mvuent
Void Dweller
wasn't really a developed thought. but references to him do bookend labyrinths.George berkely? I think this is the first time youve ever flexed your degree on here. Tell us more
berkley's famous for arguing (very convincingly, imo) that objects don't exist outside of their being perceived. when no one's perceiving the table, it doesn't exist. iirc he goes to rescue object permanence by saying that god is always perceiving the table, but literally no one has ever cared about that part. so it's the initial unmoored godless vision of the universe that's really important.
anyways, tlön is essentially "what would happen if an entire civilization of people actually believed this shit?" and berkeley gets an in-story shout out when he's described as a member of the secret society that imagined tlön. in "a new refutation of time" borges explicitly takes berkeley's argument even further, quoting him at length. (and mocking schopenhauer for either fundamentally misunderstanding or else very imprecisely summarizing his views.)
guess it just struck me how a lot of these stories are berkeleyan dreams. stories of dissolving the dam between inner and outer. and of course you can also connect that to where we might imagine borges was in the period of his life when he wrote most of this stuff: physically surrounded by other people's thoughts working in a library, his own outer senses failing, etc.