The Solipsism of the Thinking Minotaur

Глава 1Imagine for a moment that the world is a dream. Not an allegory, not a semblance, but a genuine, dense, and detailed dream you are having right now. The table you sit at, the roughness of paper under your fingers or the coolness of the device in your palm, the distant hum outside the window, even this very thought — all of it is generated by your sleeping, solitary mind. There is nothing beyond it. Other people? Merely complex, convincing puppets, endowed with speech and a semblance of emotions by your own consciousness, performing a grand spectacle for you, whose meaning and purpose remain unknown. This speculative prison, beautiful and yet terrifying, is solipsism — the extreme point of the path Western philosophy took when René Descartes, sheltering from the winter cold in his heated room, decided to find something unshakable, a point of support for all knowledge.His methodolo…