[insane_loaf]

Interesting. This sounds quite similar to transcendental idealism, then. Or even Stoicism, or Vedanta. I think Plato would agree with this idea too, seeing his cave metaphor: We are prisoners in a dark cave, facing the wall. A fire burns behind us, casting off shadows from object passing between our backs and the fire. The shadows aren't real (actually, they're the absence of light), but to us, they _seem_ real. Same idea in The Matrix.

Nice.

[jjs]

Plato thought that true reality lay in universal abstractions called Forms, or Ideas.

The Buddhist sutras take the position that "objects of mind" are just leaky abstractions created by our limited minds, which struggle to make sense of the world. The greatest fallacy, in this view, is conflating the "objects of mind" with the real objects (+) they supposedly represent.

(+) Buddhist philosophers in India developed a concept of atomism, which leads to existential riddles like, "If I look at this pile of atoms, and see a chair, is the chair inside my mind, or outside?" (If you answer either way, you're wrong! ;)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhist_atomism

http://deoxy.org/koan/76