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Well actually, the question you asked me was whether you could experience health without experiencing sick. Yes, because I rather naively assumed we could assume that health is good and sickness is bad. My mistake.
They are, because we have assigned meanings to the words good and bad which place them on a relative scale.
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Yes, but according to you, no frame of reference exists for that person until he gets sick. He hasn't been able to experience all that health he's enjoyed as his norm until he comes down with the flu, for some reason.
How do you have an idea if your arm feels the way it's supposed to unless someone tells you, or you hurt it? How do you know if your eyes work the way they're supposed to, unless you get them tested and someone tells you, or you try on lenses and suddenly realize you had bad vision? None of us exists in a vacuum. If a person was 100% healthy for his entire life, and he never saw anyone get sick or hurt, and he never had anyone tell him this is what healthy feels like, he'd have no frame of reference to even consider the concept of health.
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I was trying to say that people don't experience purely abstract concepts like Good or Bad, but that they experience more concrete realities like sickness and health, or loneliness and friendship, as either good or bad.
Sure, but the categorization of those experiences as either good or bad (or wherever in between) depends on their being an understanding of the relative positions on the scale. A lonely person wouldn't know he was lonely unless he either had experienced "not lonely" in the past, or until he experiences "not lonely." Loneliness exists because a person prefers to have engagement with other people. The only way to know that you prefer one thing over another is to know what those things are, or to at least know that there IS a something other than what you don't prefer.
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But I maintain that one does not need to have experience the bad in order to experience the good. One can experience, as I say, health, without having experienced unhealthiness. One can be happy without having to be sad first. And so on.
And I maintain that whether it's theoretically possible or not, it doesn't reflect reality. We come from the womb with the concept of preferring something over another thing. We prefer to feel not hungry, instead of feeling hungry. We prefer to feel comforted over feeling scared or alarmed. The idea of good and bad already exists for us, and we experience both from our first conscious thoughts, regardless of the fact that we don't learn to label them until later.
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As you say, the good might simply be accepted as the norm. It can still be experienced and enjoyed even if one remains unaware that a corresponding bad even exists.
Again, it depends on what "experienced" means in this context. Yes, you can experience that goodness, in that you can live, and exist, and have the good actions happen to you. But if you have never experienced anything less than good, then good wouldn't just be the norm, it would be the worst thing you had ever experienced. By comparison, good would suck compared to any experiences that were better. We see this all the time. People get spoiled. They become so used to a baseline that's really pretty good. But because they never experienced anything bad (in whatever context that is) they become dissatisfied with the goodness they have, and complain that it's bad and they want better. And that's with people who already ostensibly understand the concepts of good and bad, and have had actual bad things happen to them. The mechanic would certainly exist if a person had actually never experienced anything objectively bad.
Slowguy
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