When Do the Operational Conditions of Non-Closure Collapse？ Twenty-First-Century Schwärmerei, DMT, AI, Population-Scale Penetration, and the Loss of Alternative Access to Reality-as-a-Whole

Epistemic Non-Closure denies that the success, reproducibility, or institutional dominance of a local access configuration establishes its identity with reality-as-a-whole. Yet locally successful configurations can reorganize the apparatus, variables, boundaries, scales, temporal windows, external memory, institutional authority, and resources through which subsequent access becomes possible. This paper investigates when such transformations disable particular operations through which Non-Closure would otherwise have consequential effects. It distinguishes three forms of operational failure: the loss of a specific capacity for discrimination or intervention, the loss of the ability to detect that loss, and the failure of epistemic constraints to affect subsequent observation, evaluation, resource allocation, or reconfiguration. Kant’s confrontation with Schwärmerei and contemporary DMT-related metaphysical attributions provide historically distinct cases for examining how claims to privileged access can acquire practical consequences without acquiring epistemic entitlement. The analysis connects Sellars and Brassier’s scientific realism with measurement epistemology, scientific pluralism, institutional epistemology, and contemporary autonomous science. The central conclusion is conditional: Non-Closure itself does not collapse. What may collapse are configuration-dependent operational routes through which its epistemic constraint would otherwise influence subsequent inquiry and material reconfiguration. Earlier computational investigations are retained as exploratory rather than confirmatory evidence. The paper develops a self-critical extension of Thing-in-Itself Engineering without claiming to establish a new universal theory or to demonstrate population-scale epistemic closure.