What is your take on that tree in the forest?

I guess you refer to the old question: If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it does it make a sound? Okay, here's I how I see (or hear) it.

Have you ever wondered how the squiggles on the pages of the books you read--you do read, don't you?--translate into a shared experience with the author. Isn't that so incredibly amazing? And it's all happening inside your head. Created right there. Reach up with your hand and grasp the back of it. The entire universe fits within nicely.

And it's the same with the tree. Really, who's to say that it isn't all just happening inside your head. You visualize it upside down on the screen at the back of your head, upended so that it makes sense.

Yeah, but hey it's real. I can smell it--nope, just molecules tickling some nerve ends and scooting upward from there . . . I can touch it--just those same electrical impulses from your fingertips this time. Et cetera and so on.

No one can prove that anything is out there.

Trust your senses? No way! Take a virtual reality check . . .

A nice meal . . . tastes good . . . satisfying the senses . . . nerve impulses to brain . . .

= State of mind

Wonderful music . . . great sounds . . . resonating within . . . nerve impulses . . .

= State of mind

Basho’s haiku . . . conjuring up images, sensations, moods . . . and cerebral electric currents . . .

= State of mind

It seems to me that everything one experiences boils down to subjective experience. Bear with me, as I pick away at the warp and woof of that insight. Let’s solve once and for all the question of whether a tree falling down in the forest makes a noise if there’s no one about to hear.

Everything that I sense reduces to neural activity. That must be so by definition – that is what a ‘sense’ is, right? A way and means of perceiving the outside world. And so seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, smelling are in a sense delusional, or at least illusional.

Everything else also: all the other ways I experience life. Everyone that I relate to. The stuff that I work to possess. Hell, even the activity that I do! Am I walking, cycling and swimming or is this just what I imagine myself doing; it could be – undoubtedly is – just electrical impulses travelling to and from the concerned muscles.

Cripes, even this body! All that I’ve got to go on is mirrors and the poor evidence of my eyes. I’ve never seen the back of my head.

Thoughts and emotions swirl within. That’s all that they are; they’re no more real than the rest. Those stacks of card-houses. No more substantial than huts made of straw, bricks or sticks.

Virtual reality. Who’s to say that the universe as we know it isn’t simply an elaborately constructed virtual reality world a la Matrix which we’re all hooked up into. You wouldn’t know the difference. And really, there’s no difference in paying attention to playing the game in this or in a Second Life.

I’m not saying that they are equally as inconsequential, not necessarily.

Both could just as well be true.