Does knowing require experience?
Can someone know something without experiencing it first?
Can someone know something without experiencing it first?
Anonymous
Favorite Answer
Everything is being something, the difference is...not everything knows what it is being. This is where we enter the picture. We experience everything as being something, but until we experience what that something is being, we don't truly know what experience it has to offer.
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It has been said that you should profit from the mistakes of others because you may not live long enough to make them all yourself. We often learn from each others experiences.....if we have patience and can listen. Unfortunately the young often lack patience and must learn from personal experience. That's not always bad; it really is the best teacher. Sometimes it's the only way, but there are things no amount of study can allow you to truly understand. I suffer from manic/depression, which is now called bipolar disorder. For years people told me to snap out of it, that I was good looking, had my health, was gifted in many ways, and financially secure. "Cheer up", they said, "It's a beautiful day. Get out of the house and enjoy yourself." What they didn't understand; what they couldn't understand, is that I couldn't. Only people who have suffered severe depression can understand what it's like. This is a case in point: you can study depression and be aware of the symptoms, but you will never really understand what it is unless you experience it. I believe it is impossible to understand the deepest part of what it is that makes us human without personal experience. Can you study starvation and understand what it's like? have your heart broken, be blind, crippled, experience physical or emotional disaster without the experience? I don't think you can. Alternatively, those things which are purely intellectual like mathematics or the laws of physics do not require experience because they truly are intellectual. So, as usual, when I attempt to answer philosophical questions, I find no definitive answer; all I have are my opinions.....sometimes based upon experience.
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No. The more abstract concepts of mathematics - all required to develop today's technology - are not experienced but they are "known". If the only knowledge any one of us could accumulate were those things we learn by our own experience then we would be a dumb species indeed. Knowledge is a spiral staircase, much of which has been built by our ancestors and we add to it.
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Very interesting question... my own take on this is as follows......
Every single sensory input to our brain means an experience.... in that sense, all our knowledge is an offshoot of some experience.... however, we can use our faculty of logic along with imagination to create deeper and wider knowledge than what amounted to mere experiential input... what that roughly means is that if there is zero experiential input, then there can be no knowledge, but if there is 'x' amount of input, it can produce 2x or x^2 amount of knowledge.
Just Be
Knowing requires Being, experience leads to remembrance of that Being.
Many Blessings!