Always great to hear from a young philosopher! I take it that you are wondering if a person has only experienced some state (darkness, for example) and not experienced a contrary state (light), whether or not they would know the state itself / the state they are in. Great question. It may have a practical application: if persons have never experienced moral maturity or enlightenment of some kind, they may not know what it is (for them or for anyone) to be immature or unenlightened. Identifying states of ourselves and of the world often depend on our capacity to differentiate them (to grasp X, we often need to be able to distinguish X from not-X). The only modest suggestion I am led to make is that someone who has never seen (someone "born blind") may not experience the world as dark. They may, instead, experience the world as a matter of sounds, sensory feelings, smells, but not in visual terms. Although English usage might not entirely back me up on this, but it seems to me that for someone to...

Perhaps one might well claim that one has to have some prior experience ("experience" being broader than "perception") in order to have memory. One might remember prior thoughts, abstract propositions or a sensation rather than a full perception. Memory seems (by definition) to be about the past (I cannot remember the future, though I can remember that I believe or know that something will occur in the future) and so if there is no experience in the past to recall, it is hard to see how one might have any memory at all. In this sense, memory appears to be a dependent cognitive power --it depends on the exercise of other cognitive powers. I suppose someone might claim that they remember remembering, but this begs us to ask the question: remember remembering what? While that is my proposal (one needs prior experience in order for memory to function), the issues can be stretched a bit... Imagine God or some super-scientist made a creature (Skippy) on Monday at noon full of ostensible memories of a...

Interesting question! There are philosophers who would seek to undermine the whole picture of ourselves that is presupposed by your question. Some of them argue that we do make direct contact with the objects we touch, feel, smell, hear, and taste and that the idea that we only directly deal with sensations (or what is sometimes called "sense-data") is an illusion brought on by people like Descartes or, in the 20th century, by Bertrand Russell or A.J. Ayer. But I am inclined to think we do not directly feel and see what is around us; while I think we do (under normal circumstances) relaibly see and feel "what is really out there" this is mediated (in my view) by sensations, our visual field and so on. On this view, skepticism of an even very radical sort is conceivable. It is logically possible (I suggest) for the movie the Matrix to be right; we merely think we see what is really there, but we are being manipulated by complex computers to have the sensations we are having. One other matter...