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If a Tree Falls in the Forest

“Was I once a man dreaming of being a butterfly?

Or am I now a butterfly who dreams of being a man?”

Chuang Tzu

 

"If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?"  This philosophical exercise proposed by George Berkeley is so similar to a koan that it is basically treated as such in Google searches.

The first relationship between high-energy physics and the Tao was brilliantly proposed by Fritjof Capra in 1975.

The relationship between quantum mechanics and reality faithfully follows the school that began with Capra.

In both Buddhism and high-energy physics, nothing exists by itself. If for the Buddhist master the different species of life live parallel unrealities, the result of the interrelationship of their metabolism with the outside world, the quantum physicist verifies that reality is simply the stability of interrelationships of patterns.

For both, the ultimate reality is nothing more than the result of mental projections reflected in the neural network of each species.

Thus, the tree that falls in the forest makes a noise not only for the metabolisms that have the senses to capture sound but especially for those in which the framework that includes the perception of sound is developed.

Ultimately, the tree, its fall, the resulting sound, or its absence make no more sense than the butterfly dreaming of being a man.

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