system
A chat on subreddit /r/NoStupidQuestions
human
The point it is exploring is the difference between consciousness, and the idea of a world 'out there' separate to and before/apart from consciousness. Sound is a property of consciousness, as far as we know it takes a certain living organism to create sound as a qualitative property (i.e. as something to be experienced, to be conscious *of*).


 The purpose of the question is to consider how we should think of the idea of a material world that exists out there, perhaps before and giving rise to consciousness as we know it. If a tree falls and no living organism is around to create a conscious experience of sound from it, should it still be considered as 'sound'? How should we consider it? All the language that we have to describe it comes from our experience of it - from our consciousness of it - and hence cannot get at the idea of the reality as a material world that gives rise to consciousness, and that exists apart from an observer. 

Even if we describe it in terms of vibrating molecules this is still in qualitative descriptive terms, in terms of an experience once measured by a scientist and scientific instruments. With no observer, and no consciousness of the experience, there are no linguistic terms in which to describe the sound of a tree falling, as if it were an objective phenomenon occurring out there in the material world.

And of course, breaking it down into vibrating molecules only rephrases the question, which would now be - if a molecule vibrates and no one is around to observe it, does it really vibrate. And that is very difficult to answer even from a scientific perspective when you consider wave/particle duality.
gpt
I wrote a huge thing before realising someone had already explained it well haha.

Its all about perception being what forms reality, and that we shouldn't accept our perceptions as raw fact, because in absence of perception is in absense to how we think reality is meant to be.