Oh no, right? What IF thoughts could form free of a mind? So we've got all these thoughts floating rampantly and plunging themselves into peoples' brains.

Very true. Sound waves don't exist simply for sound. Resonation is proof of this. There was a bridge built with a structure that ignored the problem of movement. So one day, the winds blow strong, and continue to hit the bridge over and over again at the same frequency. By and by, the bridge collapses.

Even if nobody was around to hear the bridge fall(as improbable as that is), it still fell, and the path it made for people who would want to get across was gone.

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Fighting fire with fire burns the whole world.

Does it matter that we know anything at all?

Knowledge is just another one of those human pursuits, that when you eventually reach it will just be another goal accomplished, another space on the resumé.

We're all dead in the end anyway, we'll go out of this world knowing absolutely nothing.

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I only wrote this because I hate you.

RedRacoon:

Very true. Sound waves don't exist simply for sound. Resonation is proof of this. There was a bridge built with a structure that ignored the problem of movement. So one day, the winds blow strong, and continue to hit the bridge over and over again at the same frequency. By and by, the bridge collapses.

Even if nobody was around to hear the bridge fall(as improbable as that is), it still fell, and the path it made for people who would want to get across was gone.

Except wind and waves are orthogonal concepts, so your bridge example is not an example of "sound waves don't exist simply for sound" at all.
But otherwise your point is valid. It's ridiculous to think that the purpose of sound waves is to let us hear things. The assumption of purpose is a fallacy.

Daninsky:

Or rather isn't the question actually "Is a tree that falls unobserved making a sound or is sound only the sensation created by our eardrum?" and not so much if the same physics still apply for unobserved trees, meaning would they still create the waves we would pick up and interpret as sound?

I invoke Schrödinger's cat.