I have just arrived here (did you guys hear me land?), and I can't voice how much I enjoyed reading this topic, even if it is really old philosophy. I've nothing to add but the sound of silence.

Sound is a longitudinal wave (P-wave) created by compression and expansion of gas molecules in the propagation medium (such as air). Any action which compresses or expand a gas creates sound waves but, like all P-waves they cannot propagate in a vacuum.

Thank you, abcxyz, for providing the answer the OP was seeking, and also for adding another voice of reason to this discussion. I found this thread too late to post the answer first, but am adding my answer here. Scientifically speaking, a sound wave IS sound. Period. When the tree falls, it creates sound waves, and, therefore, it makes a sound. Perception has nothing to do with the matter from a scientific standpoint.

percivalpecksniff wrote:

Dreamy I find it hard to take you seriously since your recent posts in which you claim

to converse with God on a daily basis and he speaks audibly to you. You also make the claims to have

visions and dreams from God.

Your attack on me through a post to Geeman is disingenuous and does you no favours but is in line with

your odd claims to have a special relationship with God. Show a little courage and make your point to the

one you are really directing yourself.

NB See the post 'Personal Conversations with God'

You seem to have gotten out of the wrong side of bed, Percival.

As well, in your self-pity you have conceived and given birth to a man of straw, and assumed I was addressing you in some obscure way when it was Geeman I was interfacing with.

I hope you will try and understand what I have written about semantic ambiguity, you could benefit from opening your mind to the concept.

As for conversations with God, if His human creation can communicate through transmitters and receptors it is no wonder He is able to initiate electromagnetic signals at personalised frequencies that can be heard by their intended recipients, and that He is able to tune in on their thought waves and linguistic vibrations.

Is that your cell phone ringing...?

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Job 33:15 "In a dream, in a vision of the night, When deep sleep falls upon men, In slumberings upon the bed;" Theology 101 "If He doesn't know everything then He isn't God."

Kingfisher wrote;
Scientifically speaking, a sound wave IS sound. Period. When the tree falls, it creates sound waves, and, therefore, it makes a sound. Perception has nothing to do with the matter from a scientific standpoint.

May I just seek clarification?
When I was young I had perfect hearing and sounds were clear and identifiable, now, with age and industrial deafness[continuous over exposure to high decibel levels above 80 ] I have trouble, even with the advanced hearing aids that I wear, to hear TV and lots of other freqencies. To me, this indicates that 'without my ears' I would not know 'sound'.
I may be getting confused here, but, if sound is made up of waves which I cannot hear/interpret, does sound have a different function/meaning[?] to what is 'audible'??

Another example is the cochlear implant
A cochlear implant is a medical device that is implanted into the head behind the ear of a deaf person. When used with a microphone and speech processor it electrically stimulates the auditory nerve and results in the person being able to hear sound. When the system was first developed in 1978 by Graeme Clark it was referred to as the bionic ear. Since that time a variety of cochlear implants have been developed by the Cochlear division of Nucleus.

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RULES ARE FOR THE OBEYENCE OF FOOLS AND FOR THE GUIDENCE OF WISE MEN

You nailed it!

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You can do anything, but not everything. —David Allen

antonio wrote:

Jyrkkä Jätkä wrote:

Think about some religion.
Does a god exist only as long there are believers?
If the believers are converted or otherwise extinct,
does their god vanish, too?

You nailed it!

~ And Pecksniff asks why I think my experience of God must be different from other people's...change that to infinitely different.

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Job 33:15 "In a dream, in a vision of the night, When deep sleep falls upon men, In slumberings upon the bed;" Theology 101 "If He doesn't know everything then He isn't God."

Pedro you said: So if a sound wave is sound, as some have proposed, what do you call that internal dialogue that goes on inside your head when you are thinking or perhaps remembering a tune or, come to think of it, dreaming. There aren't corresponding soundwaves bouncing around inside your head but you can certainly hear what is being 'said'or 'played'. You could call it a memory, a sense, a perception or an impression I suppose. If it differs from a 'sound' then how about a dream scenario in which you have the


Pedro do we truly hear in in our imagination or do we imagine we hear based on our understanding of sound?

Do we not re-create, or even create 'sound' although not actually audible? We can conjure up past places we

have seen, but they are mind pictures as are the sounds we hear ‘mind’ sounds.

Yes you ‘hear’ in the mind as it imagines, but that ‘hearing’ is not the end product of sound waves is it,

as you so rightly state.

So can we not create in the mind based on experience? Create sound and vision in an imaginary level.

We ‘see ‘we ‘hear’ in the mind but not in reality can we… real to us but not to our fellow man.

It is amazing and humbling to think that by a series of electrical impules in the brain we can do such

things... private to our own mind and to conjure up connected thought.


