If a tree falls...

[TracyCoxx]

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.

[smc]

Originally Posted by TracyCoxx

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.

[Channy]

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.

[smc]

Originally Posted by Channy

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.

[SluttyShemaleAnna]

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....

[smc]

Originally Posted by SluttyShemaleAnna

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.

[TracyCoxx]

Originally Posted by SluttyShemaleAnna

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.

[smc]

Originally Posted by TracyCoxx

... 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.