Quote: (04-15-2014 07:04 AM)Moma Wrote:
Quote: (04-14-2014 05:18 PM)Samseau Wrote:
They are qualitatively different. Going to a country gives pleasure while reading gives knowledge.
People who claim that merely traveling is enough probably don't read much, or aren't very good at reading.
I have been Europe before, Iceland/London/Many Cities in France, the DR, Canada (but who cares), and all over the USA's east coast.
And I can say unequivocally reading about these places taught me far more than traveling there.
Ah, an epistemology discussion. You're wading deep into my territory, friend.
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Learning is a multi sense experience. You learn through touch, smell, taste, sight and doing.
Not only are the five sense incomplete, as they cannot give a complete picture of the world (can we really hear all sounds? see all the colors? distinguish between all the smells?), but all sense experience is processed by our cognitive faculties (commonly called the brain) which itself portrays information according to previous expectations and biases.
Thus nothing is unbiased.
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By travelling to other countries, you engage all those senses and you involve a total learning experience than reading about it.
But without any prior knowledge, you will not be able to interpret your sense data in any meaningful way.
For example, people studied plants and animals for thousands of years before Darwin. But before Darwin, no one really understood the plants and animals they were looking at because they lacked a comprehensive theoretical framework to interpret their sense data.
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When you read, you are limited to the bias and intent of the person writing it. When you experience it personally, you get exposed to the most honest bias of all, reality.
False. The biases of a writer are no more significant than the biases of the reader who is reading them. Calling a writer biased is trivial because everyone has biases.
Thus when you experience reality, you are still interpreting reality through your own biases. It's not honest at all.
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I say travel relating to a person who actually goes into the country and interacts with the people and their way of doing things, not to some glorified Western resort.
Having historical knowledge gives you a baseline to fill in some of the gaps..but those gaps would be gaping if you only had book knowledge to go by vs actual experience.
I agree that Western resorts are trash. But you've got it backwards. Travel fills in the gaps, whereas books provide you with the main course of information to really understand something.
While true that many books have been written by whites, you must also remember that whites are a notoriously divided people who constantly question each other. So by reading a book, one must be careful to choose the right selection of books with conflicting viewpoints in order to acquire the wisdom of billions of men condensed down into the pages of history.
And the simple fact of the matter is that your personal experience can never match the experiences of billions of men condensed down through the pages of history. This is why people say the written word is the most powerful influence in the world; the pen is mightier than the sword, etc. etc.
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