If a tree falls down in the middle of a forest and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a noise?

Question

Yes of course, it's physically impossible and logically incorrect not to (unless in a vacuum). Whats the point of it?

Answer 1

The point is considering whether anything really happens if there is no observer there to experience it. Is reality just perception or something more.

Excuse me. I just heard the sound of one hand clapping so I gotta go.

Answer 2

practically, we can only say, we need a thing that posesses the hearing sense audible to sound that will be the receiver of such sound.
You said nobody which refers to human being. How can you be sure there weren't 'anything' around (animals, insects,birds etc.) they too possess sense of hearing if not better as compared to human beings.
But this is off-tangent to your point. The answer is, it wont make a noise. Trees surrounding it cannot possibly hear the noise, or could they? gees, we never know, lol.

Answer 3

Well if something cannot be perceived than does it even exist? Watch What the Bleep Do We Know? It talks about the human mind and how it is wired. When settlers came to America the Native Americans literally were incapable of seeing the settlers ships. This is due to how the brain is wired and how it uses stimuli to create a picture of what it believes should be their, but not what necessarily is there. This is a bad explanation, but you should check the movie out.

Answer 4

semantics. this is not a real philosophical question.

its just a play on word definitions. the only reason why you can get different answers is because the question is not fully asked..
if you were to define your words.. there would only be one obvious answer. it all hinges on what you define as sound.

if you asked "if no one is there when a tree falls, does it vibrate the air?"
YES

if you define sound as the act of percieving air vibrations, then NO

so there you go... the only reason why this question sounds hard, is because your leaving it up to the answerer to define the words in the question... and since the answer depends totally on the definition that is used... its not appropriate to ask it without specifying exactly what you want to know.

once again... proof that wittgenstien was right and most philosophical questions are simply a malfunction of language.. not real deep questions.

Answer 5

Of course it does but that's not the point of the question. I think the point of the question is to sink into a deep contemplative state. The question has been around since time immortal and was probably much more perplexing before we understood gravity, mass, soundwaves, etc!

Answer 6

It's not logically incorrect. It's logically possible that it wouldn't make a noise. What's the point of what?

Answer 7

Technically your hearing of a crashing sound is all taking place in your mind. the sonic vibrations are taken from the air and sent through your ear to the tympanic membrane, the 3 bones of your middle ear and through your cochlea in the inner ear. these vibrations are transmitted by auditory nerves to the hearing center in your brain and deciphered as the "Sound" you hear.
So, without a brain to decipher it, there is only sonic vibrations in the air--this is why we have no sound in space--no medium for it to send those vibrations through.

Answer 8

Yes, of course it makes a noise.

Answer 9

If you saw the earth explode 5 minutes before it acutally did, would you consider yourself to still exist?

Answer 10

If this question gets asked often enough and everybody keeps answering it over and over and over and over, will the sales of dog whistles sky rocket?