You further said: 'impression' of a bell ringing and wake up to find that one actually is ringing, does that promote your impression to a 'sound'or was it one all along?


Is that not just the mind waking up aroused by a real and not imagined sound invading the dreamlike state

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It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. Aristotle

To quote my own post of the 18th July;
As I am typing this, I can 'hear' my own thoughts. If I am reading a book, my mind registers the sounds of actions. Others cannot 'hear' what is in my mind. Can we therefore say that we 'can hear without making sound'.

When Pedro posted in a similar vein I did not reply as I am still not sure as to whether or not he was 'taking the mickey out on me'. More so when he mentioned the 'alarm clock' which was also in my post of 18th.

My conclusion is that no one can answer the OP with absolute certainty, as there has been so many conflicting replies, it is rather like, 'what came first, the chicken, or the egg? ,

PS:
Audible Range of Human Hearing

Acoustics of Music. There are two main reasons a person would want to limit both the range of frequencies and the level of amplitude or loudness when creating and listening to music. This foundation teaches us that there are specific limitations to consider when listening to music, making music, working in loud environments or when around or exposed to extremely loud noises over a protracted period of time.

The second consideration is for understanding that there are limitations to our human ability to hear all sounds and noises. It is in understanding this limitation that we know we do not hear the complete sound spectrum, only that a portion of the sound spectrum falls into the audible range of human hearing.
Audible Range of Human Hearing – The average person has a normal hearing range that falls between 20Hz on the low side and approximately 20,000 Hz on the high side. As we age the overall perceivable range of sound decreases especially in the higher frequencies. Just in case you are wondering, hearing loss begins at around the age of 8 years old. It continues relative to the amount of abuse we put ourselves through. Our capability to hear sounds in the upper portion of the range of hearing are for most people the first to go, as far as hearing loss is concerned.

This is an excellent site re; the human ear, includes diagrams and graphs.
www.dspguide.com/ch22/1.htm

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RULES ARE FOR THE OBEYENCE OF FOOLS AND FOR THE GUIDENCE OF WISE MEN

And? please perce, where did the chickensauros dinasour come from,
Also,[please note two grammatical errors] Rhode Island was nothing but a mass of ice until 12,000 years ago,

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RULES ARE FOR THE OBEYENCE OF FOOLS AND FOR THE GUIDENCE OF WISE MEN

No mickey taking intended Ray. I might have subliminally picked up your thread or else perhaps I should be more attentive. My first post suggested that the tree in the forest problem was one of semantics (and probably Berkeley's 'extreme idealism' might in fact have been based on a misunderstanding). Incidentally, there used to be a device (now banned-but who's to know?!) which emitted such high pitched frequencies to silence the kids at the back of the bus playing their wretched loud music, but remained silent to oldies . I suspect you can find it on the internet.

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"Millions long for immortality who don't know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon" Suzanne Ertz

Oh dear Ray41 - once more you introduce the fox to the henhouse. Why do you persist in asking common sense questions when we have raised things to such a level of abstraction that any answer is possible? [only teasing, but you are good at bringing us down to earth sometimes]

But it is an interesting question and we probably need a neurologist here. I was once given a condescending "Janet and John hear voices" lecture by a psychiatrist and have not had any will to check it out. She said (if I remember aright) that the place on our brain in which we hear and process human speech, is close by, and linked, to the area where we process information, in the form of thinking about things in words.
If I got it right, she was suggesting that in pathological states we can confuse our own "thoughts in words" with stuff coming from outsiders. If we have, just for example, had lots of people using a particular tone of voice/phrase about us, the neural connections which would be used to pick up and process that tone/those words might be strengthened such that we get a short-circuit and attribute those repetitive self-talk phrases as coming from outside. It is a feature of the developing toddlers' brains that they are hyper-alert to anything which they can use to guide their behaviour and record them far more than simple input.
So we do "hear" our own thoughts in the same part of the brain that hears others speaking. There is no sound of course, merely a trick of the brain.
FWIW

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"The voice of the majority is no proof of justice." - Schiller

Indeed very interesting stuff. As I read what you wrote and reading the great links by experts I have my own thoughts and memories running around my brain and what I actually physically hear is some back ground music my wife is playing in the room. Inspiring and I can imagine nobody as of now knows yet how this really works. Miraculous, isn't it? BTW, in one ear I'm about half deaf.

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Give a man a fish you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish you feed him for a lifetime - Chinese proverb

Regardless of the relevance to the topic, Ray41 - you have succeeded in taking up (I won't say wasted) an hour of my time. I am a snapper up of information -I just wish I could access the files in my head more easily at times" Thanks I will find a use for some of the info in that link.

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"The voice of the majority is no proof of justice." - Schiller