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Original post by AndreTheGiant
I dont see how swapping sound for light changes anything the slightest.
Try it this way: "If I cease to have direct sensory experiences of a thing, how do I know that it still exists?"
Or further, because you can't trust your sensory input: "How do I know that anything other than me really exists, and that I'm not just living in the matrix?"
Or solipsism: "How do I know that anyone other than me is conscious, instead of it just being my imagination that they are?"
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You have already admitted the tree is in the woods, so of course it exists.
Well, no; you've tried to conjecture a tree in the woods, but maybe it's impossible for something to exist if there's nobody around to see it, so your conjecture is invalid.
This is often how we have to work in philosophy - using internal inconsistency to show impossibility. For example: "I baked a cake that was a cube and also not a cube." It will be impossible for me to say that and for it to be true, because it contains a contradiction; as a premise, it's trivially false.
In the case of the tree, by exploring whether it makes a sound, we might arrive at a contradiction, which would show that our premise - that there is a tree in the woods with nobody around to hear it - is false. We might prove that such a tree
cannot exist; that either there's somebody around to hear it, or that it really ceases to exist when people have left.
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Its like saying "I baked a cake. Did I bake a cake?"
This one's a little more fun if you rephrase it as "I have memories of baking a cake. Did I bake a cake?"
