If A Tree Falls In The Woods

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

Seems like a silly question. But when I think about it for long enough, I start to see a deeper question. If no one ever observes the tree; if it grows, falls, and decays and no one ever sees it, no one ever goes near the site to even see the aftermath, no intelligence ever sets foot within 100 meters of where it stood to the very day the sun explodes and melts the planet to nothing, what difference does it make weather or not the tree existed in the first place?

If no one was around to mark its existence, did it even exist at all? The same could be said of any inert object: a tree, an ocean, a planet, a sun, a universe. What difference does it make? There are likely billions of galaxies outside our speck of visible universe. But we can safely assume they don’t exist. We can pretend that there’s nothing out there past what we can see. Because there’s no way for something that distant to affect us in any way. So far that light can’t even move fast enough to reach us so we can observe what it last bounced off of.

I often wondered why humans exist. There’s so many dice rolls that led up to my existence at this very moment. How could that possibly be? Why didn’t the dice land a different way where no life started and the universe was empty and dead? Surely that would be the most likely outcome? Well yes, of course. Of course that is what happened. That probably happened many, many times before now. And it will happen many more times after we leave this plane of existence.

“In a universe where time is infinite, anything that can happen will”. If you roll the dice enough times, you will eventually get every single combination of rolls that could ever exist. You just need enough time. The universe has had plenty of time. Yes our presence on this planet was a massive fluke roll of the dice, but the universe’s dice have been rolling for an incredibly long time. So of course we exist, on this planet, at this moment. It was inevitable.

But there’s more to it than that. All those previous iterations, what do they matter? No one was there. No one recorded anything about it. Does it matter? No, we can safely assume it never happened. Because what difference would it make if it happened or not? We could be the millionth roll of the dice, we could be the very first. There’s no way to know, so it doesn’t matter.

But what does matter? This. Right here. Right now. We matter. Our existence matters. Why do we matter? Our mere ability to consider those kinds of questions makes us matter. We make our own meaning. We give that meaning both to ourselves and everything around us. Our existence in this universe makes this universe matter. Without some sentient being in it, this universe would lose meaning which is no different than never having existed at all.

For the universe to exist, it must have meaning. For the universe to have meaning, we must exist in it and wonder about it and ask questions and search for answers and laugh and cry and LIVE. We are the result of the universe searching itself for meaning. We are the universe experiencing itself.

And that alone has beauty and meaning.