If a tree falls in a forest with no one to hear it, then does it make a sound?

Most of us have heard this one.

If a tree falls, without anyone around to hear it, does it in fact make a sound?

I do not know why people have been trying to answer this qustion for centuries. Perhaps it was something to think about if you're having trouble falling asleep. The answer seems obvious.

The answer is "no". But the question should be, "does any one care if the tree makes the sound?"

The answer should again be "no". I have personally not come across anyone who has ever wondered if trees make sounds when they fall. Not even botanists (and I honestly can say that I have in fact met a botanist before). Whether or not a tree makes a sound will not change anyone's life. What would possibly be life changing and important would be if for instance the tree fell on some poor forest dwelling critter or if the trees were falling because of rising pollution levels.

A more relevant question in today's society, I think, is, "if you have spent two hours writing a blog, and no one has read it, and it gets deleted before you post it, does the blog in fact say anything?"

This is a far more perplexing conondrum.

To the writer, the process of writing a blog is real as are the ideas that are in the writers mind and typed out onto the computer keyboard. Be that as it may, arguably, ideas coupled together with the phyiscal act of typing does not make the blog real. In order to be a real blog, the blog has to be posted and someone has to read it.

Let us look at some analogies. Person A living in Athens 2000 years ago has an interesting idea...something to do with whether trees make sounds. He's about to go to bed so he doesn't write it down. The next morning he wakes up and is too busy to write it down because he's got to go for some meetings with the rest of the citizens. After a boring meeting with some citizens about slave rights and public sanitation, he heads back home for an early dinner. On his way, he gets run over by a chariot and dies so no one gets to hear his clever idea about trees.

Lets fast forward to present day, some Masters student B, living in Oslo types out a blog on his computer for two hours about innumerable things including the history of paper-clips but deletes the blog before posting it on the internet. The recover fuction also fails to work. He gets a little upset and decides not to redo the blog post. The next day, he goes to school and and puts of redoing the blog. Months pass then years. He graduates, returns home, gets a cushy job, has two children and a brown dog named Rex. He still remembers the blog that was never posted but having lost his faith in modern technology, decides never to do it again.

In both scenarios A and B, the outcome is the same. Both the Athenian citizen and the Masters student in Oslo have at the end produced nothing. There is nothing.

But what is the difference?

The difference I would say is that the Athenian citizen is better off. The Athenian decided that sleep and meetings were more important than his silly idea about trees and went on to do productive and at least enjoyable things until his death. All he did was to spend at most a couple of seconds thinking about whether trees made noises when they fell.

The Masters student in Oslo on the other hand, did not only spend many days formulating his thoughts on what his blog would be about; he also spent several hours deliberating on the precise words that he would use and did in fact type the whole blog out. The Masters student has therefore wasted numerous days and much energy when he could in fact have just used the time to improve his ranking in on-line pool. The Masters student would only have been better off than the Athenian had he not laid a single finger on the keyboard.

My conclusions are:-

Typing out something which is deleted and irretrievable before anyone has read it is as good as not doing anything at all. It is only more frustrating.

It is possible that a person who says he spent two hours typing a blog that does not exist may in fact have very well not have typed out anything at all but only thinks he did (this is more frequently the case for term papers and the like).

A blog that has been deleted before anyone has read it can never be redone because nobody...not even the writer knows whether it has been redone correctly and accurately. That which has not been written cannot be rewritten.

My final conclusion is that the answer to my question as formulated is "no". The blog does not say anything. There is no blog. There is at the very best only the writer's idea of the blog which exists only momentarily in the murky depths of his mind.

Only I am real. The blog is not. Who are you?