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If a Tree Falls in the Forest…
…does it make a sound?
Well, yes. Yes, it does. As much as I wish it weren’t so, there just isn’t a meaningful distinction between “sound” and “noise” that lets me get away with saying that someone has to perceive the former in order for it to have occurred.
The most common and convincing contrast between sound and noise is that noise is unwanted. If it were phrased the other way, that sound is “wanted noise,” then maybe we could squeak out a lexical case that sound made when there’s no one there to want to hear it isn’t sound at all. But, given the way the distinction is generally made, it seems more profitable to reform the original question: “If a tree falls, etc., etc., does it make a noise?” That might be an easier question to answer in the negative.
Which brings us to the administration of President Obama, and the question that recent events bring to mind:
If a crime occurs in an administration and there’s no one there to report it, does it make a scandal?
Because it looks increasingly likely that crimes, serious crimes involving abuse of police and intelligence powers at the highest levels, occurred. If true — and the evidence is already compelling even though the serious investigation is just beginning — then there will be scandal, as there should be. At the least, it should darken an administration that basked in the glow of a fawning press. At the worst (and I think we’ll get there), some high-ranking officials of that administration should stand trial for betraying their offices in the service of their party.
Serious stuff, from what we are often told is a “scandal-free” administration.
The press likes to claim to be the noble guardian of democracy and reports daily that “democracy is under attack.” The only evidence to support that claim is the misconduct of the press itself, first in looking the other way while one administration tried to handpick its successor, and then spinning like a dervish in its eager complicity to undo the unfortunate “mistake” of 2016, when the crimes of a scandal-free administration proved insufficient to achieve the expected outcome.
Oh, great. Now we’re going to have to argue about the definition of “nobody.”
My ‘point’ was (still is, I suppose) that there are definitions of ‘sound’ that have only a tangential relationship to the common meaning of ‘what you hear’. I feel
verysomewhatnot very strongly whichever way is the opposite of that taken by whoever started the idle cocktail party chatter, because that is the ‘fun’ of questions like this — the ‘argument’.Another fun topic is “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” which depends on what definition of ‘egg’ you will accept. Whichever that is, I will take the opposite view — for a time, at least.
If there is a ‘tape’ recorder present when the tree falls, is the presence of sound dependent on whether or not someone plays back the ‘tape’?
Schrodinger’s timber?
Indeed. Those are what we in the business would call “incorrect definitions”.
;-)
https://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/animals/stories/finally-answered-which-came-first-the-chicken-or-the-egg
The tape does not contain sound.
The tape contains patterns encoded in a ferrous powder.
When played back on a tape player, these patterns are read as voltage fluctuations which cause the paper cone of the loudspeaker to vibrate.
The loudspeaker vibrations then cause vibrations to propagate through the air.
These vibrations only become sound when interpreted by a functional mind.
I want to say I’m going to mansplain to those of you who still don’t get it that “sound” is an objective, and not subjective, phenomenon. That’s what I want to do, and I want to actually use the “mansplain” neologism when I do it, just for its maximally pugilistic and pugnacious effect.
But that’s as close as I’ll get to doing so, because of course the matter really is open to interpretation.
A minority of primary (i.e., first) definitions of “sound” require that a listener be present; every definition of sound as a noun includes a meaning that does not require that a listener be present.
Increasingly, the better (my opinion) dictionaries contain a primary formulation like this (taken from the Oxford English Dictionary):
(emphasis mine)
What I like about this definition is that it describes the two essential qualities of sound: that it be a vibration in the air, and that it be a vibration of such amplitude and frequency as to be discernible to a listener — should such a listener be present.
Now, if you’re thinking “so a person has to be there, so that the sound can be heard,” you’re wrong, and I’ll try to make that clear:
If a temperature of 451 degrees Fahrenheit can ignite paper, is it necessary that paper actually be ignited for that statement to be true?
If a force sufficient to accelerate a mass to a velocity of seven miles per second can propel that mass into space, is it necessary that any particular mass actually be propelled into space to make that true?
If the sign on the wall of the dining room at the Elks’ Lodge on Highway 6 states that the room can, by order of the Fire Department, accommodate a maximum of 176 people, is it necessary for the room to be filled to capacity for that restriction to be in place?
If a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one there to hear it, but it made vibrations in the air of sufficient amplitude and frequency as to be discernible to any listener present had there been a listener present, then yes, it made a sound.
If a metaphor is taken literally does the philosophical point it made still exist?
I don’t understand any of that.
Plus there is no such thing as a sound detection apparatus. It is a vibration detection apparatus. If your island contains a deaf cat, let’s say, that cat still can detect the vibration. Through it’s body touching the ground, and through its whiskers. But it does not “hear” the tree falling. That’s because the apparatuses that it can use to detect the vibrations are not capable of translating those vibrations to the parts of the brain that convert vibrations in to sound.
But we are splitting hairs…
I try my hardest to be a nobody.
Yes, but perhaps not with the person who has taken it literally.
Nobody succeeds like you do.
FIFY
It’s better than splitting wood, because before you can split wood you first have to fell a tree, and nobody wants to hear about that.
They dodged the issue. The question, properly phrased, is “Which came first, the chicken or the chicken egg?” I mean, reptile eggs had been around a long time before, but who cares?
The problem is: What is a chicken egg? Is it an egg laid by a chicken, or an egg from which a chicken hatches? Their chatter about proto-chickens presumes (without saying) that they endorse the latter view. If they mean that, they should have to defend it. I therefore reject their response.
For now.
The chicken came first. Obviously.
The chicken-or-egg question is only a conundrum to people lost in the Lamarckian wilderness. People with some grasp of genetics understand that it is the genetic makeup of the developing embryo that instantiates the chicken. That genetic makeup, the product of whatever mutation distinguished the first chicken from its not-quite-chicken parents, is what Chicken Zero passed on to every chicken since. And that genetic makeup was embedded in the embryonic chicken, not in the other dozen or so components of that deceptively complicated vessel we call an egg.
Well I got indigestion just reading about it.
And there are known unknown events and unknown unknown events.
Every year Ricochet loses at
lestleast one pedant in a pistols-at-dawn scenario. Please for the love of all that is sacred, tamp down the divisive rhetoric for the children and stuff.Ok, Mr. Actual Factual.
Exactly! But the “sound deniers” are a stubborn bunch . . .
I think you can pump the brakes on that one.