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# oooh that
told me.

*shakes*
(, Wed 26 Sep 2007, 23:28, archived)
# Questions which look deep
but are actually just interminable, due to the person asking the question deliberately ignoring the answer, in order to continue to appear deep, are excruciatingly annoying and not clever.
(, Wed 26 Sep 2007, 23:42, archived)
# that's funny because I was thinking
it was you that was ignoring the answer to look authoritative. It still remains that sound is a human idea and without humans to apply that idea onto a given context, the idea cannot exist in the reality of that context, but only in a potential reality devised by those humans.

And I'm not ignoring your answer, I'm providing an alternative answer.
(, Wed 26 Sep 2007, 23:57, archived)
# I wouldn't like to look authoritative
and am physically incapable of it in face-to-face conversation. You do seem to be covering the same ground again, though. There is the idea of the sound, and then there is the actual sound itself physical sound. Been over that already. No, the idea can't exist without somebody to hear the sound, yes, the physical sound can.
(, Thu 27 Sep 2007, 0:02, archived)
# except that physical sound
is again a human construct. Without a human to decide that the physical component is sound, how can it be sound in any form other than a potential form? If there's no record of the sound, then it's just a presumed event, but can a presumed event be a physical sound when it's not a real event?

Or to put it more simply - what if the tree didn't make a sound when it fell? If you assume it did but weren't there to hear it, then you'd be wrong. It can only produce or fail to produce a sound if there is someone there to hear it or not hear it. Kind of like Schrodinger's cat for trees.
(, Thu 27 Sep 2007, 0:09, archived)
# Tree which we hear fall right in front of us are also just presumed events.
(Schrodinger's cat was invented to point out that the idea of observations changing reality is ludicrous.)
(, Thu 27 Sep 2007, 0:15, archived)
# The tree which we hear becomes
an observed event because we heard it. The tree which we assume to make sound is a presumed event because we have no record of it and are extrapolating the event outcome based on previous events. And Schrodinger's cat is not about observation changing reality, it's about reality being indeterminable without observation, existing in what he described as a superstate of both yes and no.
(, Thu 27 Sep 2007, 0:22, archived)
# We are extrapolating the outcome due to our theories about trees and sounds.
This is also the case when we observe the event "directly" - which I put in quotes because there is really no such thing as direct observation. And, re: Schrodinger - nuh-uh.
(, Thu 27 Sep 2007, 0:30, archived)