I remember learning the word empirical. It was in an introductory philosophy class, I was 18 maybe. It was in reference to what we can know, what is definite. I took it to mean you can only know what you have experienced, what your eyes and other senses have told you. Of course, the eyes can lie, they can trick you. There are plenty of stories of hunters shooting people because they saw a deer, and they’d swear it was a deer because their eyes have been trained to see deer. The eyes can lie so we have to fully experience things in order to know that they are broadly true. A great example of this is on the movie Good Will Hunting when Robin Williams says that great line about not knowing what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel. This line really hit me the first time I heard it.
Where can I find similarities as I do know what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel? I have been on many a Scottish mountain in winter, which although completely different from say the Himalayas, at least I can fathom somewhat the depths of discomfort someone there would feel. I haven’t really stood on a desert, the plains of the Sahara feel completely alien, though I have obviously stood on sand. My experience is not your experience and nor should it be. But it should be experienced nonetheless.