If a Tree Falls in the Forest (Pt. I)

In my classes we discuss the question of what we mean when we say that something is real. One aspect of the question we specifically address are sensory phenomena like color, fragrance, taste, sound, and so on.

Students often hold the view that these phenomena are objectively real, that sugar is sweet regardless of whether anyone ever tastes sugar, the sky would be blue even if there were never any living things on earth to see it, and a tree falling in the forest makes a sound whether or not there's anyone around to hear it.

But is it true that the phenomena of our senses are objectively real? Consider this description of how music is downloaded to a computer and then transferred to the listener's ear. The description illustrates the point that a piano, for example, doesn't actually make music. The music is made inside us by our brains/minds.

If there's no ear to capture the energy, no brain/mind complex to interpret that energy, there simply is no music.

Here's the article's description of the process of recording music for storage on a computer:

• The acoustic waves are picked up by a microphone and converted to electrical pulses.
• The pulses are converted by an analogue-to-digital (A-to-D) converter into numbers representing the frequencies and dynamics of the waveforms.
• The digital signals are compressed by an algorithm into a coded representation storable on an external medium, such as an MP3 file.
• The code is written as magnetic spots on a hard drive according to a storage algorithm that does not necessarily store them in physical order.
• On demand, a read head on the drive reconstructs the bits in their proper sequence and transmits them as electrical pulses to the central processor.
• The CPU relays the file to a router where the file is packetized and sent over the internet to a specified address, possibly traversing electrical wires, the air (radio transmissions), or space via an orbiting satellite along the way.
• The destination site’s router reassembles the packets into a file for storage on a “cloud” server such as YouTube or SoundCloud.
• The website embeds the file’s location in its local server, which you, the listener, access by means of touch, using a mouse, keypad, or touchscreen.
• Your computer’s sound card converts the digital signals into audio output through speakers.

Notice that at no point in this process is there the sensation of sound. Nothing is actually heard. The article's description stops here, but if we were to continue the bullet points we could say that,

• The audio output of the speakers consists of waves of energy traveling through the air like waves in a slinky.
• When these strike an ear they're transformed into an electrical impulse that travels along the auditory nerve.
• When that impulse reaches the brain it's converted, in some mysterious, marvelous way that no one understands into the sensation of music.

Until that final event happens there is no music, no sound at all, just electrochemical energy. The music is created by our brain/mind and the relevant sensory apparatus. Sound is a sensation, and without the involvement of a sense there can be no sensation. To insist that sound exists even though no one hears it is like insisting that pain exists even though no one feels it.

And if that's true of sound and pain it must be true of all of our other sensory experiences as well.

And if that's true what would the world be like if we had additional senses, or fewer senses? Why think that the world is exactly the way we perceive it to be, or, for that matter, anything at all like we perceive it to be?

One last question: Why do I refer to the brain/mind? Why not just assume that the brain is solely responsible for the sensations we experience? I'll consider that question tomorrow.

From Malawi to Minnesota

Socialism is a seductive idea. It attracts many of those who yearn for a narrower gap between rich and poor, but the reality is that capitalism has lifted far more people out of poverty than has socialism. Because of capitalism there are fewer poor in the world today, as a percentage of global population, than at any time in history. Many of those who still live under socialism, however, still struggle for life's basics.

Martha Njolomole's story is quite amazing. John Hinderaker at Powerline blog introduces her to us:

Martha Njolomole was born in Malawi, one of the poorest nations in Africa, and a country where pretty much all economic activity is controlled by the government. She grew up in a household that had neither running water nor electricity. Nor did her family own any books. Through a combination of talent and extraordinary diligence, Martha won a scholarship to study in the United States. She was stunned by what she found here.

Today Martha is an accomplished economist and author of several important papers. She tells her story in this Prager U video:

Hinderaker adds this,

Martha has come a long way from the days when she carried water in buckets on her head, and scrounged for thrown-away scraps of newspaper on which she could practice reading. That distance is, really, the distance between socialism and free enterprise. No one is better qualified than Martha to explain that to America’s young people.

