Several years ago, while I was studying for A+ certification, my PC Repair instructor, a southern gent (with the typical conservative lean) went into a critique of the question:
If a tree falls in the forest, and no one’s around to hear it, does it make a sound?
Now I’m almost certain (given his conservatism) that his answer to the question, and the confidence with which he held it, came out of a mild hostility towards any take that might be considered hippy-like. I further suspect that his fluency in computer and sound technology (he was an audiophile who enjoyed the warmth of the old tube electronics) had something to do with it as well, that he had become so immersed in it that it had begun to project into his sense of how the world in general worked. But his explicit answer was that when the tree fell, it produced sound waves. So, of course, it made a sound! And as much as I trusted his authority on the issue of PCs, I knew immediately that something was wrong. But I’m not that light on my feet and often have to fumble around with a thing before I’m clear on what I think about it. Besides, how fluency or proficiency of my instructor in philosophy paled in importance to how proficient in PC repair he thought I was. So, understandably, I kept my mouth shut.
But it didn’t take long before I figured it out. The problem was that he had answered the wrong question. As is often the case with people who have strong feelings about something, he was hearing something he could respond to with more conviction:
If a tree falls in the forest, and there’s no one around to hear it, does it make a SOUND WAVE?
Being as immersed in applied science, as he was, he had assumed a scientific definition of the term “sound”. But the question was clearly working from the more nominal definition of sound as phenomenon or what is experienced. This should have been implicit from the clause “and there’s no one around to hear it”.
But the point here is not to gloat in my victory over my PC Repair instructor. He was an otherwise intelligent person who had given me some useful information on other things –both PC related and not. And the only important achievement to come of it was my A+ certification.
But it also gave me something else it in that the memory had kept an otherwise trite philosophical musing from slipping permanently beyond my intellectual horizon. Several years later, I began to realize that the presence of sound waves present some more subtle issues and the deeper question of why they exist in the first place. Granted, one could argue that they are accidental qualities of matter and that there is no “why”. Still, you have to ask. It just seems a little superfluous. And the same can be said for light waves. Certainly, we could easily rest on the notion that matter has just been there since the beginning of time. But would it have had any real need for sound or light waves, properties that could later be exploited by eyes and ears? Couldn’t it all have as easily done without it? And while we could easily write it off as some kind of happy accident; couldn’t it also be reasonably argued to lend some support to the Anthropic Principle, to the idea that everything seems created to be experienced?
Anyway….
