It’s going to depend on whether you define sound as a vibration that can be heard or as the reception of the vibration and its perception by the brain. For example, consider a vibration through air of frequency 30 kHz. It can be heard by a dog, but not by a human.
I believe the falling tree makes the earth and the air around vibrate; but if there is nobody to hear it, nobody hears it.
This isn’t a logical proof that no phenomenon of sound somehow “accompanies” the vibrations. The way science has constructed the scenario makes it seem like the explanation rules out the possibility that the perceived “sound” can exist outside the mind that constructs it from the stimulus, but that assumes the world is nothing but the theoretical atomic and subatomic constructs that are themselves imagined by physicists. It also assumes the world is a meaningless and purposeless place with only sub-molecular interactions occurring there. The problem with this perceived view is that it reduces reality to a meaning-poor narration about reality and relocates all meaning into the human psyche.AlNg:
Not really. It still sends vibrations and such on the air but it isn’t sound as we know it until the vibrations reach the ear and is translated.
Definitely man introduces a rich variety of novelties into reality with his appearance; and he himself is part of this reality. On the other hand, the world is not the theories we make about it. It is incredibly richer than that. However, it doesn’t imply that sounds and time must be part of that richness independently and before the appearance of sentient and intelligent beings. Whenever a new kind of being has come into existence, it has introduced new interaction modes with him. Therefore, there is nothing wrong on saying that before the existence of such beings, the interaction modes peculiar to them did not exist.
A novel is something that belongs entirely to the human realm. It has absolutely nothing to do with the molecular components of the physical book nor of the ink. Nevertheless, it is always subject to interpretation within a given social context, and from that perspective it is always recreated when the reader reads it.
A novel is a human creation embodied in the medium of paper and ink. As such, a novel is, for the most part, comprehensible. Where the analogy falls short is that the cosmos is not a human creation. So while a novel is in the human realm, entirely, the cosmos isn’t. The question then becomes, “How fully do human representations or interpretations of the cosmos truly capture what is there in reality?”
How do you know this with certainty? Perhaps matter was in a different form and gravity caused a collapse into a chaotic singularity which then was the catalyst for the big bang.
You’re just pushing the argument back one iteration.webmasterpdx:
How do you know this with certainty? Perhaps matter was in a different form and gravity caused a collapse into a chaotic singularity which then was the catalyst for the big bang.
The cyclic theory goes on without end.
Matter preceding the BB cannot be measured today and it is a conjecture. But the BB is also a conjecture - although it has a lot of support, and there is a lot of evidence to support it, there are alternative theories. For example, there is the cyclic theory which postulates a big Crunch followed by a BB, etc. ad infinitum. Some newer cyclic theories take advantage of the dark energy component of the universe to answer objections arising from consideration of the second law of thermodynamics.
At issue isn’t where it ends, but where it begins. It must begin with some cause…
The “dark energy” must, then, be created. That’s the question to address here.
The theory is that there is no beginning. According to Marcus Aurelius it extends without end both backwards and forwards.
How does one argue for a contingent being having no beginning?Gorgias:
The theory is that there is no beginning. According to Marcus Aurelius it extends without end both backwards and forwards.
By appealing to the model of the mathematical real line. The real line is contingent as it does not contain within itself the reason for its existence. Yet it has no beginning and no end.
The “model of the mathematical real line” does not have physical existence, per se. We’re talking about a created universe that does have physical existence, and are asking how that can be. The existence of the model does not provide justification for the physical reality.
That becomes problematic, as it requires you to explain the “coming into existence” of the created universe – from scratch – at each instant.
The line has no ‘being’, in a physical sense… which is what we’re discussing.
But according to the philosopher Plato and the more recent scientific Holographic Principle extracted from String theory, the objects existing in this world are projections of mathematical objects which exist in reality although a separate reality. Even Euclid taught that nature was the physical manifestation of mathematical laws. According to the Pythagoreans, of fifth century BC, numbers are both living entities and universal principles. In any case, since mathematics has been proven to be unreasonably effective in describing the real world, I fail to see the wisdom in excluding mathematical models to understand real world situations.
So, as I said previously, they don’t have physical existence (in this universe). Moreover, your purported “existence in a separate reality” doesn’t ground them in that reality; you would still have to describe how they came to exist, right?
You’re moving in the wrong direction, though: you want to claim that existence in a mathematical model implies existence in reality; the Euclidean claim you assert only says that there is a model that represents already existing reality, not a model that gives rise to a reality.
