There are some things that we can NEVER understand through empirical science.

Thanks for joining. First, a clarification. I am not talking about proof here. I am talking about understanding. There is an entire class of phenomena that can never be understood through science. Let me now go ahead and explain what this class of phenomena is that I'm talking about. I'm talking about the class of phenomena that I call raw experience. For example: There is an apple on my desk. I am staring at the apple. The light in my office bounces off the apple and certain wavelengths are reflected into my eyes which get translated into electric signals which trigger something to happen in my brain. The effect of all of this is that I experience a vision sensation that contains a particular shade of color which I describe as red. There are other shades and shapes in my visual experience which I could describe to you as well. First, I am NOT talking about the wavelengths, or the electric signals, or my brain. I am talking about the visual experience that it all results in. This is what I am calling a "raw sensation" or "raw experience." It is "what it feels like for me to be looking at an apple on my desk." Now, like I said, I can explain to you what I am seeing, but you can never actually access it. I'm not saying I could be lying. I could be telling you the absolute truth about what it seems to me that this apple looks like. I can give you details about how I truly perceive the particular shade of red that the apple appears to be. But you can never directly access the experience. In fact, there is no empirical way for you to access my experience, or me yours. Even if we put you on a gurney, open their skull, and connect the most sophisticated machinery imaginable to your brain and track every neuron, synapse, and neurotransmitter in your brain, we still would not have access to your actual experience. We could still never even come close to understanding what it feels like to be you remembering your first rock concert, or what it feels like to be you listening to Stairway to Heaven, or what it feels like to be you stubbing your toe. Take religious ecstasy as another example. We can ask people who have had such an experience describe it to us. We can find out how people behave during such an experience and how they behave afterwards. We can, again, put them on a gurney and open them up and measure their brains while the experience is happening. None of these things will give us one inkling of what it really feels like to experience religious ecstasy (I'm an atheist by the way). We could have such an experience of our own and then we would know what it feels like for ourselves to have such an experience, but this is not empirical evidence. We can't use our experience to explain to someone else what religious ecstasy is like. We aren't a ecstasy-o-meter which we can simply take measurements from and plot on a graph. Or, scratch that...yes we can, but that doesn't add to our understanding of the experience itself. We can measure how much we sweat during the experience. We can measure our vocalizations. We can measure our body temperatures. We can measure our brain activity. We can measure all sorts of things during the event and it will bring us no close to understanding the raw experience itself, because the raw experience is SOMETHING DIFFERENT than behavior. Now, you said in your previous argument that "if you arrive at the conclusion that something can never be known or proven, via experimentation, then you have arrived at an understanding non the less." I am perfectly willing to agree that raw experiences can be understood to be incapable of being understood via experimentation, but that doesn't disprove the point I am trying to make. I am not saying that raw experiences can not be understood at all. I am saying that they can not be understood through science. I have direct access to my own raw experiences and so I know what it means for me to be having this particular experience that I am currently experiencing right now. I will not address your other arguments since they are not relevant to the discussion. This is not your fault since I had not actually made the domain of the discussion clear from the initial outset. I am not talking about proof and I am not talking about an abstract description system. I am saying that raw experiences are absolutely inaccessible by empirical methods and, as such, can never be empirically understood. Since science relies on empirical evidence, science can never be used to describe raw experiences. Why does this matter? Who cares? Well, it matters in areas such as psychology and interpersonal relationships. For example, while it might help if I try to understand what is happening to my girlfriend's brain when she is in a bad mood, it's also very important to understand how she is FEELING and what she is EXPERIENCING. The only way to do that is to communicate with her and try to understand what she is saying.