I think Hummus is delicious

Since I know nobody is going to bother reading comments, I will post McBain's second argument here. Please do not hold his tardiness against him, as the only reason it was not posted in time is because we were at a bar...eating hummus. McBain wrote: I am glad that we are both in agreement that taste and whether hummus is in fact delicious or not is a subjective matter. This narrows the stipulations for whether you think hummus is delicious down to the matter of thought. You bring up Descartes' logical paradox of Cogito Ergo Sum ( I think, therefore I am) and disprove that for me quite nicely. However you bring up the point as to whether or not there is the POSSIBILITY that you may be a part of a reactive functioning thing that operates automatically due to some kind of hummus consumption complex. If that is a possibility, there also must the POSSIBILITY that your pre-defined hummus consumption function, and your whole existence for that matter is a construct of some other force. Who's to say what you are thinking or doing isn't part of somebody else's reality? Why I just thought of all this hypothetically while reading and constructing arguments, and your hummus consumption or thoughts have all been part of that scenario. Who's to say that your entire existence, thoughts and arguments in this debate aren't part of some fantasy I conjured up in my mind? I could just be making you think that hummus is delicious even though it is not because I have intentionally made you think so. Even if you are just a functioning thing without thought, you could still be a construct of my own imagination and reality. To take another step back for that matter, who's to say that both of us, our thoughts and this entire debate, aren't a scenario imagined by some person, thing, or consciousness OTHER than us? For that matter, this guy could just be a thought of somebody else, who would be imagining that some guy is imagining that we are having this debate. All that being said, maybe we don't actually exist or think at all. Maybe we are just fiction. ****************************************** End McBain ****************************************** I would love to continue an argument along these lines, but unfortunately for the topic at hand you really haven't progressed anything. What you propose is that it is possible that my thoughts are not actually mine because you can imagine a scenario in which they would not be. However, you provide no proof, or even a logical progression of thought toward this end. Instead, you simply posit that because we can have some degree of doubt, my thoughts are not my own (and therefore I do not think that hummus is delicious). This statement leads us necessarily into a realm of total skepticism. Total skepticism has three major criticisms that I would like to briefly address. 1.) Most practically, if we assume a precedent of doubting anything which may possibly be imagined to be false, then we cannot function in our daily existence. I have no motivation to go to sleep tonight, because I can doubt that the world will exist when I wake up. If I actually give this idea enough credence to act upon it, I will oversleep and miss work. Pragmatically, your claim flawed. 2.) Radical skepticism destroys the possibility for argument, which is most relevant to this site. Absolutely any position you take can be refuted by positing a hypothetical scenario in which your claims are false, however unlikely it may be. I can make this claim boldly because you have sought to use the denyability of thought as your thesis, however the total reality of personal subjective thought is arguably the most irrefutable of Descartes metaphysical claims. Philosophically, your claim is flawed. 3.) Most important of all, you are attempting to prove something in the positive sense. Because you have cause to doubt my claim is not actually evidence of the truism of your own claim. For example, if I claim that it is always sunny outside, and you counter this claim by saying that sometimes it rains, you cannot also that that it always rains. Negative examples do not give rise to proof positive. Completely, your claim is flawed. For my own part, the only further evidence that I can give of my claim that I do indeed think that hummus is delicious is that I ate a whole tub of it yesterday after work. Nobody forced me to, and I had plenty of other things to choose from. Although to be fair, I did also eat a bunch of salsa. Please, if you think that the Universe is expanding into an infinite substance which is both something and also nothing, like an inflating balloon, please vote PRO.