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  #1  
Old 04-22-2011
aw9725
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Default If a tree falls...

Hope you don't mind me starting this thread. Enoch and smc have brought up an ?age old? question: ?If a tree falls in a forest does it make a sound??

The answer, I believe, is ?It depends on what you mean?? Here is my reasoning. When the tree falls there is of course the physical act of it falling. As it falls it passes through the air and also most likely strikes other trees. This action disrupts the surrounding air and creates waves. But is it ?sound?? If there is a living thing around the area that creature will ?perceive? the waves as sound. If there is nothing within range then there is nothing to ?perceive? and hence no sound.

Another example. Say you are watching a thunderstorm. Everyone knows that lightning heating and disrupting the surrounding air creates ?thunder.? But what if you are too far away to ?hear? the thunder? I live in central Indiana in the United States. We have had a lot of storms recently--most right on top of us! But what if you live in one of the large open states like Texas? When travelling across Texas I have often seen thunderstorms at a distance that produce lightning--but no sound. Either I was too far away or the sound was obscured by something else like engine noise or the radio.

Here is my question: If you come across a tree lying on its side in the forest, how do you ?prove? it fell and wasn?t always that way?
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Old 04-22-2011
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Here is my question: If you come across a tree lying on its side in the forest, how do you “prove” it fell and wasn’t always that way?
Because it's a fucking tree. They don't grow like that. But I already expect a response along the lines of: "Have you seen every tree everywhere? Then how can you know that NO TREES grow like that?" At the sight of which I will probably go away and watch some baseball.

Hello aw9725. Back so soon? I think this thread will drive me crazy.

Last edited by Enoch Root; 04-22-2011 at 12:38 PM.
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Old 04-22-2011
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Because it's a fucking tree. They don't grow like that. But I already expect a response along the lines of: "Have you seen every tree everywhere? Then how can you know that NO TREES grow like that?" At the sight of which I will probably go away and watch some baseball.

Hello aw9725. Back so soon? I think this thread will drive me crazy.
Ah, Enoch, relax. Employing the scientific method, general truths based on observation and empirical evidence can be derived that will allow you not to go crazy. Think about what you might observe with respect to the "fallen" tree that could serve as clues.

I won't speak for aw9725, but I will try not to be too professorial going forward.
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Old 04-22-2011
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Originally Posted by aw9725 View Post
Hope you don't mind me starting this thread. Enoch and smc have brought up an ?age old? question: ?If a tree falls in a forest does it make a sound??

The answer, I believe, is ?It depends on what you mean?? Here is my reasoning. When the tree falls there is of course the physical act of it falling. As it falls it passes through the air and also most likely strikes other trees. This action disrupts the surrounding air and creates waves. But is it ?sound?? If there is a living thing around the area that creature will ?perceive? the waves as sound. If there is nothing within range then there is nothing to ?perceive? and hence no sound.
That is exactly as I see it. If there is no creature whose organ of hearing is within the range of hearing, and if the mechanical wave that is nothing more than an oscillation of pressure transmitted through the air is not sufficiently strong, then it is ONLY a mechanical wave and not sound.
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Old 04-22-2011
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That is exactly as I see it. If there is no creature whose organ of hearing is within the range of hearing, and if the mechanical wave that is nothing more than an oscillation of pressure transmitted through the air is not sufficiently strong, then it is ONLY a mechanical wave and not sound.
A disturbance in the air can be interpreted by the brain as some form of sound.
Some plants can also respond to vibrations. Tomato blossoms require vibrations to pollinate. Strawberry plants sense vibrations as insect attack and respond with chemicals to resist the attack. So living things can respond to vibrations.
A sound may be defined as a vibration detected by a brain and interpreted as a sound. Typically, a sound would have some meaning, roar of a lion or call of a bird for example.
A tree falling would create a vibration and possibly a screech if it fell on a rabbit, of course, something would have to "hear" the screech.
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Old 04-22-2011
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If this is purely a SEMANTIC argument it is therefore nearly useless to people and is quite quickly dealt with as you randolph and you smc have demonstrated.
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Old 04-22-2011
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If this is purely a SEMANTIC argument it is therefore nearly useless to people and is quite quickly dealt with as you randolph and you smc have demonstrated.
No, it's not semantic, at least as I see it. Rather, it is about what constitutes "reality" in some circumstances, and whether certain physical phenomena are real in the abstract or only when they are concretized by experience.
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Old 04-22-2011
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That's what I was trying to get at: the argument is only really useful and really interesting if it is used to ponder reality. But from the previous posts everyone seemed to be talking about what the definition of sound is.
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Old 04-22-2011
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That's what I was trying to get at: the argument is only really useful and really interesting if it is used to ponder reality. But from the previous posts everyone seemed to be talking about what the definition of sound is.
I believe you are projecting, at least onto my post, a level of certainty that I don't have. Sound, I believe, is the actuation of the mechanical pressure wave in the vessel of a hearing organ (be it a human, other animal, or plant). But of this I am not certain; it is a scientific definition that hypothesizes. I think the reason that the question of a tree falling in a forest and whether it makes a sound has become a "classic" is precisely because it poses the issue of reality vs. perception, and in a sense synthesizes the general discussion about whether one who has not "seen everything" can make reasonable assumptions to describe reality, including the reality of that which she or he hasn't seen.

