IF A TREE FALLS IN THE FOREST . . .

BoGoWo he never fell over but dropped out of UCB minus on semester of getting his degree in nuclear physics and has been a postal carrier ever since. He will be retiring to his house in the flats this year.

Patio Dog, the Secret Life of Plants was very popular years ago, but I don't think I ever read it. After reading the reviews on the Amazon site, I realize that it fits with my philosophy of the interconnectedness of everything in the world.
I think anyone who has ever experienced nature as a kind of religious experience, appreciates the idea of a spirit in all things.

Joe Nation, there are rumors that Twyla Tharp is buying the rights to your tape with the intention of choreographing an avant guarde ballet. The music will be composed by Philip Glass, featuring John Zorn on the saxophone.

It will be almost impossible to understand, but the imagery will make up for it--a kind of surreal, hallucinogenic dream of plants finally having their say, explaining all the suffering they have experienced because of humanity and the pollution we have inflicted on them.

The title is uncertain--some have suggested: Nature: The Zeitgeist.

Watch the papers for a December opening.

I am kinda into rocks right now and if you can start grasping the "idea of the spirit of rocks", well, that one is though. Some days I think I've it but it is real hard to retain. It all started with the Amerindian readings and it works real well with my enlightenment/Hindu side. Wish I could say it is accomplished - then again, neither is the enlightenment stuff either.

Welcome to PatriUgg..


I think there is a book called The Secret Life of A Plant,
but it decribes how a sheet metal factory works.
Then there is The Secret Lives in a Plant
which decribes the goings-on amongst the staff
subtitled "What the Watchman saw".

I wanted the secret life of a double agent.
Even the secret life of a real estate agent.
Some real estate agents need some Secret.
Some double agents are plants working undercover.
Always cover your plants in case of frost.
David Frost was a British double agent.
What his actual talents were continue to be a secret.
It's not what he wanted.
What I wanted was to be famous.

what I have is the secret life of a plant.

Trees
Wow!
That is certainly a double-helix strand of conceptual reproduction!

I am floored. Grounded. The ground... aha!
What if... trees do not fall in the forest, but the forest rises up to meet them?
From our lowly fuzzball perspective it only APPEARS that a tree falls,
because we are much less aware of what the ground is actually up to.

Consider: two objects (A and B) are attracted to each other in space.
For A to gravitate towards B, there is an equal and complementary attraction of B towards A.
The same force operates on both entities.
The relative amount of attraction depends on the relative mass of the objects (despite what my girlfriend claims).

Now, I've measured a tree to be approximately 2000 to 20,000 pounds (ouch!), and very difficult to lift.
Placing a scale against the Earth and heaving the whole thing over my head reveals the earth to be only 180 pounds or so. Very much easier to lift. At least ten times easier.

So for every foot the tree falls towards the ground, the ground must be falling towards the tree about TEN TIMES AS MUCH!

The tree won't make hardly any sound at all (even if you were there), because it's the ground making all the noise.
I rest my case. And my head.

Hmmm.

BillW makes no sense to us or to himself.

Joe Nation is having an identity crisis--is he a plant, a different plant, a real estate agent or a celebrity?

CodeBorg just gave himself a headache and in the process, gave one to the rest of us.

Where are we and what are we doing here?

Are there any trees left standing?

Come on, I was a hippie forty years ago, I can't take this stuff anymore!!

Did we hear the tree fall? It's been awhile. c.i.

c. i., it all depends on your perspective. LOL

I defecated in the woods once and nobody saw it or heard it, but did anyone smell it and if not did it even count as a poop, and did the leaf I used to wipe with eventually gag a passing maggot, and is this is where the term shithouse philosophy came into being because outside in the woods isn't really a house except in the larger sense that our planet really is everyones house or perhaps more accurately the planet is our house but our bodies are our homes and my home gets pretty messy but I try to have a woman come in a couple times a week and....what were we talking about?

Yes, indeed!

Some trees stand forever, especially in my new neighborhood...some of the oldest have been vandalized by cuts many times before and some times after when tree sitters are in them, let me not go there right this minute...but in the meantime the tree is on its way out.

I have not a smidge of a doubt that sounds happen whether or not one of us is there to hear the physics of it occur.

My drive home from the SFBay area takes me through 160 miles of mixed forest, mostly redwood. Boy is it comforting in my new home. Until of course you look further.

Anyone interested in looking further, check out a quite responsible local paper, the North Coast Journal. I'll give a few links later, but if you check on the main site on google, you can just wade on through many interesting articles, with varied points of view.

Berkley's Argument
Berkley's argument while elegant and groundbreaking in terms of skepticism had a major flaw in it (Berkley thought that if perception was reality. Blindfolded himself on a train tracks. He died needless to say, but he did get his point across. Hence, if a tree falls in the forest and no one sees it, did it really fall, or was it always as it is in our perception?). The flaw is this :
If we accept cogito ergo sum, meaning existence infers location (most modern interpretations support this, See Plato's def. of truth <true>), then:
Would not perceptions infer a location also. Don't discount this entirely, please, until you here the argument, because it seems to me to adhere to logic like duct tape. In Plato's arrow model of thought, he describes memory like shooting an arrow out and grasping an idea from some other world. This infers a location housing thought without perception. Therefor, would not the images exist in some place, wether caporeal or not, regardless of time and our own perception? Logically it would seem quite probable, and I would appreciate someone looking over my argument. Thankyou for reading. Please respond.

As Always (pun intended),
Second Socrates

Bruce Cockburn sings a great song called" If a tree, falls in the forest. Does anybody care ? certainly this song is both memorable and timely again.

If there were no fauna to hear a tree fall, will other flora hear it?

, CI, Flora isn't on this thread. She waiting at the bus stop in front of the branch bank drinking a glass of branch water, wouldn't you know!

Second Socrates (Hey come on in!) you wrote:
Did you really write that? I love it--- arrow model of thought-- but alas-- it's (He's) wrong.

Thus :
when Flora was little her mom had a special tiny bottle of pink creamy lotion that she would share with Flora. It was a tiny clear bottle with a white top that her mom would get out of the second drawer. Just a little on a hand or cheek because it was so special..... Flora didn't know what the lotion was called........
Flora's mom died suddenly. Years passed, Flora grew up and went to college and one day was walking down the dorm hallway when she smelled the smell of the special pink lotion. She burst into the girl's room crying "What is that lotion? What is it?" and all the memories came flooding back into her consciousness, the lotion, the little bottle with the white top, the second drawer, the scent of the creamy lotion, the feeling of the lotion on her hand.
"It's Johnson's Baby Lotion." said the startled girl.
===
We don't know how the memory of a smell is retained in the brain. For that matter we don't know how anything is stored in the brain, (chemical, electrical, combination of both? ) but the memory of the smell of the lotion was as real as the smell itself. All those images and feelings, all that recreation of reality was stored at a location alright, Flora's brain synapses kept the recordings of all those very well for all those years, but they didn't exist anywhere else till now.

Now, of course, they are in your brain too.
====
Flora never found out why her mom had put the Johnson's in the little bottle with the white top.

Joe

Joe, But you did put Flora on this thread. Loved every word of it. c.i.

If a tree falls in the forest - is there a Bush mandated chain saw close by?

George (Washington) did it! I swear. c.i.

That's good enough justification for me - chop another down, for the Gipper!

Or on the other hand it could be that sound happens wheather an person hears it or not. You know like you can feel sound even if you cannot hear.