If a tree falls in the forest and there's nobody there to hear it, does it make a sound? What do you think? Well, I have the science to answer this question. The answer is no, because sound doesn't exist outside of the brain. The science? I think she's confusing science, semantics, and philosophy. And she does use it as a great excuse to explain some audiology concepts, so go take a listen. But the question itself originated with the Irish philosopher George Berkeley back in the early 1700s, and he used it as a way to explain his philosophical concept of immaterialism. theory that states that nothing in the physical world exists except in so far as it's perceived by our own minds. So if we don't perceive the sound of the tree falling, no tree. But she argues that there's a difference between sound waves which exist regardless, and sound which is only that which is perceived by our own minds. But if you think about it, science itself is the process by which we try to observe and understand the natural world, and use our observations to make hypotheses and update our beliefs. It tries to determine objective truths about the natural world that are divorced from our psychological perceptions of things, except psychology. I can talk about sound as a pressure wave, I can talk about the speed of sound as it goes through different mediums, like air, and that itself is divorced from any concept of us listening to it. And more than that, a key aspect of science these days is devising experiments that use equipment to measure things. I can have a microphone in the forest that measures that sound, and then view the readout on my computer, and I was never there to perceive it. The sound wave never reached my eardrum, and yet that sound existed. Thank you.
Additional notes
#stitch with @emily | neuroscientist 🧠 When a tree falls in the forest: The science AND philosophy behind this famous question 🌲🤔 The argument she makes was first made by Scientific American back on April 5, 1884, when they addressed the question “If a tree were to fall on an uninhabited island, would there be any sound?” by saying ”Sound is vibration, transmitted to our senses through the mechanism of the ear, and recognized as sound only at our nerve centers. The falling of the tree or any other disturbance will produce vibration of the air. If there be no ears to hear, there will be no sound.” What do you think, sound or no sound? #science #philosophy
References
- Source named in caption: Scientific American, April 5, 1884. No direct source URL was listed in the workbook row.
- Source named in transcript: George Berkeley and immaterialism; no direct source URL was listed in the workbook row.