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.
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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.
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Thu 27 Sep 2007, 0:09,
archived)
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.
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.)
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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.
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Thu 27 Sep 2007, 0:22,
archived)