I've never been to China. I believe it exists. The evidence is pretty overwhelming. In fact, I am certain. From a philosophical perspective, how one gets there (to the certainty, not to China, which I am pretty sure is by plane these days ), is fascinating.
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Old 04-23-2011
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If you 'hear' a sound in your mind you are perceiving sound. An fMRI would show the same parts of the brain are active as if you were actually hearing a sound. But is there really a sound? No. Because there were no vibrations through the air or other medium. The vibrations through a medium are the sound.

As for pondering reality, these are macroscopic objects and do not need to be observed to exist or influence the environment unlike subatomic particles in quantum mechanics.
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Old 04-23-2011
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If you 'hear' a sound in your mind you are perceiving sound.
Yes, but that is not the perception of which I was writing. I was writing of the perception that a sound was issued when the tree fell in the forest although you weren't there to hear it. Your point, though, is well taken.
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Old 04-26-2011
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If a tree falls and no body is there to see it, does it make a sound?

The answer is yes, sound doesn't work based on sight, it's based on hearing. Meaning, a sound won't go off if no one is there to witness it. Animals can hear just fine, they would hear it. And if there were no animals there, it would still make a sound, but it would go unheard.

This question is retarded, i'm sorry. Bad attempt at philosophy this question is.
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Old 04-26-2011
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If a tree falls and no body is there to see it, does it make a sound?

The answer is yes, sound doesn't work based on sight, it's based on hearing. Meaning, a sound won't go off if no one is there to witness it. Animals can hear just fine, they would hear it. And if there were no animals there, it would still make a sound, but it would go unheard.

This question is retarded, i'm sorry. Bad attempt at philosophy this question is.
The only person who wrote a "retarded" (what an awful word to use) version of the question is YOU. No one else mentioned anything about sight or being there to "see"! But it sure is an interesting way to join our discussion ... by misrepresenting and then insulting it.
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Old 04-26-2011
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If the forest sets on fire and no-one is around, does it make heat and light?

Now, I don't think anyone is going to argue that heat only means the sensation felt from hot things or that light refers to the sensation of seeing, so what's the deal with people trying the same thing with sound?

As for the fallen tree, you can prove it fell by the way it is snapped off at the roots and also the signs of impact on the floor.

The whole Zen thing really is a crock of shit, if you want to really get all mystic why don't you ponder something genuinely mysterious and incomprehensible, like Quantum Physics.

Particles have no fixed position, unless they get close enough to interact with another particle, which also has no fixed position....
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Old 04-26-2011
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If the forest sets on fire and no-one is around, does it make heat and light?

Now, I don't think anyone is going to argue that heat only means the sensation felt from hot things or that light refers to the sensation of seeing, so what's the deal with people trying the same thing with sound?

As for the fallen tree, you can prove it fell by the way it is snapped off at the roots and also the signs of impact on the floor.

The whole Zen thing really is a crock of shit, if you want to really get all mystic why don't you ponder something genuinely mysterious and incomprehensible, like Quantum Physics.

