Last Surviving Person
Would the last person left alive be a solipsist? Not necessarily. The last surviving person would of course have to confront and accept that his or her consciousness is the only local human consciousness in existence (subject to verification that all other humans have not survived), whereas a solipsist believes that his or her consciousness is the only one in existence regardless of who else, if anyone, is living. If the last surviving person is a solipsist, he or she will believe that even when others were alive, there never had been another thought, experience or emotion other than his or her own.
Read more about this topic: Solipsism, Psychology and Psychiatry
Famous quotes containing the words surviving and/or person:
“For my own part, I commonly attend more to nature than to man, but any affecting human event may blind our eyes to natural objects. I was so absorbed in him as to be surprised whenever I detected the routine of the natural world surviving still, or met persons going about their affairs indifferent.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Even in ordinary speech we call a person unreasonable whose outlook is narrow, who is conscious of one thing only at a time, and who is consequently the prey of his own caprice, whilst we describe a person as reasonable whose outlook is comprehensive, who is capable of looking at more than one side of a question and of grasping a number of details as parts of a whole.”
—G. Dawes Hicks (1862–1941)