the way we understand the universe is by experience…
and not by innate idea’s…
let us try this:
a spaceship lands and we see an alien being walk out of it…
we can visually see the alien being having two legs… we
have experience with that, so we can understand that,
the alien has two arms, once again we have experience that…
but to understand the other aspects of the alien,
we would have to dissect him/her/it, test the blood of the alien,
see if they have lungs, spleen, heart, liver, we would have to experience
the alien to understand who, what, when, where, how and why about the alien…
what if the alien was zinc based, not copper based, we have no experience with
that, we wouldn’t know how that worked until we experimented with that sort
of thing, until we experienced that zinc in their bodies… the scientific process by
its very nature, forces us to experience nature to understand it…we cannot fully understand
something if which we cannot experience something… we can guess and speculate,
but we cannot know… like death, we can say a great deal about death, but until
we personally experience it, we cannot know it or truly understand it…
we must experience something to know it or to understand it…
recall that we are made of the same stuff that stars are, we can
understand a great deal because we are made of the same stuff as
the universe and this fact alone, gives us some understanding of
the universe, because we have experienced within ourselves or
within matter easily within reach…
so, does this also mean we can know/understand time and space, yes…
because we are part of the universe and time and space exist within
the universe, and time and space exists within us and around us, we
can, by our experience of it, know and understand time and space…
we can know and understand concepts that exist in the universe because
we in some fashion, are part of those concepts because we both exist in
and experience space and matter…
thus we can explain how we know/understand concepts like justice
and math and geometry… in some fashion, they exist in
the universe around us and as we too, exist in the universe around us,
they are as we are, part of the universe…experience explains
how we can know matters that seem to be outside the range of experience…
if we share the same matter, star stuff for example,
because our matter is the same we share something with everything
that is made up of star matter, even if that something is billions of light years away,
we still share the experience of having the same material within our bodies…
we can potentially know/understand everything if we can experience
it on some level…
Kropotkin