Korean Job Discussion Forums

[SPINOZA]

My co-teachers' class went off on a complete tangent this afternoon and the rather tiresome question "if a tree falls over in the forest and there's no-one there, does it make a sound?" came up. Of course it makes a sound, I replied. The tree falling over makes a sound in the absence of a listener in exactly the same way as the tree exists and falls over in the absence of a seer. The tree falling over, the very existence of trees and other physical objects in the physical world, are taken for granted to exist regardless of whether anyone sees them by this question, yet the tree making a sound is in question. Why the big thing about sound? It's just a form of perception like sight. This age-old question presupposes that the tree falls over even though there's no-one there to see it, yet this event making a sound is called into question. Why?

[n3ptne]

Again I'll give you props on the name... in the middle of a book on the man, "Critical and Intreperative Essays on"... nonetheless my answer for you is simple:

People are stupid and havent the slightest clue as to the physical ramifications of the existence of sound.

[joe_doufu]

What is a sound? It surely makes vibrations but if there are no eardrums to pick them up, are they "sound"?

[Satori]

Sound is vibrating air. It only becomes percieved as sound when it hits the ear drum and causes it to vibrate, which then sends the vibration to the brain where it is interpreted as sound. But you don't have to be there for a sound to ocurr. A simple experiment would be to place a recording device near the tree and record the result. Even with no one there, if the tree falls over there will be sound on the recording device.

[SPINOZA]

The recording device answer doesn't suffice. By placing a recording device there, you're essentially placing a pair of ears there. When we ask "if a tree falls over and there's no-one there, does it make a sound?" we mean would it make a sound in the absence of a man-made recording device also. If that sufficed as an answer it'd be a rather rubbish question. We mean...in the absence of any sound-reception capability whatsoever.

[joe_doufu]

The recording device records vibrations, and reproduces them.

The philosophical question here is, does "sound" mean vibrations or does it mean a human brain's experience of vibration? Or does it mean my experience of vibration.

Vibrations in nature can be objectively measured. Sounds as heard by a human are subjective. We can't even be sure that other humans and animals experience sound the same way we do.

[JAWINSEOUL]

HERE IS YOUR ANSWER (I HOPE)

I understood the problem this way. The tree does not make a sound but it does make noise.

Noise is electromagnetic radiation (as light or radio waves) that is composed of several frequencies and that involves random changes in frequency or amplitude

Sound is the sensation perceived by the sense of hearing. (The Sound waves need to be received by the ear and a signal sent to the brain to hear this sound.)

So the answer is the tree makes noise but since their no one there to hear it does not make a sound.

[mole]

I always thought of this as a definition question rather than philisophical.

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=sound
hmm.. still kind of leaves room for argument. I like 1.a. So sound.

[Satori]

[khyber]

the whole 'resonance" theory...
Isn't that the one where everything is vibrating? and that therefore, everything makes a "sound".


As has been said many times before, i think that sound doesn't require
an EAR to register. It simple requires a SURFACE (or some hard object) which can vibrate (that being an eardrum).
Whether it can be register as "Sound" for US

[Satori]

Well feel free to say I'm wrong. I studied music at university so this is my zone. But whatever gets yer rocks off...

[joe_doufu]

[IwalkAlone]

My goodness people......If a deaf man watches a tree fall.....not to burst any bubbles but we are actually all in comas, being harvested for our body heat to create energy to run super computers of immense AI....duh...get a grip!

I believe the root of this question deals more on the lines of the importance of events that occur without our knowledge. If a tree does indeed fall in my absence, the sound does not exist in my life and therefore its existence is the same as its nonexistence....it's irrelelvent!

[Gorgias]

There are many takes on this question. Like a good amount of philosophy stuff, there just might not be any answer what-so-ever. The tree falling question is from ol' Bishop Berkeley. Other philosophy majors who spent more time on Berkeley can add to this, but in short, Berkeley was an Empiricist, he questioned what we can know about "the world" as it is "beyond" our senses. Berkeley's famous quote is: "Esse est percipi" or "To be is to be perceived." The fact of sound or waves or ears or what have you sort of misses the point. It doesn't matter exactly that the question uses a tree and sound, the point is sort of:
what, if anything at all, can we know about "the world as it is in-itself" (if there even is such a "world")?
There are many takes on an answer, but a good answer is maybe: Nothing. Or like some joke: "there isn't even a tree."

Anyway it's good to think about these sort of things at times; winter is kind of the philosophy season. But don't stress about it too much, there has not been a final answer in 300 years so far, so I doubt we're gonna come up with the truth of what is behind "the veil of the world" here on this forum.

[mole]