We have all heard the question "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it still make a sound or a noise?" We have heard it ten, hundreds, or thousands or more times.
What does that question have to do with the description of Metaphysical Naturalism (MN) as "A belief concerning the supernatural, sacred, or divine, and the practices and institutions associated with such belief"? [See this blog dated 09.05.2008] MN, concerned with defining such things, and with the denial of what is non-existent, and with replacing belief in the supernatural or the lack thereof with a certainty about the natural cosmology of the universe and existence itself, has an interest in addressing "The Tree in the Forest."
Every answer I have ever read misses the essential point, which is not about "sound or sound waves being heard or not heard," nor about whether sound is different from noise. Those are the excuses of metaphysicians who will not, or cannot, face the real question, or who have no idea that another question more real exists.
The question is: Does existence exist independently of consciousness? When seen in this context, it does not matter if "sound" or "noise" is used as the definition of what happens when the tree falls; it matters whether you think things happen whether or not a consciousness is there to perceive that it happens.
The belief that reality requires a consciousness is gaining in prevalence. It has been a staple of some eastern philosophies for thousands of years. Some western philosophers have advanced the idea. Many young students facing philosophy for the first time have serious existential questions about their own existence. That makes a shameful indictment of how far our "intellectual" standards have plunged since Renaissance scholars brought Jefferson and America's other Founders to an understanding of men's unalienable individual sovereignty.
Those modern men and women who doubt their own existence have fallen backward in time 500 years, and can have no conception about their unalienable sovereignty, except what they are lucky enough to glean from between the lines of their teachers words, teachers who tell them their "rights" include all those things which must be provided by other men when they themselves fail to provide it--like health care.
(Deregulation of the health-care industry and extended patent lengths on pharmacuticals would considerably alter the high cost of care and drugs. But that is better left for another blog or two or three.)
To believe that consciousness gives reality to reality, e.g., that "perception is reality," is fallacious logic called the Primacy of Consciousness. (The Primacy of Perception is also a fallacy. ["...perception [as] the causal product of atomic sensations," again e.g., "perception is reality." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Merleau-Ponty ]
The Primacy of Existence states that existence exists. http://www.aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/primacyofexistence.html
http://www.geocities.com/katholon/poe.htm et al.
Existence exists. Period. There can be no requirement for the conscious perception of a "thing" to make that "thing" real. In this case the thing is whether or not a noise or a sound is generated.
If we grant that it is generated, because we agree the tree exists and that it fell, and that in the falling certain effects are the result of the falling--one of those effects being the generation of noise or sound--then it does not matter which definition you choose. Some choose "sound," some choose "noise." We can agree that in the context of the Primacy of Existence, which word we use does not matter.
But those who believe the fallacy that a consciousness must be conscious of the cause-and-effect agree it does not require consciousness to make the sound or noise waves reality when the tree falls--unless they are hard core in their belief that the tree would not even fall if no one was there to see it fall. That would require the explanation that the tree does not exist to fall unless consciousness perceives the tree and the forest to give them their reality.
If one chooses to call it "noise," then "sound" is what requires perception. If one chooses "sound" as the effect of a falling tree, then "noise" requires perception. If one chooses to comprehend that noises and sounds and falling trees are going to happen even after Man is dead and gone, then he also comprehends that existence, not consciousness, is primary.
That is where the end result of the Primacy of Consciousness demonstrates its illogic. I have seen questions that ask such things as, "When I die, will existence cease to exist?" If the answer was yes, then logic would require consciousness to give empirical reality to all that exists, and that it would exist only within one's own consciousness, within ones own moment of perception, except where more than one consciousness is also conscious of the same tree and the same forest at the same time--and from precisely the same perspective.
A "positive belief concerning the supernatural" would be required for such a demonstration of solidarity on the part of more than one consciousness. The evidentialist argument http://www.iep.utm.edu/e/evidenti.htm is that if four people are standing on the corners of an intersection and an accident happens, each of the four people will have differing details on the accident, since each perception took place from a different perspective. This argument holds that if each of the accounts is factual, then four different sets of facts exist.
This might be compared to the four accounts of the angels at the tomb of Jesus when the angels told "the two Marys" about his "resurection."
"Matthew says that the angel that was sitting upon the stone on the
outside of the sepulchre told the two Marys that Christ was risen, and
that the women went away quickly. Mark says that the women, upon
seeing the stone rolled away, and wondering at it, went into the
sepulchre, and that it was the angel that was sitting within on the
right side, that told them so. Luke says it was the two angels that
were standing up; and John says it was Jesus Christ himself that
told it to Mary Magdalene, and that she did not go into the sepulchre,
but only stooped down and looked in.
"Now, if the writer of those four books had gone into a court of
justice to prove an alibi (for it is of the nature of an alibi that is
here attempted to be proved, namely, the absence of a dead body by
supernatural means), and had they given their evidence in the same
contradictory manner as it is here given, they would have been in
danger of having their ears cropped for perjury, and would have justly
deserved it. Yet this is the evidence..." [Thomas Paine; "The Age of Reason"]
"Yet this is the evidence" for the account of whether or not a tree makes a sound or a noise in the forest, that different people can have different perspectives of the same event, and if they did not themselves have any perception of the event, the sound or noise could not have happened because a sound or a noise is a perception.
The fallacy can be described this way:
If sound is perception of an event, and
If a falling tree makes a sound,
Then the sound of the falling tree is in the perception of the event, and only in the perception of the event.
This is a belief in the supernatural, when naturalism is defined as existents including actions for which there is "no supernatural cause and government, but [which are] self-existent, self-explanatory, self-operating, and self-directing..." http://www.ditext.com/runes/index.html .
In other words, Metaphysical Naturalism is the certainty that existence is self-sufficient and requires no help from man (or god) to make it work. That such "certainty" is contextual with Man's knowledge of the logic of his physics makes it a belief. Certainty does not require infallibility and infallibility cannot be had in logic; infallibility makes beliefs even out of certainties where certainties are substantiated by logic. Nor does fallibility make certainty any less certain.
Beliefs are defined as religions by many authorities, and this Assemblage will not take umbrage by that definition, when it advances the wall of separation between church and state. As it is the committed purpose of this Assemblage and its Academy to help maintain this wall of separation, and as it is not contradictory to claim any belief as part of one religion or another, nor to claim that religion is a system of beliefs, it is the belief of this Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists that the production of noise or of sound by an empirical existent, under normal and natural conditions, is self-evidentiary, a certainty, and a primary axiom of existence.
The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists is the sm (service mark) of the Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism tm, which is the educational arm of the Assemblage.
This publication © 2008 by Curtis Edward Clark and Naturalist Academy Publishing ®
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