Writing 200 Blog Post 16 - Trees, Part II

If a tree falls in the forest and no one’s around to hear it, does it make a sound? I used to think this was a rhetorical question, or at least an obvious one. Of course it does. The laws of nature don’t change when humans are watching. The air is just as capable of propagating sound waves, the tree just as sure to create them. Problem solved—a resounding yes. Now I’m not so sure. A strange confluence of factors has arisen in the past week to make me doubt what I once took to be self-evident. First, I watched a video about quantum entanglement and learned that my first premise—that the physical world doesn’t work differently under observation—is apparently false. Next, I started reading a new book, The World as Will and Representation. I haven’t gotten too far into it, but the first few pages have been dense. Among the points made so far is this puzzling statement: A subject (“that which knows all things and is known by none,” e.g. a human consciousness) and its object (“all that appears,” e.g. a tree falling) cannot exist independently of each other. This calls into question not only whether unobserved events happen predictably, but whether they happen at all. And finally—after this blog post began, actually—I started thinking about the word “sound.” I originally thought of it as a purely physical phenomenon, but is that really what the word means? Or is “sound” intrinsically meshed together with “hearing?” To ask the question the opposite way, can hearing exist without sound? If not, why be so sure of the converse? This gets at an equally sticky philosophical question that I’ve encountered specifically in the work of Sartre: does unrealized potential—like the potential of a sound to be heard or the potential of an ear to hear—truly exist? I really don’t know how valid my doubt based on quantum entanglement is, since a 20-minute video didn’t make me an expert, but the latter two seem to be well-established and unresolved metaphysical questions. Had I thought to visit the question’s Wikipedia page before today, I would have seen the first one listed. There’s no resolution to this post. In fact, the resolution came first. I was smugly happy to be so sure of my answer before today, and now my world is shattering. Even the premise of the question is unclear. Can a tree fall in the forest when no one’s around? Does the forest exist? Do I exist? I still want to say yes. But why? If a tree falls in the forest and no one’s around to give it a name, is it a tree?