Particles have no fixed position, unless they get close enough to interact with another particle, which also has no fixed position....
I won't speak for anyone else who has posted, but nothing I have posted is remotely part of the "whole Zen thing." It is about whether among some of the phenomena of everyday life such as, say, waves, there are differences between their behavior as humans judge them and, indeed, even what they actually are based on how we perceive them as part of a system. And if that isn't scientific, I don't know what is.
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Old 04-26-2011
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Originally Posted by SluttyShemaleAnna View Post
If the forest sets on fire and no-one is around, does it make heat and light?

Now, I don't think anyone is going to argue that heat only means the sensation felt from hot things or that light refers to the sensation of seeing, so what's the deal with people trying the same thing with sound?

As for the fallen tree, you can prove it fell by the way it is snapped off at the roots and also the signs of impact on the floor.

The whole Zen thing really is a crock of shit, if you want to really get all mystic why don't you ponder something genuinely mysterious and incomprehensible, like Quantum Physics.

Particles have no fixed position, unless they get close enough to interact with another particle, which also has no fixed position....
I've always thought the sound if noone's there to hear it thing was pretty silly too. The only argument that can get a little traction is what exactly is the definition of sound. But vibrations through air does not need an audience.

And you're right. Quantum Mechanics is much more interesting. Many parts of the theory that can actually be experimentally observed yield baffling results. And the parts that we can't experimentally determine, like when observations are made do quantum particles choose a particular state, or are alternate universes created on the spot? That's plenty of food for thought.

Or my favorite... There are several physical constants that must be just right to permit life to exist in the universe. Like the charge of the election & proton. If they were at all different atoms would be impossible. The value of the gravitational constant. Too high and the universe would collapse before it hardly expands at all. To low and the universe expands so fast that galaxies or even solar systems and planets cannot form. etc... So if quantum states and parameters can take on any value within its probability spectrum, and only take on a specific value when observed, did the human race, when making astronomical measurements and observations of the cosmic background noise left over from the Big Bang, set these quantum state parameters to parameters that were condusive to the evolution of life in the universe? And since these parameters could only be observed by living creatures, they would have to be configured to values that led to the development of life right?

Questions like this depend on what exactly occurs when an observation collapses a quantum wave function, which we do not know. What constitutes an observation? Can it only be made by a living organism? If so, why? What's so special about plain ordinary matter that can be found anywhere in the universe that's assembled in a certain way that constitutes life? Or can an observation be made simply be the excitation of electrons in an atom by incoming radiation? If so, how is it that an electron or atom is in the proper place for an observation when it's own position would have to be determined by observation? So yeah, you're right. Quantum Mechanics is ripe with interesting questions that go right to the heart of why we're here, what is existance and challenge our perception of reality.

p.s. or we could talk about if your refrigerator light is on or off when you close the refrigerator door.
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Old 04-26-2011
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... Or my favorite... There are several physical constants that must be just right to permit life to exist in the universe. ...
That is, "life" as humans define it. This is not meant to be argumentative, only to point out that such a question by its very nature includes assumptions that, under some circumstances (including ones that we may not even be capable of thinking of), may simply be wrong.

One simply needs to consider the work of Craig Venter, the man behind the private endeavor to decode the human genome. His team has been trying to strip down an organism called M. genitalium to its bare essential to see what it requires to survive. They have been working with genome transplant that in theory, at least their theory, constitute creating "life." Other scientists (e.g., the biophysicist David Deamer at UC-Santa Cruz) call what Venter has been doing the production of a "radically engineered organism" that is not new life.

Thus, we see that what "life" means cannot even be agreed to with respect to the human genome project.
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Old 04-27-2011
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When people talk about radically different life, they talk about organisms that make use of organic compounds like arsenic, or DNAless life but with some other mechanism that achieves the same thing. Maybe not even carbon based, but silicon base. If any life could exist in the kinds of environments I'm talking about - i.e. a solar systemless universe, or a universe that only lasts a few million years or less (giving little time to evolve), or even an atomless universe it would be several orders of magnitude beyond radically different life.

But who knows, there may be parameters of subatomic particles that can be tweaked to create something just as ingenious as an atom. But for the context of what I'm talking about, it doesn't really matter what kind of life it is or how radical. Whatever life form it is, makes observations that determine quantum states, and the question of physically what does it take to make an observation still remains.

Well I'm outta here... I'm going to Florida to watch the last launch of Endeavour .... it's a bittersweet feeling /
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Old 04-30-2011
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How about a more contemporary version aw?

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