What...are the possibilities that human life on Earth only goes back 200 to 500 years. With 200 years being on the extreme low end and 500 years being closer to the actual fruition. Now, let us look at the term "Fruition" for an extra clue: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/fruition?s=t
Or that the world only popped into existence 200 to 500 years ago with the built-in appearance of having progressed through billions of years beforehand. Although Witt provides one reason below for not bothering with such possibilities, another is simply the morality of not denying all those past humans the opportunity to have actually experienced and lived through their individual lives. This is really no different than the motivation for accepting that there are many minds existing right now with internal manifestations of their existence. Albeit a minority of the population may actually seem content with the idea that they are no more than superficial p-zombies (depending on how one interprets or misinterprets the chatter occurring in some corners relating to eliminative materialism). Ludwig Wittgenstein: Let us turn to the view, which is connected with "All that is real is my experience", namely, solipsism of the present moment: "All that is real is the experience of the present moment". (Cf. Wm. James' remark "The present thought is the only thinker", which makes the subject of thinking equivalent to the experience.) We may be inclined to make our language such that we will call only the present experience "experience". This will be a solipsistic language, but of course we must not make a solipsistic language without saying exactly what we mean by the word which in our old language meant "present". Russell said that remembering cannot prove that what is remembered actually occurred, because the world might have sprung into existence five minutes ago, with acts of remembering intact. We could go on to say that it might have been created one minute ago, and finally, that it might have been created in the present moment. Were this latter the situation we should have the equivalent of "All that is real is the present moment". Now if it is possible to say the world was created five minutes ago, could it be said that the world perished five minutes ago? This would amount to saying that the only reality was five minutes ago. Why does one feel tempted to say "The only reality is the present"? The temptation to say this is as strong as that of saying that only my experience is real. The person who says only the present is real because past and future are not here has before his mind the image of something moving: past < present < future. This image is mispast present future leading, just as the blurred image we would draw of our visual field is misleading inasmuch as the field has no boundary. That the statement "Only the present experience is real" seems to mean something is due to familiar images we associate with it, images of things passing us in space. When in philosophy we talk of the present, we seem to be referring to a sort of Euclidean point. Yet when we talk of present experience it is impossible to identify the present with such a point. The difficulty is with the word "present". There is a grammatical confusion here. A person who says the present experience alone is real is not stating an empirical fact, comparable to the fact that Mr. S. always wears a brown suit. And the person who objects to the assertion that the present alone is real with "Surely the past and future are just as real" somehow does not meet the point. Both statements mean nothing. By examining Russell's hypothesis that the world was created five minutes ago I shall try to explain what I mean in saying that it is meaningless. Russell's hypothesis was so arranged that nothing could bear it out or refute it. Whatever our experience might be, it would be in agreement with it. The point of saying that something has happened derives from there being a criterion for its truth. To lay down the evidence for what happened five minutes ago is like laying down rules for making measurements. The question as to what evidence there can be is a grammatical one. It concerns the sorts of actions and propositions which would verify the statement. It is a simple matter to make up a statement which will agree with experience because it is such that no proposition can refute it, e.g., "There is a white rabbit between two chairs whenever no observations or verifications are being carried out." Some people would say that this statement says more than "There is no white rabbit between the chairs", just as some would say it means something to say the world was created five minutes ago. When such statements are made they are somehow connected with a picture, say, a picture of creation. Hence it is that such sentences seem to mean something. But they are otiose, like wheels in a watch which have no function although they do not look to be useless. --Wittgenstein's Lectures, 1932 - 35, Edited by Alice Ambrose
