It sounds a lot like two hands clapping, but quieter, because you can only do it by slapping your thumb against a couple of your other fingers and not to hard. This, of course, leaves open another important philosophical question. Is a thumb a finger?
A while back my friend Massimo Pigliucci took Neil deGrasse Tyson to task for, among other things, equating philosophy with asking the question, "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" That was a dig, of course, made in the context of suggesting that philosophy had no real utility, and that the real thinking was all about science, not…