If a person had never seen fire, but studied all the logic behind combustion, could they truly know what fire is without experiencing it?
I think yes, because a brain is capable of producing the image/simulation of fire, due to relativity.
Itâs not so much starting at the beginning, itâs starting from the human vessel.
Fire is in our lineage, and our brains capacity.
With enough understanding, one could learn about fire before ever experiencing it.
One could produce a fitting knowledge to the unknown outside.
If a partial clue, such as heat, was given, yes. If no evidence was given, no.
The human vessel itself has many traces of fire, we already have half of the evidence we need, and thatâs all we need to paint a full picture.
There are a lot of ways to go here.
No amount of science and logic of the taste of apples can provide the same bits of knowledge or concepts or experience as actually eating and tasting an apple. So if you are asking if you can imagine how hot a fire must be and how bright tongues of fire look, without having experienced any of those sensory inputs, the answer is no. If you had no concept of heat, of yellow and white, and red, or tongues, or upwardly dancing gas, then you will have a hard time even understanding anything from the logic of combustion, let alone be able to imagine something remotely like fire from a mere description.
Let me ask this: does a person who HAS experienced fire, touched and seen it, does that person know what fire is, or do they need to understand all the logic behind combustion in addition to experience before they might claim to truly know fire?
All of that said, the fiction writer is in the business of giving you an experience imagined from mere logic. So there is something to be said from learning about something from a book. And further, if two people have driven trucks all their lives, and one of them drives a brand new truck with some new features, I do believe he could describe the new features (provide all the logic) to the other trucker who hasnât experienced it, and that second trucker could imagine the experience and have some idea of the experience of driving the new truck without actually driving the new truck. Meaning, knowledge of the logic of things is most useful between people who already have shared experience. So in theory you can know things without experiencing them, but such knowledge is only able to be coherent to you as it fits into a context of general experience. Knowing works hand in hand with experience - they donât displace one another.
And really this is a question about how experience arrives to you. Doesnât arrive through the senses only, or can it come through language. Meaning, the logic of combustion is one experience of fire, and burning your hand is another experience of fire. Not sure they need to translate into each other.
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It seems definitional to me. How will we use the word âknowâ? Is experience a necessary element of knowledge?
If youâre asking for opinions, mine would be that I would hesitate to say that person knows fire. I would more likely say, âThat person has a fine understanding of the logic of fire but doesnât know what itâs like. Heâs never sat before a fire and felt it and spoken across the flames to another person.â
But I am a known hedger, soâŚ.
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The negative answer to this question is given by the so-called Knowledge Argument, made famous (or notorious, depending on how your take on it) by Frank Jacksonâs âMaryâs Roomâ thought experiment:
Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor. She specializes in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like âredâ, âblueâ, and so on. She discovers, for example, just which wavelength combinations from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via the central nervous system the contraction of the vocal chords and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the uttering of the sentence âThe sky is blueâ.⌠What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a color television monitor? Will she learn anything or not? It seems just obvious that she will learn something about the world and our visual experience of it. But then is it inescapable that her previous knowledge was incomplete. But she had all the physical information. Ergo there is more to have than that, and Physicalism is false.
It seems to me that Maryâs Room could work as well in reverse. The caveman knows fire intimately. Then he becomes educated and learns all the mechanics of fire. Does his new knowledge make physicalism false? To me, both experiences seem like they played out in the physical world, so Iâm not sure why weâd privilege the fire-experience over the learning experience.
But itâs the first Iâve heard of Maryâs Room, so maybe Iâve got it wrong.
I think that at least part of fire is the experience of it. Without experience of fire, I think any understanding must be partial, at best?
I disagree. I think 100% of fire can be understood with enough evidence. Thereâs evidence suggested by the original post.
I think the debate is whether brain has power, or that that power is lesser, or none at all.
Isnât experience, evidence of a sort? If not, then one might be tempted to assert that evidence is insufficient without also accompanying experienceâŚ
The original topic suggests there is: heat, a human, a room, light, etc.
Thatâs enough evidence to develop imagination of a perfect fire in brain.
If no evidence at all, it canât be done.
Experience is required, yes, but relative things count as experience.
Yes but the Maryâs room thought experiment purports to show that physicalism is wrong by demonstrating that there is some ineffable quality present in the colour red.
But the OP raises an interesting point, itâs quite difficult to imagine physical objects without experiencing them ( not just mind generated illusions)
I feel the Maryâs room thought experiment is a little oversold.
