[Craig] My point: your position is that Micah's statement is tautological & advocates solipsism. If you--finding it tautological--agree with Micah's statement, how do you avoid advocating solipsism?
[Case] Ok, thats a start. Micah is a big boy and can speak for himself. But the statement: "Nothing can be shown to exist independent of humans" is fraught with problems. The first is as I mentioned, if there were no humans, who would you show something to? Saying that existence depends on having someone around to see it does not really work for me. I believe someone here already mentioned that the universe was around from something like 13 billion years before humans arrived. Do you seriously think the universe sprang into being with Adam? Do you think that when mankind finally gets around to killing itself the universe will cease to exist? Or if you are an optimist in 200,000 years when we have evolved into some other sort of creatures will the universe no longer exist. You could get away with saying that our description of the universe would cease to exist if there was no one around to hear it. Or you could say our understanding of things depends on other humans to validate it. But even if you disregard the tautology and take the statement seriously it implies at best a kind of naïve idealism. Perhaps it is not strict solipsism but the reasoning behind it is along the same lines. But I take solipsism very seriously. It is one of the perennial problems of philosophy and at least to my knowledge has never been dismissed on logical grounds. No one has ever seriously advanced the position either as far as I know. But everyone rejects it simply because it is absurd not because it is illogical. Personally the only reason I dismiss it is through an act of faith. moq_discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
