If a tree falls in the forest - revisited

In one of the early posts I wrote about my answer to a Zen riddle. If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one to hear it, is there a sound? My answer was that sound needs both an originator (the vibrating air created by a falling tree) and a sensor (our ear) along with the ability to process the sensation (the chemistry of our brain). In the post I expanded the answer saying that without someone there, not only is there no sound, there is no forest nor tree, only empty space with tiny bits of matter and energy swirling around. The other day I was pondering emptiness and thought of a more tangible example of there being nothing but emptiness without a sensor and a processor.

We are surrounded by a multitude of vibrating photons zipping all around us. A small segment of these we can see with our eyes (visual spectrum), others we can feel on our skin (infrared). Also zooming around us are photons of longer wavelength (radio waves) which we neither see, smell, hear nor feel. The sources of this long wave radiation are varied, some known and others unknown. A certain portion of these waves we have generated ourselves in the form of radio and TV signals. Because we cannot sense them, though we may be in their midst, we are totally unaware of their existence. However, out of this jumble of energy, with a proper antenna we can detect these photons and with the aid of the processor in a TV set and a screen, we can view what to our eyes and mind appears as scenes of amazing clarity. In this context, the question would be; if a TV station sends a signal and there is no antenna nor TV is there a picture? The picture is made when the waves are captured with the antenna, converted in the TV receiver and picture projected on a screen. No TV, no picture. Without a TV, though there are signals emitted in some orderly fashion, they are still only waves.

So if there is no one or nothing to sense and process information, just as without a antenna and TV there is nothing but empty space with subatomic bits of matter and energy zipping around and no sound, no tree, no forest and certainly no picture. My feeling is that in the greater scheme of things, our sensing and processing capability is very limited as is our understanding of the universe and its origin. How does a chimp see the world, a fish, a worm? How much further from the truth are they?

In relatively recent times, as with the example of the TV, we have developed numerous sensors and converters that translate un-sensed activities within our “emptiness” into ones we can indeed see, smell, hear or feel moving them into our realm of consciousness. As time goes by, more and more such will be devised and with that our understanding of the universe will continue to expand. However, I believe that because of our brain’s capacity and the limitation of our reasoning abilities we will probably still only come to know at best only one billionth of what there is to know. Or will we evolve to where it grows to two billionths?