thedoc wrote: ↑Fri Jun 30, 2017 9:08 pm
"If a tree falls in the forest, and no-one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?
If you are very narrow-minded you would say that without a conscious being to hear, there is no sound. But if you are more open-minded you would agree that sound is just vibrations in the air and to be a sound doesn't need a conscious being to hear it.
Wow, if irony were gold, then you would be a rich man, doc.
I’m a big fan of metaphors that help us visualize difficult concepts. So...
Imagine a DVD player playing a DVD of a raucous and noisy scene of trees falling over left and right in a forest, all of which is appearing up on your new Samsung 4K television screen while blasting the crashing tree sounds from the speakers of your new surround-sound audio system.
Now, imagine removing the television screen and the speakers from this scenario while allowing the DVD to continue running, wherein all of the information that represents the images and sounds is still progressing through its algorithmic processes.
The question is, are the images and sounds of trees hitting the ground, literally present in the bumps and pits of coding on the DVD? Or is the existence of the imagery and sounds dependent upon the presence of the monitor and speakers?
Hopefully, the obvious point is that the informational patterns that underpin the phenomenal features of the universe are analogous to the information on the DVD, while the sensory aspects of consciousness, in this case, vision and hearing, are analogous to the TV monitor and speakers.
And just as it is logical to deduce that there are no actual sounds and images of trees falling to the ground amidst the bumps and pits of information encoded on a DVD, likewise, there are no sounds and images of trees falling to the ground amidst the peaks and troughs of quantum waves.
Both mediums require the presence of something else (other than themselves) to transform the information into that which the information represents, otherwise, “reality,” as we understand it, does not exist.
Now if you continue to insist that in the absence of consciousness, sound is still there, then you just aren’t looking deep enough into the “noumenal-like” underpinning of reality where the tree question has its roots (pun intended).
Quantum theory’s concept of “non-local” reality, like Kant’s concept of noumena, is inconceivable, and it is there in which the quandary of the falling tree lies.
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