Dear shyspook,
Thanks for your enthusiastic post.
If we think the world into existence. Who thinks the thinker into existence in the first place?
Actually let's not bother answering that one or we'll be here all night again, won't we?!
Chicken and egg. Chicken and egg.... and on it goes...!
Your ideas actually remind me of a poem my mum once told me which relates to Bishop Berkely's philosophy of idealism (Bishop Berkely's idea apparently was that there is no such thing as physical matter, only souls and ideas). The query raised with this philosophy was, if things only exist through perception/observation do they still exist when there's no one there to perceive them?
The poem goes like this: (it's being spoken by someone sitting alone under a tree in a college quad)
I'm sorry to bother you, God,
But there's one thing I find rather odd
And that's how this tree
Continues to be
When there's no one about in the quad.
Dear Sir, your astonishment's
I'm always about in the quad
And that's why the tree
Continues to be
Observed by, yours faithfully
God.
Apparently on this occasion, having a notion of God perceiving everything solves that particular problem. But of course we can ask who perceives God in the first place etc.etc...
Best wishes
Ingrid
