Voice of Experience

In relation to knowledge and understanding derived directly from our own experience, none of us know more substantially about them than men and women at other times and other places, and perhaps know and understand far less than them. On the other hand, unlike personal knowledge as a result of direct experience, impersonal data from objective observation, inference records, related hypotheses and theories, and experiments conducted on them accumulate from generation to generation. This type of non-experiential knowledge changes the nature of human experience and all forms of life on this planet, in ways that are difficult to imagine, let alone fully achieve. The alliance of mathematics, scientifically refined objective observation, and experimentation, along with agreed-upon methods for reaching agreement on agreed-upon truth, has led to the emergence of technology that changes all our lives with unprecedented and astounding speed, in almost everything. It transported us from swords and arrows to bombs and missiles in four hundred years. We are in a unique position. Do we all know this? Do we realize it?