Oneiromancer, writing on the fourth of January 2001, says, "Our patterns of perceptions ... are so very much like the world which we have constructed and called 'physical reality' that our intuitions and theories concerning our construction bear much explanatory and predictive power over our perceptions, and thus the universe."

Careful study of this long sentence reveals the following meaning: "The world we perceive is so much like the world we perceive, that the world we perceive is like the real world." Unfortunately, this makes no sense. No matter how carefully we study our experiences, we won't know how the universe actually looks, according to certain thinkers namedropped below. At any rate, one cannot go from the tautology of "The world we perceive is like the world we perceive," to make the conclusion that the real world is therefore somehow related to this world we perceive; nowhere in the setup is there mention of a real world, so it ought not to be in the punchline.

The point of the dichotomy between the phenomenal world (the world we see, the world we experience) and the noumenal world (the world as it actually is) for people like Gottfried Leibniz (who did not, admittedly, use that terminology) and Immanuel Kant (who, to the best of my knowledge, came up with that terminology) -- being, respectively, the first to attempt a separation of consciousness and the universe in which it exists, and the first to "successfully" achieve it -- et al., is that we cannot know the real world, the universe as it is, the thing-in-itself. If you want to distinguish between a phenomenal realm and a noumenal realm, you do so for a reason: namely, you have no idea what goes on in the noumenal realm, so you have in some way to explain the phenomena going on all around you. It is redundant to say the phenomenal realm and the noumenal realm are the same thing, because in that case there would just be on Realm, known as the universe.

G.W.F. Hegel, I believe, built his philosophy on being able to know the noumenal realm, whereas Kant said we could only know that the noumenal realm existed. You do not have to believe in this dichotomy, of course. (Rene Descartes, for all his questioning and doubt, ultimately concluded that the world we experience is the world as such; Aristotle and Plato, from what I know, did not consider this issue at all.)

Even if you do not believe in the dichotomy, though, or even if you're a Hegelian, Oneiromancer's brand of logic just won't work.

(PS, I think the tree does make a sound. I happen to think that the emission of sound waves constitutes the making of a sound. Thanks, QXZ.)