The famous, already cult film by the Wachowski brothers "The Matrix" became a real revelation for many viewers, posing a number of questions before them. How much can a person trust the senses? What if the surrounding space is just a deception, an illusion?
It may surprise you, but the Wachowskis are far from being pioneers here.
The nature of reality has occupied the minds of thinkers at all times. The Greek philosopher Plato, in the book "The State", solved the problem by means of the "Cave" symbol. Imagine a certain community of people who are from birth in a cave and instead of the real world perceive its reflection in the form of shadows on the walls of their home. One of the inhabitants manages to get out of the cave and experience the true reality. When he comes back and tries to explain what he saw to the others, he stumbles upon misunderstanding and aggression.
In the 18th century, the Irish bishop George Berkeley believed that the world around us exists only in our perception. He was convinced that common sense tells us this. It is impossible to think about something that is not perceived, and even at the very attempt to think of something as unperceivable, we, thinking about it, perceive it.
Berkeley's ideas were continued to develop by the Scottish philosopher, historian, economist David Hume. He argued that we cannot prove the existence of the external world as the source of the existence of our sensations. Hume believed that in the process of cognition we are dealing only with the content of our sensations, and not with their source. Therefore, we can not prove either that the world objectively exists, or that it does not exist.
The famous 19th century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, a broad-minded man, was one of the first European thinkers to take an interest in Eastern philosophy. Speaking about the world of struggle and suffering that surrounds modern man, Schopenhauer uses the eastern Indian word "Maya", indicating the illusion and illusion of this world. He characterizes the true state of the world precisely with the word "nirvana", meaning the state of complete calmness and indifference.
And now we come to the most interesting part. It turns out that the original ideas that at different times came to the heads of Western philosophers have long been known in the East to people practicing Buddhism.
Around the 2nd century AD, the Indian monk Nagarjuna, the creator of the doctrine of the Middle Way, starting from the doctrine of the causal origin of all things, came to the conclusion that nothing exists by itself, does not have its own being and essence. Any element exists only due to its connection with all other elements, outside the chain of causes and effects, it has no existence. Consequently, all elements of "reality" are insubstantial and empty. But this is not emptiness (shunyata) in our usual understanding, but the original nature of all things, as they are described from the point of view of the ultimate truth.
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We are living in an interesting time of fusion of what seemed to be mutually exclusive philosophical views and polar cultures. At the junction of different sciences, new ones are born, interdisciplinary research has appeared. Perhaps, in the near future, all this will help open the veil of the mystery of the perception of the world as a total illusion. It is curious what will happen if the secret of being, known only to a few enlightened Buddhist monks, becomes the property of all mankind.
Konstantin Dyatlov