This post makes that connection explicit by mapping the origin story onto two of those questions.
Bad Question #1: “Is time an illusion?”
This question only arises if time is first treated as a thing: something that must either exist or not exist, independently of perspective.
But from a relational ontology grounded in processes rather than objects, time is not a candidate for illusion in the first place. What exists are relations between processes, actualised differently across perspectives. Relativity theory does not undermine time; it undermines the assumption that time must be globally uniform and thing‑like to be real.
Once relations, rather than objects, are foundational, the question collapses. There is no hidden answer waiting — only a misaligned starting point.
Bad Question #2: “Does consciousness really exist?”
Here the thing‑based assumption is even more visible.
Consciousness is treated as an entity — something that must be located, reduced, eliminated, or defended. The resulting debate oscillates endlessly between realism (“it’s irreducible”) and illusionism (“it doesn’t really exist”).
From the perspective developed here, consciousness is neither substance nor illusion. It is a phenomenon: a perspectival actualisation within relational dynamics. Asking whether it “really exists” mistakes a mode of appearance for a candidate object.
The loop persists because both sides accept the same mistaken ontology.
What Changes When Potential Is Taken Seriously
The deeper commonality across the Bad Questions is the refusal to treat potential as ontologically basic.
Once reality is assumed to be exhausted by actuality, every phenomenon must either be promoted to thinghood or dismissed as unreal. By contrast, when potential is understood as structured — as a theory of instances — phenomena no longer need to carry the burden of metaphysical self‑sufficiency.
They are real as actualisations, not as objects.
Diagnosis, Not Doctrine
What matters is not agreement with the ontology as such, but clarity about what is doing the work.
The Bad Questions persist because they smuggle in a picture of reality that their own source theories quietly reject. The origin story simply makes that mismatch visible.
Seen this way, the aim of the series was never to answer the questions — but to show why, given the way the world is already understood to work, those questions could never have been the right ones to ask.
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