Devin Arkema

This paper identifies and critiques a pervasive but unexamined assumption in ethical discourse about technology, cognition, and selfhood: the Presupposition of Prior Boundedness (PPB), the claim that a bounded, self-consistent subject existed prior to its constitutive entanglement with the systems that now shape its evaluative and practical capacities. Drawing on the recursive ethical framework of Arkemedics (Arkema 2024) and the phenomenological sequence of the concept album Dragoon Nightmares, I argue that PPB is false in the general case, that invasion narratives depend on it to generate their ethical force, and that its dissolution requires a relocation of sovereignty from boundary-maintenance to recursive orientation within entanglement. I develop the Indistinguishability Thesis (IT): for any sufficiently entangled system-self relation, there exists no epistemically reliable method for distinguishing, from within the relation, between a self that has achieved accurate awareness of its constitutive entanglements and a self whose evaluative capacities have been captured by those entanglements. IT is a limit on first-person confirmation from within the relation; it does not imply that third-person evidence is irrelevant. I argue that this indistinguishability is not a failure of ethical reasoning but its most important constraint, and that the fundamental ethical obligation in conditions of constitutive entanglement is not to achieve certainty about one’s position but to maintain the recursive capacity to keep asking.