If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Please give it a thought, for a moment.
Obviously, the answer is YES; how does it matter if a person is there or not, is the instantaneous reply we hear from our logical circuits up there, followed by a quick sense of superiority arising from the apparent triviality of the question. But one second, this deserves another thought. What is Sound? Sound is a perception which we get, when some vibrations hit our eardrum and is recognized as "sound" only at our nerve centers. So if no human is there around, can we say, the falling tree made some sound? Welcome to the unconquered lands of Metaphysics!
I was dumbstruck with the realization which dawned upon me, completely stupefied with the thought of numerous unperceived possibilities which can exist in this world. I felt like being awakened from some world of ignorance, as I steeped into the mystical depths of this conundrum. The world we see, is the way we perceive it through our senses. We are so much tied to our senses that we simply can't imagine what lies beyond and that sets a limitation to our interpretation of reality.
I found this conundrum immensely powerful and impacting. As this fact sinked in further, becoming a grist to my cognitive mills, I started developing a parallel theory myself stemming up from this weird realization. If we observe our daily lives in light of this idea, the very fact that at times we tend to be so adamant with our own notions and prejudices that we undermine other person's beliefs, simply because we can't feel them; the same way we ignorantly answered 'yes' for this tree-falling-in-a-forest question, driven by our default sense of perception. Just because we can't empathize with the scenario that how a tree will fall(silently?), we are pushed away from the world of clarity to the not-so-comfortable world of complexity. As we mature and age, the rigidity of our beliefs is further strengthened with whatever experiences and emotional reactions, our senses impose on us, and over the time we start attributing our own 'relative' sense of things as something 'absolute'. The moment we encounter contrary views, we tend to disregard them. The world today is caught in the mire of conflicts arising from differences, but more than the conflict itself, it is the intolerance towards 'other perceptions' which fuels most of the fires. We should always keep in mind, we can't deny something just because we can't feel it. Developing sensitivity towards counter-views and accepting things which are imperceptible to you can make somethings better, is what I felt.
Though the answer to the actual question is still open-ended and subjective, an intense food for thought for scientific and philosophical minds, but the way it struck me completely added a new dimension to my sense of judgment and reality. I am not confident on whether the extrapolation of the conundrum to daily life, is out of the way exaggeration or makes some sense, but this is what I felt, just another insignificant grain of sand in the desert of wisdom!
This conundrum is actually a famous philosophical thought experiment that raises questions regarding observation and knowledge of reality. Wikipedia Reference : If a tree falls in a forest
Though the answer to the actual question is still open-ended and subjective, an intense food for thought for scientific and philosophical minds, but the way it struck me completely added a new dimension to my sense of judgment and reality. I am not confident on whether the extrapolation of the conundrum to daily life, is out of the way exaggeration or makes some sense, but this is what I felt, just another insignificant grain of sand in the desert of wisdom!
This conundrum is actually a famous philosophical thought experiment that raises questions regarding observation and knowledge of reality. Wikipedia Reference : If a tree falls in a forest
