It is the time and time again old saying does the tree falling in the woods make any sound if no one is around to hear it hit the ground. This question has plagued mankind for an undetermined amount of years many even centuries. No one is for sure of the questions origin however the question itself is the important factor not the origin. There has been many debates over the issue.
I choose to use simple logic and reasoning close to the same as John Locke would of thought and try to make a reasonable agreement.John Locke was known as an empiricists epistemologists whose essay has puzzled many minds and made many observations into the human knowledge. Even though many consider John Locke a failure there are a ton more who consider him a brilliant mind. “Though the qualities that affect our senses are, in the things themselves, so united and blended, that there is no separation, no distance between them: yet it is plain, the ideas they produce in the mind enter by the senses simple and unmixed.
” (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding pg 86) there is no doubt that if the mind thinks the tree makes a sound then it does according to Locke. Yet the argument is to be made that any mind can make a rash thought of ideas that no longer are plausiable. Sometimes the mind needs something as simple as the tree fallen sounding to reset itself and to be reassured.Locke later states that simple ideas only enter the mind through two ways which are sensation and reflection An Essay Concerning Human Understandin pg 88). For most people the answer to the question is simple, a tree will always make a sound when it falls, their reasoning behind this is the tree makes a sound when someone is around to hear it so why will it not make a sound when no one is around to hear it.
The senses have always played tricks on the human race. The sound will always remain to be true due to the fact that the mind thinks that it will, so why doubt the mind.Locke argured his points through the mind and how can a person agrue with the very thing that controls their whole entire body. According to Lockes page (http://www.
philosophypages.com/hy/4l.htm), John Locke “proposed the fundamental principle of empiricism: all of our knowledge and ideas arise from experience”. Which only goes to strengthen the statement that our senses tell us that the tree will repeatedly make a sound as it falls in the woods whether or not anyone is around to hear it.
Locke used to approaches to prove his argument by stating that “sensation, we obtain ideas of things we suppose to exist outside us in the physical world.According to the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy ( i Ideas in General) “All the parts of out knowledge, he (locke) insists, have the same rank and the same history regarding their origin in experience.” Here we see the word experience again combined with our ideas. To me this means that if I simply see or hear the same the reaction repeatedly over and over when the same process is taken it will ultimately produced the same reaction whether or not anyone is around.
Thus the tree makes a sound. My senses tell me it will and following Locke’s reasoning for logic the tree will make the sound in the end. The tree does make the same sound falling through the woods no matter there is a person there to hear it or not.
