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[VALIS]

And can someone tell me why whenever the topic turns to metaphysics or philosophy, seemingly 9 out of every 10 people will try to fluff it off with smart ass comments? Happens every time (not just here, just about anywhere).

 

[Phoenix]

Plato's Allegory of the Cave:
http://faculty.washington.edu/smcohen/320/cave.htm

Yep. Well I see someone else has taken a basic philosophy course. These questions are by nature 'unanswerable' because it depends on an observers frame of reference to determine what happened in the first place. If you have an observer, then you can't answer the question.

Its like another 'relatively useless' thing we talked about in philosophy with regard to proving that you exist, proving that what you see is real, and proving that the universe didn't begin mere seconds ago. All of these things are from the frame of reference of the observer.

Given a frame of reference, you can even take a tree falling in a forest under common terms and say 'no it didn't make a sound'. It could fall so slowly over such a long period of time as to have made no sound in the process. Observer frame questions are always fun to talk about, but there is no real ANSWER to them. Any 'answer' you get is more about how you approach the question than anything else.

 

[Zaptruder]

So, tell me, what color is the sun? Yellowish, right? But outside of our atmosphere, it looks white. Sunlight also contains all seven colors of the spectrum, atmospheric conditions just have us seeing the yellowish and sometimes red parts, never the green and never the blue. We have a blue sun as much as it is a yellow sun, WE just never see it as blue under our atmosphere.

But there is no inherent "yellowness" built into the sun, there is no "greenness" in grass, and there is no sound built into a falling tree. It takes certain conditions to make these things happen, they are not within the objects themselves. A falling tree does not make sound to a deaf person, nor does it make a sound if no one is there to hear it because all the conditions of what we've defined as sound aren't being met. Again, if we were all deaf, we wouldn't be talking about sound at all. So how can you say a falling tree DOES make a sound all the time? It obviously doesn't under those conditions. Reality is subjective upon the person experiencing it.

Are you sure? That our sun is a white star? different stars really do have different colors; that is the light energy they emit corresponds accordingly to different parts of visible electromagnetic spectrum, dependent on their physical chemical composition.

While it's true that you can split the values of light coming from the sun, such that you can derive blue, red, green, or any color of the spectrum, their combined totality will be skewed towards a more specific value. This is also true of common light sources such as filament bulbs.

From there, you can start intepreting it under different conditions... such as light passed through a material with the refractive index of X over Y distance, or light as percieved by a blind person... but in terms of a relative absolute and unmolested frame of reference, certain things can be said about the sun, that can be held as definite and true.

That said, I do agree whole heartedly; reality is subjective to perception. Or rather, the individual realities that we create through our perception are more important than what's real, in terms of an absolute frame of reference.

... the significance of which is that, particular attention should be paid towards perceptions of realities as much as the actual reality itself... which of course alters the perception.

 

[Scalemail Ted]

The tree falling question is a Zen Buddhist koan. Koans are simple "riddle" created by the Zen masters to challenge normal logical thought. The idea is that you can't get to enlighenment by thinking about it, so the teachers created little ways to get the students to think outside the box. In truth there IS no right answer; the point is to go in circles. All the possible answers have contradictions, so you can't use logic or reason to "beat" the question.

 

[Zaptruder]

The tree falling question is a Zen Buddhist koan. Koans are simple "riddle" created by the Zen masters to challenge normal logical thought. The idea is that you can't get to enlighenment by thinking about it, so the teachers created little ways to get the students to think outside the box. In truth there IS no right answer; the point is to go in circles. All the possible answers have contradictions, so you can't use logic or reason to "beat" the question.

They might've worked back when they were invented, but with the advent of science, giving clear and reasonable explanations for various phenomena around, they have since become outdated, or expired (can't find the right term, but you get me).
Of course, most people aren't knowledgable enough to pull those answers out, so for the most part they still work.

But it's a bit of a fallacy to say that they have no answers still, when the original questions themselves were flawed from an absolute sense; i.e. as questions with no answers, they've failed (but only long after they were devised).

In a more practical sense, the koans still achieve their desired goal, of expanding thought, through a simple question. That they do or don't have an answer is immaterial, but the process of thought that goes into finding the answer is the significance of what is achieved; otherwise, not only is there no point to a question that leads to no answer, no resolution, but keeps you thinking for all eternity in a circular manner, but it's rather disruptive, if not destructive of productivity.

 

[MIMIC]

So, tell me, what color is the sun? Yellowish, right? But outside of our atmosphere, it looks white. Sunlight also contains all seven colors of the spectrum, atmospheric conditions just have us seeing the yellowish and sometimes red parts, never the green and never the blue. We have a blue sun as much as it is a yellow sun, WE just never see it as blue under our atmosphere.

But there is no inherent "yellowness" built into the sun, there is no "greenness" in grass, and there is no sound built into a falling tree. It takes certain conditions to make these things happen, they are not within the objects themselves. A falling tree does not make sound to a deaf person, nor does it make a sound if no one is there to hear it because all the conditions of what we've defined as sound aren't being met. Again, if we were all deaf, we wouldn't be talking about sound at all. So how can you say a falling tree DOES make a sound all the time? It obviously doesn't under those conditions. Reality is subjective upon the person experiencing it.

Plato's Allegory of the Cave:
http://faculty.washington.edu/smcohen/320/cave.htm

What the ef? Those examples are far in between the falling tree question. I really don't know much about the sun but as you say, if the sun emits blue as well as green light, it's still there even if we don't see it, right? Regardless of the condition, it's still there.