“If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, did it make a sound?”
Odds are, you've heard this philosophical phrase. It's been taken up by pop culture and has lost a bit of its context along the way. You hear people saying, "if you drink a Starbucks and don't post a picture, did you really drink it?" and things along those lines...
The original question focuses on the differences and possible effects of perception, observation, and conscious experience. It is related to quantum theory, where observation alone changes the behavior of particles. If you were to think that a tree making "a sound" is a conscious experience, then a tree that falls when no one is around to hear it doesn't make a sound. If you were to define "a sound" as air vibrating, independent of a nearby person around to process the vibrations into information they call sounds, then a tree falling and making the air vibrate, is making "a sound".
Now, on to memories... "Is a happy memory still happy when it's forgotten?
There's the memory and the feeling attached to remembering it. Let's say the memory is the tree falling, and the happy feeling attached to remembering it is the sound. This implies the memory is a sort of thing that exists in the world, and remembering it and feeling happy can either be a product of observation/conscious experience, or a factual attribute of the memory.
So, my grandparents have happy memories of my mom's childhood. But my grandparents have dementia and alzheimers, so they're forgetting loads of things, among them, memories of my mom growing up. And I find myself asking what happens when these memories are never remembered. What happens when they're forgotten? Are they still happy? Or does that happiness they produced when they were remembered also get lost?
Is a Happy Memory Still Happy when it's Forgotten? Acrylic Paint, Medium, Spray Paint, Embroidery Thread and Synthetic String on Canvas
My mother’s favorite colors symbolize the happy childhood memories that are being forgotten by her parents. Foggy yet warm, these colors are the backdrop for the stitched neurons that drip off the canvas, obscuring the paint underneath and falling all the way to the ground. The layers of matte paint and layers of yarn represent the memories being muffled by tau protein tangles and beta amyloid plaques - two causes for Alzheimer’s. Hoping forgotten memories can remain beautiful and happy, I’ve reframed Alzheimer’s into soft fading. For the first time, I turned to painting instead of science for understanding and comfort.
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