RICK:If a newspaper errs in the forrest and there's nobody there to read it...
is it really nonsense? How Zen
I liked your analogy it was funny but let me show you something that I took of
Boeree's webstite. He would distinguish the tree fall and the newspaper
erring.
BOEREE
"I believe the world is composed of nothing but qualities -- colors, sounds,
temperatures, shapes, textures, movements, images, feelings, and so on.
Unlike materialists, I do not reduce these qualities to atoms or energies or
anything “physical”. To me, these atoms and such are just explanatory
devices, good for helping us to predict and control, especially when we can’t
see what’s going on. But they are nothing without the qualities they refer
to.
Unlike idealists like Bishop Berkeley, however, I don’t think that all of
these qualities require the presence of a mind to exist -- some do, but others
don’t. When the tree falls in the forest, the sound happens, whether there is
someone there to hear it or not. Further, I believe there are plenty of
qualities -- an infinity of them, perhaps -- that we do not and cannot
perceive at all. Some animals, for example, can hear sounds and see colors we
cannot. These sounds and colors are every bit as real and rich as a high C or
blue-green.
On the other hand, some of these qualities we call “matter” and some we call
"mind." "Matter" includes the ones that emphasize form, resistance, and
especially separateness from mind. The ones we call “mind” include those
qualities that are more elusive, more personal, harder to share. Both are
real, neither is superior in some way. There are as well qualities of time,
space, number, causality, value, and so on, that are hard to place in either
category. "
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