Understanding And Experiencing

No one needs to be married to understand marriage; no one needs to be personally mistreated on the basis of their race (as someone of any skin color at all) to understand the nature and ramifications of racism.  To list more similar examples, no one needs to face a natural disaster to understand all the ways it could terrify someone, enjoy a particular movie to understand exactly why someone else loves it, or struggle with mental health issues to know that it is logically possible to have such burdens and to understand what they could be like.  It is reason rather than sensory experience that grounds truth and knowledge, and reason is accessible independent of all social interactions and all experiences except for the conscious grasp of reason itself.

Besides sheer stupidity--assumptions and contradictions--no one would ever oppose these facts unless they wanted to feel a sense of uniqueness in that they erroneously believe that someone else cannot relate to or understand them, though this is far from true.  No non-telepathic being can know what others are experiencing, so I cannot know what someone else is truly feeling or thinking, but I can perfectly understand what they seem to be communicating and the possibilities of what they might be experiencing.  Neither I nor anyone else must have all possible experiences in order to understand all knowable philosophical truths, which are what dictate the nature of experience itself and the things being experienced.

I do not need to have cancer to perfectly understand what cancer is supposed to be like.  I do not have to be asexual to understand the various ways someone could experience or live out asexuality--and more importantly, what is true about the concept and what logically follows and does not from it regardless of how anyone feels about it.  I do not have to want to steal to understand theft and why someone might wish to do such a thing.  Only a fool thinks that experience adds anything to knowledge except what it is like to personally experience something.  Yes, experiences can prompt thoughts and rationalistic discoveries, but no one still needs to experience a possible state of mind to understand it, and free of all assumptions at that.

People delude themselves if they believe that they cannot be understood by someone else who is not experiencing their exact emotions, circumstances, and desires.  Perhaps some such people want to feel special or superior in assuming that no one else can understand these things which all willing, thorough people are capable of knowing thanks to reason, which transcends all experiences and is what metaphysically and epistemologically underpins them.  Perhaps they are genuinely stupid enough to think their own completely avoidable experience of not understanding concepts and, ironically, experiences themselves is something all other people share.  Not everything will necessarily be thought of without experiential prompting, but no one has to experience situations or states of mind to understand them.

Logic, people.  It is very fucking helpful.