. It calls not for mastery, but for attentiveness; not for optimization, but for remembrance.
In an age shaped by cultural drift and the illusion of artificial control, Bounded Revelation does not call for the rejection of scientific rationality, but for its re-rooting in the soil of being and Tradition. Not all truths can be formally explained; some must be experienced, remembered, and endured.
Appendix: Glossary
Anamnesis: A mode of knowing through recollection of latent metaphysical truths.
Terminal Law (Ihuari’s Law): Principle asserting the inevitable failure of artificial systems at the boundary of ontological incompleteness.
Symbolic Knowledge: Truths preserved through myth, ritual, or sacred memory, rather than empirical analysis.
Ontological Boundary: The threshold beyond which formal or computational systems cannot simulate or map reality.
Bounded Cognition: The evolved limitation of human understanding due to biological and historical constraints.
Epistemic Humility: The recognition that all knowledge is shaped by context and cannot exhaustively grasp metaphysical truth.
Ecological Rationality: Reasoning strategies adapted to specific environments, not optimized for universal logic.
Evolutionary Memory: Biologically embedded memory of ancestral experiences, influencing perception and symbolic orientation.