15 Jul
2023
15 Jul
'23
5:34 p.m.
On Sat, Jul 15, 2023 at 01:00:53PM +0200, David Kastrup wrote:
Well, the philosophical question might possibly be
phrased as "if no
tree falls down in a forest and there is someone around to hear it, does
it make a sound?"
That again is word games, it just depends on how you define 'sound'.
But this makes more sense as a neurophysiological
question, namely how
the hearing adapts to total silence, similarly to how vision adaption in
total darkness is a neurophysiological question.
In this case adaptation doesn't play any role, it's all about how a
sequence (in time) of events is perceived. Humans are quite bad at
making 'objective' measurements of such things. This is even more
evident when visual and auditory events are mixed and the subject
has to find out the time relation between those.
Re. total silence: if you are in a completely soundproof room you
will start hearing your heartbeat and the blood flowing in your
ears after some time. Most people can't handle this for long and
start screaming 'let me out'. Those that remain inside longer
usually have a completely wrong idea of how long they were in.
--
FA