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Comment by zeteo | Hacker News Reader

Wonderful example of arguing with strawmen and assigning mental deficiencies to those who disagree with you. The whole idea about the tree falling in the forest is not the definition of the word "sound", but rather that we have no evidence it made a sound. It's a comment on how we assume the world works in a certain way even where we can't really observe it doing so.

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Wikipedia lists "is sound only sound if a person hears it?" as "The most immediate philosophical topic that the riddle introduces."

This is the question that Eliezer addresses. You may have been introduced to the tree falling riddle in a different context, but he's dealing with the most common interpretation of the question.

You can't accuse him of straw manning simply because he didn't deal with some other possible philosophical question regarding trees and sounds (the wikipedia article lists a few others, including something like yours). He clearly states up front the exact argument that he's dealing with.

In the original historical presentation, perhaps. I've seen this argument on IRC and I assure you it was not taken to be about that.

That's just one step away from reasoning form a paradox and patting yourself on the back, how you have proved something (would the same argumentation be as enticing if it were based on misappropriation or misunderstanding like that of using "physics" for arguing for perpetuum mobile?).

My bigger gripe with your reasoning is that using topology 1 and stopping at that (i.e. there are no questions left) precludes (or makes intractable because of combinatorial explosion) reasoning by analogy (symmetry).

It's quite correct that people's misconceptions about physics aren't a good guide to reasoning about physics. But they can be useful evidence for reasoning about how people form conceptions.

I think that interpretation of the discussion died the moment the first recording device was invented.

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