Friday, May 05, 2006

Solipsistic Dreams



This lingering idea goes back as far as I can remember. The terrifying notion that I am all alone and that nothing else exists outside of my own mind. I sometimes ponder why I‘m not even more unnerved by such a conception than I actually am, for if true, it should surely mean immediate insanity, or at least insanity from the vantage point of the psychiatric profession, which upon realizing it as potentially a product of my own mind, provides a duality of both comfort and concern. For if I truly am the God of my own universe, why is it that I have relegated my locus of awareness to the lowly position of a mortal who is believing myself to be as a peer amongst my own creations. It‘s like the 80‘s movie Tron in which the computer programmer becomes trapped inside the program and has to conduct a life and death struggle with the animations of his very own code slinging. The problem is, there is no rational way to disprove this perspective. You can move away from thinking about it by immersing yourself in concrete endeavor, or move towards it by living in isolation and departing from the cultural collective, but in the end, the question will still be there.

JMR