I am as much impressed by the ineffable quality which allows Mary to form an understanding of red/fire in her head, from language.
The observation of human from his sense organ eyes were created for visually understanding universe, while a knowledge or a thought about a visual thing without seeing doesnât make the knowledge complete and full,and since if you say i am wrong then there shouldnât have been any difference between sights and direct thought or knowledge which is nonsense actually. I guess it might answer many questions.
Well, the argument assumes that physicalism requires all knowledge of the world to be convertible into âpropositionalâ knowledge - the kind that one can acquire from books and such. As such, physicalism could not account for experiential knowledge. But why stop there? There are other meanings of âknowledgeâ that also donât fit into that narrow framing â knowing how to do something, for example (e.g., knowing how to ride a bicycle or mend shoes). Or knowing someone in an old-fashioned sense (that is, having been formally introduced and accepted into the company of that person).
Thatâs interesting. But I donât see how itâs possible. From time to time, as I write, I look at a sentence and say to myself, âWell, no one has ever written that sentence before, Iâm pretty sure.â
One time I met a philosopher who spoke like thatâsaying that only a tiny percentage of all knowledge had been gained to this pointâand I wondered the same thing. If knowledge exists in human words, I donât see how weâd ever quantify it.
But I think I understand what youâre saying about the puzzle. It is assumed that Mary, somehow, has acquired every possible proposition about the physics of redness. Then we marvel at the ineffable effect that fire or red has on us.
For myself, Iâm pretty sure I see the effect that red has on my brain to simply be a part of physics. Iâll try to explain it to Mary if I ever meet her (but sheâll have to let me hire a neuroscientist to help.)
This is tangential and fussy. I donât think there is logic behind combustion. One could look into the science of combustion, for example. But logic is about the relation between propositions. Fire is neither logical nor illogical.
The OP asks us to consider, in essence, whether the experience of fire can be substituted-for by evidence, even loads of evidence, perhaps of the highest standard. You have answered this question âyesâ, but you seem not to have offered any justification â or evidence! 
â but only assertion. Yes? 
Yes.
Itâs a hard problem.
I was only adding my opinion. Iâll have a thought on how to solve it, and Iâll respond later.
If you have 25% of a pure puzzle complete, you can imagine accurately 100%, the complete puzzle. It is the same for fire.
In some puzzles this is not true, but it is true for some puzzles, depending on purity.
We can assume no tricks in the âpuzzle-of-fireâ, it is one of those puzzles where itâs true.
If I acquire 25% of knowledge about fire, in the same manner as I predict the remaining 75% of a pure puzzle, I can imagine 100% of fire.
And thereâs a lot more power in brain that makes it more likely that I am telling the truth.
Thereâs a certain amount of evidence we require.
Perhaps the same can be said about pure puzzles; not always will 25% suffice.
If you knew 99% about fire through artificial means, would you be able to imagine 100%?
What I suggest, is yes, and it can be done through a lesser, but certain percentage.
Can brain imagine fire off 25%/50%/75%?
25%, yes, is my understanding of brain-power. To present evidence of this is difficult. I will take some time to think.
Why is 25% enough? Because itâs a partial picture, officially a âmajor partâ, with a highlighted unknown.
Itâs possible to imagine the missing part or construct it through trial and error or science, if we have a major part.
Evidence is factual stuff, usually. Mental stuff, meaning the presentation of the evidence, not the evidence itself. I.e. we consider the evidence, how reliable it might be, etc, mentally. And so on.
Experience, on the other hand, is a whole-bodymind thing. It affects the mind and the body both. Evidence canât be visceral (or feel so), but experience canâŚ
Experience starts with sensation, but it doesnât end there. The whole process that we call âperceptionâ follows. And all of this is pre-conscious, of course, so it happens outside conscious awareness. Anyway, perception reaches its conclusion when the sense data has been received, interpreted, and incorporated into the existing dynamic world-model we all carry in our heads; a dynamic thing. Much of all this goes beyond mere factual (we hope!) âevidenceâ. Memories of a childhood experience of fire, when Grannyâs house burned down. Or whatever.
And finally, experience can, in some circumstances, also be evidence, or used as such.
Any thoughts?
Only if there were suitable analogies in his experience, involving the same senses. If there were no such analogies (for example, a person is blind and deprived of the perception of temperature and pain, then the concept of fire would be in his mind only an abstract concept, like, for example, âfreedom.â