My philosophy is simple: Until I experience something directly, I don’t know it.
For example, mathematicians learn formulas, but they don’t know what the formulas represent, because they haven’t gone out and directly experienced the numbers that have been written on a piece of paper. (Credit: Leonard Susskind.)
Another example. For many years I had read accounts and seen photos of Golgotha, the place where it is claimed, Jesus was crucified and later entombed. It had the appearance of isolation. When I finally visited Golgotha directly, I was surprised to see that it was barely above a noisy, oil spotted bus station. In other words, until I saw it and experienced it firsthand, I hadn’t really seen it or didn’t really know it.
Last example. This past year so much had been reported by the media about the catastrophes that hit Southern California in the form of forest fires, homelessness, and migrant inflows that I thought I would find a collapsing region. I just got back from vacationing there. I was surprised to once again experience how big So Cal is. It has moved forward as if nothing had happened.
You simply cannot know ANYTHING about the real world until you engage IT directly. Until that happens, all is abstraction. It is a fiction that you can know about the real world solely as created in your mind. You can know symbols that attempt to represent it, but you cannot know it directly without experiencing it firsthand.
As a result, I’m slow to conclude that I know anything for sure until I have experienced it directly.
I don’t think I’m asking too much, do you?