Philosophy Now Forum

I just wonder.

PhilX

No. But it's important to those who can hear and see it.
p.s.
But then again it'd depend upon what you mean by "important"?

Yes. Nature looks and listens, it never speaks. All human speech is a fiction and not reality.

Although animals do display the capacity to be vocal as a way to communicate, it is not in relation to a self the way human vocals are.

Possibly. I'm assuming that what you mean by "important" is that it would be useful to accomplishing some goal - like survival or procreating. There may be some things that you can't perceive that might be useful to accomplishing your goal. I'm sure you had an experience where you made a decision with some information you had but after you made that decision you realized that there was other information available that would have produced a better outcome from your decision. That information could have been something you never knew, or something you knew but didn't think about it until after the decision was made.

Also, your brain filters a lot of the information your consciousness receives, and even then your attention in consciousness willfully ignores certain bits in favor of more important bits - bits that are more pertinent to the situation at hand.

I like to think that we know most of what we need to know to accomplish most of our goals. Natural selection has been filtering out bad interpretations of sensory data and promoting new mutations that allow organisms to access more information about the world for eons. For instance, eyes have evolved separately in different organisms at different times so detecting and processing electromagnetic energy as a means of knowing about the world seems very important.

Survival itself seems to be the perfect catalyst for determining truth about the world so that you may survive in it. If there was something that existed that we couldn't perceive and it posed a threat to our survival, natural selection would promote any mutation that arose that allowed an organism to detect such a threat. If there was no threat then natural selection would never favor any mutation that would detect it. In this sense, the thing wouldn't be "important" enough to perceive.

Possibly more important, as whatever 'you can't hear or see' could jump of the bushes and bite you on the bum, and you'd be ill prepared to defeat it!