It'd be helpful if people like Martha Njolomole didn't have to do the job that America's college professors are being paid to do.

Another Christmas Gift Suggestion

Saturday I urged readers to consider my novel In the Absence of God (2012) as a Christmas gift for friends and family and mentioned in passing its companion novel Bridging the Abyss which came out three years later.

Bridging is, in part, the story of the search for a young girl who has disappeared off the streets of Baltimore, MD and is believed to have been abducted. Members of the girl's family as well as those involved in the search are forced to confront the tension between a secular view of life which offers no ground for thinking any act "evil" and the obvious evil of which some men are capable.

Here's an excerpt from the Prologue:

In 1948 philosopher W.T. Stace wrote an article for The Atlantic Monthly, a portion of which serves as an appropriate introduction to the story which follows in these pages. Stace wrote:

"The real turning point between the medieval age of faith and the modern age of unfaith came when scientists of the seventeenth century turned their backs upon what used to be called "final causes" …[belief in which] was not the invention of Christianity [but] was basic to the whole of Western civilization, whether in the ancient pagan world or in Christendom, from the time of Socrates to the rise of science in the seventeenth century ….

They did this on the [basis that] inquiry into purposes is useless for what science aims at: namely, the prediction and control of events.

"…The conception of purpose in the world was ignored and frowned upon. This, though silent and almost unnoticed, was the greatest revolution in human history, far outweighing in importance any of the political revolutions whose thunder has reverberated around the world….

"The world, according to this new picture, is purposeless, senseless, meaningless. Nature is nothing but matter in motion. The motions of matter are governed, not by any purpose, but by blind forces and laws….[But] if the scheme of things is purposeless and meaningless, then the life of man is purposeless and meaningless too. Everything is futile, all effort is in the end worthless.

A man may, of course, still pursue disconnected ends - money, fame, art, science - and may gain pleasure from them. But his life is hollow at the center.

"Hence, the dissatisfied, disillusioned, restless spirit of modern man….Along with the ruin of the religious vision there went the ruin of moral principles and indeed of all values….If our moral rules do not proceed from something outside us in the nature of the universe - whether we say it is God or simply the universe itself - then they must be our own inventions.

"Thus it came to be believed that moral rules must be merely an expression of our own likes and dislikes. But likes and dislikes are notoriously variable. What pleases one man, people, or culture, displeases another. Therefore, morals are wholly relative."

This book, like my earlier novel In the Absence of God, is a story of people living in the wake of the revolution of which Stace speaks. It's a portrait of a small slice of modern life, a glimpse of what it is like to live in a world in which men live consistently, albeit perhaps unwittingly, with the assumptions of modernity, chief among which is the assumption that God does not exist or is in any case no longer relevant to our lives.

A world that has marginalized the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition is a world which finds itself bereft of any non-arbitrary basis for forming moral judgments, for finding any ultimate meaning in the existence of the human species as a whole or the life of the individual in particular, and for hope that the human yearning for justice could ever be satisfied.

Modern man dispenses with God and believes that life can go on as before - or even better than before - but this is a conceit which the sanguinary history of the 19th and 20th century confutes. A world that has abandoned God has abandoned the fountain of goodness, beauty and truth as well as the only possible ground for human rights and belief in the dignity of the individual.

Modernity has in some ways of course been a blessing, but it has also been a curse. History will ultimately decide whether the blessings have outweighed the curse. Meanwhile, Bridging the Abyss offers an account of what I believe to be the only way out of the morass into which widespread acceptance of the assumptions of modernity has led us.

If you'd like to read more about either novel click on the link at the top of this page, and if you're looking for a gift for someone who likes to read and who thinks like W.T. Stace, both Absence and Bridging might be just the thing. I hope you'll give them a look.

They're both available at Hearts and Minds Bookstore, a great little family-owned bookshop, and in both paperback and e-book at Amazon.