[soineuh]

Do I need direct experience to know about something? Was this empirical standard impressed upon you by a particularly wicked LSD trip, or are you unaware of the means by which the vast majority of knowledge and understanding is acquired? Does this lack of awareness play any role in your use of psychedelics to 'learn things'?

[mirimir]

Sure, you don't need direct experience to know about LSD trips. But you obviously do, in order to actually know LSD trips. Really. Trust me. You have no fucking clue. You're like Hellen Keller, before that insight at the well.

[soineuh]

I honestly feel bad for you people. Your inner world must be so miserable and barren. I get high just thinking about things several times a day, without any drugs whatsoever. There's no fucking way I'd ever risk that for same lame visuals and a poor man's ego death. You're basically a farm animal telling an Olympian he should try the corn feed.

[mirimir]

You're evading the point. Say what you will, you don't know what an LSD trip is like. If you look back up the thread, you'll see where you went off the rails. But hey, maybe you're just here for the lulz.

[soineuh]

I know everything anybody needs to know about it and more. All you people have is "you need to try it to understand," and you're talking to someone who knows better than you.

[mirimir]

No, I didn't say that "you need to try it to understand". You don't need to do anything. Except to maybe learn a little humility, be less of a know-it-all, and observe the norms of the community that you've joined. Or not.

Anyway, I simply asserted that the claim to know an experience, before having that experience, is absurd. I'm pointing to the distinction between knowing something, subjectively, as opposed to knowing about it, objectively. That's just a fact.

Consider a less contentious example. Let's say that you've never eaten dry-aged beef. Would you claim to know the taste? Sure, you could understand the chemistry of the curing process. You could have loads of GC/MS data. People could tell you about it. You could have all sorts of brain scan data. You could have formulated all manner of suppositions. But even with all that, until you took a bite, you wouldn't know the taste.

In case this is a new concept for you:

> There are, however, other uses of the terminology related to objectivity. Many philosophers use the term “subjective knowledge” to refer only to knowledge of one’s own subjective states. Such knowledge is distinguished from one’s knowledge of another individual’s subjective states and from knowledge of objective reality, which would both be objective knowledge under the present definitions. Your knowledge of another person’s subjective states can be called objective knowledge since it is presumably part of the world that is “object” for you, just as you and your subjective states are part of the world that is “object” for the other person.

> This is a prominent distinction in epistemology (the philosophical study of knowledge) because many philosophers have maintained that subjective knowledge in this sense has a special status. They assert, roughly, that knowledge of one’s own subjective states is direct, or immediate, in a way that knowledge of anything else is not. It is convenient to refer to knowledge of one’s own subjective states simply as subjective knowledge. Following this definition, objective knowledge would be knowledge of anything other than one’s own subjective states.

http://www.iep.utm.edu/objectiv/