to properly understand experience and how we understand experience,
let us follow through experience…
we are born…the senses like vision, hearing, taste, touch, smell…
give us information about the world, about experiences……
but at birth, we are unable to make sense of these sensations given
by the senses… in other words, we might hear a voice, but we cannot
understand the voice and we do not even know the voice is a voice…
for us at birth, it is simply a sound that has no meaning for us…
as the year passes, the 1st year, we begin to make some small sense of the world…
we might be able to connect the sound we hear as a voice to come from
a specific human being…but we still don’t know what the words are yet……
in other words, we learn from experience what voices are and what sound is
and what smell is and what is touch…and at the same time as we are experiencing
our senses, we are also being indoctrinated and this indoctrination continues to the
point of when we are finally able to get clear of and escape ourselves from
this indoctrination…usually adulthood…
so we are getting information about the world from our senses
and we are being told what that information means from
our parents, the schools, the media, the state, and that information
is given understanding by the myths and biases and habits and prejudices
we are being taught/indoctrinated with from childbirth…………
the form of the world as we understand it comes from the indoctrinations
that we are taught from childhood……
or to say it another way,
we don’t know anything a priori…
our information of the world comes to us from experience, empirically……
from parents and school and the state and classmates and we
take an experience and understand it from that information
that we were taught about the world from parents and school and the state
and classmates…
let us say, something dropped from the sky…
we would attempt to understand that something
from our experiences…the object is silver…
so we compare other silver objects to this object,
but it doesn’t seem to compare… we then
try to match it with other items that we know of…
but we are stymied because we cannot know or understand
an object without knowing, from experience, what an object is…
can you know a priori what an aspirin tablet is?
no…… simple as that………you cannot know or understand
what aspirin is before you have already experienced it in some
fashion……
the object from the sky… how to you understand something
without an experience of it… the object from the sky is
a tool meant to repair a space ship…would we be able to
understand that without any experience with it… perhaps
if we compare the object from space with tools we already have
and we might, might be able to relate the space object with tools
we already have, but it would mean we can’t “think” our way into
understanding, we would have to measure and compare and give context
to the space object… in other words, we would use experience to
connect the space object to our tools… to our hammer or to our screwdriver
or something like that……….
now one might try to save the a priori concept by relating them
to mathematical concepts…
but once again, we learn math by experience, we are taught
1 + 1 =2…… we don’t have that knowledge instinctively, because
if we did, then why do we go to school to learn it?
I recall in my youth, 50 years ago, of learning my math tables…
I recall spending hours reciting the times tables… 8 times 5 is 40…
9 times 5 is 45, 10 times 5 is 50… we spend a whole lot of time
in our youth reciting such stuff…if it were a priori, then we are
wasting a lot of time in youth learning stuff we already know…
our very childhood learning is argument enought that we learn
via experience, empirically and not by any a priori means…
the practical matters of our educational system is proof enough
that we learn empirically and we understand by experience…
although you have emprirically and experience, those two words
really mean the same thing…
Kropotkin