Last week I interacted, from a safe distance, with two falling trees. Driving on old US Highway 64 as an intense thunderstorm wound down, I stopped behind the blue flashing lights of a sheriff’s patrol car. I rolled down my window when the young deputy approached through the rain.
“There’s a tree blocking the road ahead,” he said. “My partner and I couldn’t move it, so we called for a chainsaw crew. You’ll need to detour up Trout Cove and down Greasy Creek to get around it.”
I thanked him and turned right, snaking my way up Trout Cove through dark clouds and mist to the top of the canyon. I turned left and followed the road along Greasy Creek back toward the highway. The muddy waterway overtopped its banks in places, partially covering the pavement and reducing travel to a single lane. I made it safely to my destination, although the usual 15-minute trip took me three quarters of an hour.
During my morning walk the following day, I heard the crash of a big tree falling in the valley below me. No doubt it’s a casualty of last evening’s rain saturating the soil and the wind giving it a final push, I thought. I remembered a discussion that occurred during my college philosophy course, back in the early 1970s.
Irish philosopher George Berkeley (1685-1753) posed this question: If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to witness it, does it make a sound? Berkeley believed that objects only exist when they are being observed. From this perspective, if no one is around to hear the falling tree, it does not make a sound. A logical extension of that viewpoint is that if nobody sees the tree topple, it didn’t happen.
Hogwash! IMHO, that is a perfect example of humankind’s egocentricity. It is the two-dimensional, Flat Earth Society kind of thinking that has brought America to the precarious situation we find ourselves in at this moment in history. “I must see it to believe it; otherwise, it doesn’t exist.” Ask your politicians how far that’s got them this year.
I didn’t see either of the trees. Therefore, they must not exist.
Image by Fran Lafferty from Pixabay
#fallingtrees #lifequestions #philosophy
Add comment
Comments