This must be a documented phenomenon...

[ninja_prophet]

...but all I can think of is the Light Grenade. I've taken to reading Daylight Atheism (the blog of Andrew Marczyk, as read on Ebon Musings), and it's good stuff. Today's post talks about torture, and links to this Straight Dope thread where a guy provides a firsthand account of waterboarding himselfI didn't really know what waterboarding was

Comments

[humanethic]

"but I lack the procedural knowledge of how to imagine what it's like, because I haven't actually experienced it and don't have the memory with which to construct such an idea

[ninja_prophet]

OK, short version first: fuck you, because you actually can't judge an experience until you've actually undergone it. Why? Because you haven't actually undergone it. Up until that point, all you can do is guess. You might be right, you might be wrong, but it's a fucking guess, and that's all.

Fries in a Frosty, airplane rides, roller coasters, drugs, and sex are all experiences that don't quite add up from their constituent parts. You can guess, sure, but until you actually try it, your guess is a guess and nothing more.

[ninja_prophet]

OK, long and somewhat more respectable version (part 1):
I find your reasoning to be asinine here. "Don't knock it 'til you try it," in my experience, actually holds water for experiences in which all concerned parties consent to whatever activity we're talking about - what food you eat, what drugs you take, how you have sex, and so on. Also, it only works (and only should be used) when people don't know what they're talking about. Propositionally, I do know what I'm talking about here, now that I've looked it up - and I accept that, barring some wide and far-reaching conspiracy, this definitely shouldn't be forced upon anyone. But in a very important respect, I don't know what I'm talking about, because what I'm imagining is not matching up with what I'm reading. Before I experienced alcohol, nicotine, marijuana, and sex, I had radically different opinions of those things. I thought I was able to imagine what they were like, but the effects were in at least some way different than anything I'd experienced up to that point.

Part 2

[ninja_prophet]

(cont'd. from above)
Joe, can you imagine what it's like to be a fly? A fly is orders of magnitude your lesser, both in size and cognitive capacity, yet possesses senses and reflexes which are orders of magnitude greater than yours. I'm not asking you to imagine "Joe's mind in a fly's body," I'm asking you to imagine what it's like to be a fly. Compound eyes, six legs, wings, the coordination to use all of those in harmony, and whatever cognitive capacities - the list goes on. I'll bet you'll imagine something, if you bother to try, but that thing you'd be imagining is not what it's like to be a fly. Maybe you'd even get close, but you still wouldn't know, and I want to know. To go back to the hair-on-fire scenario, you literally don't know what it's like until it happens - how fast your hair would burn, how your bubbling scalp would feel, what it would be like for the temperature of your brain to rise (if it would, which I don't even know), et cetera. I mean, fucking duh, it's a bad idea. But I guessed at what waterboarding