Dumb Question About Trees Falling in a Fores

2. This topic is about single minded one-dimensional thought. We ask dumb question, yet we do not ask the other dumb question which is essentially no different from the first dumb question with the exception of paradigm and context.

 

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It's the same in your case, because you are a nobody!

 

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Of course it does! it still produces a soundwave whether there is a reciever present or not. 'Make a sound' is defined as transmitting a vibration of atmospheric molecules, not the reception.

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Can you prove that? ...without using anything that resembles the workings of the human ear?

Baron Max

 

Whats proving it got to do with it? OK in as much that every single tree in the history of the world that has been heard falling has made a sound, the odds of a sound not being made are negligible at best.

It makes a frigging sound moron!!!!!!!

 

I'm curious to know what you think sound is, Baron.

 

This is a paradoxial evaluation which people try to phrase as a query, it remains a paradox because of inadequate variables. Needs rhetoric but fundamentally flawed. Trees make noise even when they don't fall.

 

Because if you don't hear it, you have no proof that it makes a sound.
Why believe something without proof?
Why believe the moon exists when you don't see it?

Why believe the walls around you are solid? If you go touch them, you'll see they're solid, but why assume they are solid when you're just watching them? There's no way to prove they're solid when you're not touching them. They're just a vision.

Even children can understand this simple logic. It's common that little children think the world disappears when they close their eyes.

It's not scientific to say that we live in an objective world because there's no way to prove it.

It's an assumption... a hypothesis... a theory... based on past experiences, and past can't be proven.

If you believe stuff without proof you risk jumping into conclusions and live your life with an erroneous model of reality... and if you live with an erroneous model of reality.. generally you're gonna get poor results.

 

addition

actually this is a later definition, which was added to the meaning of 'sound' primarily because of troubles with this question. The original definition was, if i remember correctly, simply of the sensation in the mind.

A few figured that they would resolve the intuitive difficulties that result from this question by re-defining 'sound' to include what we might call 'sound-waves'. This too results in difficulties: 'sound-waves' are simply pressure waves propogating in an elastic medium.

Granted, by including 'sound-waves' in the definition of 'sound' they allowed people to say that a tree falling in the forrest does indeed make a 'sound'; but the further problem arises when one considers that most varities of pressure waves propogating in an elastic medium we can not hear. We would not call something which we could not hope to hear (even if we are within the proximity) a 'sound', yet sound-waves are a subset of this general class. The attempt to fix the problem simply by defining a sound as the wave which causes the sensation makes the definition get a little convoluted in the end, so from what i've seen in most dictionaries the general definition brings the sensation and the process which causes the sensation together under one definition.

Its sad that there can be so many different definitions for a single simple word, each which gives a very different answer to a simple question. Anyway, because of all this semantic crap you can't just answer yes or no, unless your being specific about what you mean when you say 'sound'.

Before bring QM into the picture, the answer is quite obvious once its clearly set out: a tree produces pressure waves which the human ear would be capable of hearing if it were in the vicinity, but because it isn't in the vicinity there is no sensation of sound. (my particular bias in definitions is the original: i distinguish between the waves which cause a sound, and the sound as the sensation in the mind... so my own answer would be "no, it doesn't make a sound").

But with all that said, it isn't over... did the tree even fall if no one were around to see it? I'm not learnt enough in quantum mechanics to know what a physicist today would answer to the question, and i believe the notion of decoherence would allow a sound-wave to be made; but under some interpretations which i know of, the wave does not exist, or at least it is in an undefined state, so long as there is no observers. When i wrote a paper on this a few years ago, i was quite happy it wasn't all semantics.

Edit: besides which, it can't simply be a "transmission of vibration in atmospheric molecules", as ugly as that is... because wouldn't that mean that which i heard when i was swimming today was not sound?

 

yeah but we know trees make noise, asking whether or not it does is infering that they don't, which renders the phrase dumbfounding. So why ask the question in the first place? It is used as a metaphor to elaborate stuff

 

oh, and any attempt to PROVE that it makes a sound is going to have to overcome the problem of induction, to say the least. Good luck.

 

You're going to get pretty poor results if you ask for proof of everything first, too. In fact, because most things in reality can't be proved, i doubt you'd get any results at all.

 

What's a fores??????

 

I think it is supposed to make us question to what degree does our subjective sense of reality interact with the objective sense of reality

 

Or, even moreso, whether or not it can be said that an objective reality exists.

 

Not really, it just shows what a bunch of useless languishers philosophers are.

 

its purpose is to show that you can't prove anything through induction; it doesn't question objective reality per se, just what we can know of it.

 

Since the advent of sound recording, this question has become quite answerable.

It is about as unknown as the answer to the question, "if you drop something heavy, and there is nothing impeding its movement toward the earth, will it fall?"

However, as a metaphor, this question is still as powerful as ever.

The question can be said to apply to knowledge being made available to someone who doesn't have the mental capacity to grasp it, among many other applicable scenarios, and that happens on this website quite a bit with racis... er, I mean with people.

 

i've taken you off ignore for this question.

in short, no, the tree doesn't make a sound.
the tree produces sound waves but there is no decoder to decode them.

a similar question would be does a radio wave from an A.M. station produce sound without a radio?
the sound is there on the radio wave but without the decoder it will never be heard.

 

since this is a philosophy forum, its more than ok for me to ask how do you know that it will? What is knowledge? Can we justify induction in light of it's obvious problems?

Theres a reason why these types of questions are still around after such a long time: they can't be answered so easily... their purpose is to produce further questions, in this particular case of knowledge; they are not supposed to be answered.