If a tree falls in the Matrix, and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?

Are we living in the Matrix?

A question that no one really wants to ask themselves. However, today in TOK we were asked which pill we would take if we were asked the same question as Neo:

“You take the blue pill, the story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.”- Morpheus

I feel that for the purposes of TOK, choosing the red pill is almost compulsory. It shows a desire to go beyond the automatic assumptions of your reality,
not to simply believe without thinking. On the other hand, TOK is unlikely to make the ‘reality’ we live in (illusion or not) uninhabitable. If you took the red pill, nothing would ever be the same again; you’d lose everything that you had worked for (even if it wasn’t real), but hopefully TOK won’t cause that to happen.

We like the security of believing that the world around us exists as we see it,
and until we have evidence to show us that we are all completely deluded; we will carry on this way. There are some days when I couldn’t care less if everything around me was just an illusion, because I’ve never known anything else, and doubt that I ever will. But what if I could know? Would I actually take the red pill? I hate the idea that we are pawns in someone’s game, that we are being blindly pushed on in a certain direction, making decisions that we believe are free will, when they are actually the machinations of a greater force. That is the harsh truth if the world is an illusion- we are being played with. Even our brain lies to us. Our sense perception is warped by our bias and what we are expecting to see.

Now for the tree. Everyone knows the question, that has been argued over in every philosophical discussion ever, so much so that it is almost ‘old news’. If no one is there to hear something, does it make a sound? Does it happen at all? Mr Saha told us that the answer is no and that it will always be no. A sound is something that is heard; the sound can only exist if we hear and process it. The world doesn’t exist as we perceive it, until we perceive it that way. I find this way of thinking overly egocentric.

We are not the only living beings capable of acquiring sense data and processing it, in fact many animals have senses far better than ours. This means that we don’t experience a large part of the world because we simply can’t detect it. We can’t see in ultraviolet, or hear sounds above 20 kHz, or even smell as well as many other animals can. So how can we say that events do not occur or ‘the tree doesn’t fall’, when we are only receiving a tiny part of reality through our senses? If something happened to cause a very high pitched noise; we would say that there wasn’t a sound, because we couldn’t hear it. Of course there is no way to say that trees make sounds when they fall, or if sounds exist if we aren’t there to hear them. But sounds are simply vibrations of particles, and although physics is a human construct; we have to believe that the laws of physics remain the same, even if we are not there to process the data.

Anyway, this post probably isn’t even here, the evil overlords of our brains are just creating it to cause mental anguish among those who don’t want to think, so let’s just forget that this ever happened, for the sake of our sanity, if nothing else.