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Pleiades's picture

Okay, so a tree falls in the

Okay, so a tree falls in the forest and doesn’t make any ‘sound’. But we have basically defined sound as ‘an interpretation of waves in the air by some organism with a organ to gather these waves and a brain to process those waves’. There are still compressions of air going this way and that, but because there is nothing there that it is useful too, it isn’t a ‘sound’ (as we have defined it). This is like a bee saying ‘a UV wave passes by and there are only humans around, does it really exist?’ Just because we can’t tell its there, doesn’t mean a) it isn’t, b) it isn’t useful to something else perhaps in some other way. Think about that wave traveling through the forest. Sure if there is nothing with an ear drum it can’t be a ‘sound’ but it still tickles the hairs on the leaves of plants when it passes by. So I think the implications are just that if we define everything in this universe relating to US (as humans), we can’t make this silly little analogies introducing the absence of us and expect them to have a whole lot of meaning. I think this is kind of the same with disability in our society. By definition a disability is a condition or function judged to be significantly impaired relative to the usual standard of an individual or their group. By the standards of that group, you are disabled. Sure in another group you may have the advantage, the way things worked out (by evolution I mean). You have a disadvantage. ‘In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king’. So perhaps reality is all relative, but this is how we have defined it. So we have to deal with the consequences of that.

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