If a Tree Falls...

A Question of Perception

“If a tree falls in the forest,” runs the question “and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?”

The Anglo-Irish Bishop George Berkeley (1685-1753), after whom the University of California at Berkeley gets its name, puzzled about the philosophical notion: if something is not being perceived, can it be said to exist? He summed up his conclusion with the Latin phrase esse est percipi - ‘to exist is to be perceived’.

Our intuition is clear: even if we aren’t perceiving something at some moment, it can still exist. However, Berkeley took the motto seriously and claimed if things are continuously to exist, there must be a continuous perceiver - and that must be God. The persistence of things independent of human perception thus provided a handy proof of God’s existence.

The brilliant Oxford classicist Ronald Knox came up with an amusing pair of limericks, set in an Oxford college quadrangle or ‘Quad’, to illustrate the point:

There was a young man who said "God,
I find it exceedingly odd
To think that the tree
Should continue to be
When there's no one about in the Quad..."

"Dear Sir, Your astonishment’s odd.
I am always about in the Quad. 
And that’s why the tree 
Will continue to be,
Since observed by, Yours faithfully, God."

It’s time this exchange was updated to reflect conditions in a modern Oxford College. I suggest the following:

Said the Warden of Merton “I see
That your thinking’s as quaint as can be.
Why posit that God
Must be watching the quad
When there’s round-the-clock CCTV?”

For good measure, I propose two elegiac couplets in Latin to render the first two of the limericks. I may propose a third after I’ve worked out how to say CCTV in Latin.

Sic inquit iuvenis: “miror quod sistere pergit
 arbor in hoc, nullo percipiente, loco.”

(Literally:
Thus says the young man: "I'm amazed that the tree
continues to exist in this place, when no one is observing it.)

"Sed nil mirandum est:  semper loca rure frequento;
  sic exstare licet, lustro Ego namque Deus.”

(But there's nothing to be amazed about. I'm always around 
in the countryside. Let it thus exist, for I, God, am watching.")