Toward Reality - An Asymptotic Inquiry into the Boundary Between the Internal and the External

How can finite agents distinguish between experience generated from within and experience constrained by something external, when all experience is mediated by internal models? Traditional responses appeal to phenomenology, metaphysical disjuncts, or belief justification, but none provide a criterion accessible to inquiry itself—especially when internally generated experience may be coherent, persistent, and socially complex. We argue that the boundary between the internal and the external is not marked by any intrinsic feature of experience and cannot be crossed by a decisive test. Instead, it is approached asymptotically through inquiry structured to expose failures of generative closure: the capacity of a single generative source to coordinate all possible experiential outcomes through accommodation. Externally constrained experience is characterized by the systematic failure of such closure under sustained, adversarial, perspective-diverse investigation. We introduce intersubjective certification as the procedural mechanism by which this failure is exposed and argue that scientific practice is its institutional realization. The resulting view—asymptotic materiality—offers a post-Kantian account of objectivity as an achievement of inquiry rather than a metaphysical given.