What is Common Sense?

[Enmos]

...but to them hours and minutes weren't known.

They didn't know centimeters and meters either. Does that mean they didn't know what length was?

 

[iceaura]

Common sense lost the will to live as the churches became businesses,

When was that: 6000 BC?

and criminals received better treatment than their victims

People who think criminals should be abused at government whim, or the government should act as an agent of revenge, lack common sense.

- - after a women failed to realize that a steaming cup of coffee was hot. She spilled a little in her lap, and was promptly awarded a huge settlement.

The number of people who think they have common sense, but firmly believe that particular modern circus, media hyped, obviously bs, version of events, is very large.

Common sense is what labeled radios and televisions "idiot boxes".

Today we mourn the passing of a beloved old friend, Common Sense, who has been with us for many years.

The people who burned women alive in public for being witches and stoned them to death for alleged adultery, beat their children for discipline, and endowed the inbred children of deranged megalomaniacs with divine rights of rule over them, had a common sense deficit larger than anything we're dealing with today.

Cavepeople didn't know the EXACT time but, as I said , did know day and night but to them hours and minutes weren't known.

People had to have developed a very accurate - within minutes or less in the modern measure - notion of elapsed time to became nomadic pack hunters, if not before. Anything down to about ten minutes is casually visible, astronomically, without special equipment such as a carefully positioned stick in the ground. The stick will get you to the minute or less, if you know what you are doing.

 

[cosmictraveler]

Evan at night or cloudy days

When was that: 6000 BC?
People who think criminals should be abused at government whim, or the government should act as an agent of revenge, lack common sense.
The number of people who think they have common sense, but firmly believe that particular modern circus, media hyped, obviously bs, version of events, is very large.

Common sense is what labeled radios and televisions "idiot boxes".

The people who burned women alive in public for being witches and stoned them to death for alleged adultery, beat their children for discipline, and endowed the inbred children of deranged megalomaniacs with divine rights of rule over them, had a common sense deficit larger than anything we're dealing with today.

People had to have developed a very accurate - within minutes or less in the modern measure - notion of elapsed time to became nomadic pack hunters, if not before. Anything down to about ten minutes is casually visible, astronomically, without special equipment such as a carefully positioned stick in the ground. The stick will get you to the minute or less, if you know what you are doing.

Evan at night or cloudy days?

 

[iceaura]

Evan at night or cloudy days

Sure. Cloudy nights, now, might present difficulties - but they were much better off than modern folks who lose their phones.

 

[Landau Roof]

What? You mean they had some form of time telling machine? The only thing they knew was it was day or night and they didn't name those either.

The passage of time is our own built-in sense of things. Years ago I had a brother who fed a stray dog. The dog would show up at the kitchen door exactly at 5:00 p.m. everyday. If a dog had that much time-sense, why would not our ancestors? (And, no, it wasn't that our kitchen inhabitants followed the kitchen clock so exactly and prepared food, and set the meat cooking, which the dog could smell, precisely at the same time every day. Dinner time varied fairly widely.)

 

[cosmictraveler]

The passage of time is our own built-in sense of things. Years ago I had a brother who fed a stray dog. The dog would show up at the kitchen door exactly at 5:00 p.m. everyday. If a dog had that much time-sense, why would not our ancestors? (And, no, it wasn't that our kitchen inhabitants followed the kitchen clock so exactly and prepared food, and set the meat cooking, which the dog could smell, precisely at the same time every day. Dinner time varied fairly widely.)

Our ancestors weren't subsisting on handouts but rather had to fend for themselves. You can train a dog just by giving them food at a certain time and eventually they get used to it and are "on time" to get the free meal. The animals that the cave man would go after, for the most part, were not as smart as the dogs so they weren't always around the same place at a certain time everyday. If that were the case after a few kills the animals wouldn't be there any longer to kill for they become depleted.

 

[Landau Roof]

Our ancestors weren't subsisting on handouts but rather had to fend for themselves. You can train a dog just by giving them food at a certain time and eventually they get used to it and are "on time" to get the free meal. The animals that the cave man would go after, for the most part, were not as smart as the dogs so they weren't always around the same place at a certain time everyday. If that were the case after a few kills the animals wouldn't be there any longer to kill for they become depleted.

Do you practice deliberate misunderstanding or are you just that dense? I won't respond to such pitiless trolling. However, to answer the question you should be asking if you weren't playing the fool - it's as others have said earlier above: early humans would have had a good sense of how many hours since sunrise and what not; how long they'd been out hunting and so forth. There are all sorts of ways to 'feel' the passage of time independent of mechanical devices. I would share them with you, but you will say something senseless like, the sun is too brainless to know at what speed the Earth is rotating'.

 

[Yazata]

Concerning the original question: What is Common Sense?

I'd say that the phrase 'common sense' refers to what people know about the universe simply by living their lives, prior to any specialized initiatory instruction that purports to reveal its inner secrets.

People eat and sleep, they fall in love, they do whatever it is that they do every day. There's a great deal of information about the world implicit in all of that.

I still remember sitting in a philosophical class discussion where several people were insisting that the physical universe was just a phenomenal illusion, a mental construction. Then the class finally broke up and... everybody left the room through the door! Nobody walked through the wall! Nobody just thought themselves home, instead they went to the parking garage and fished around in their pockets for their car keys. Somebody even suggested that everybody go out for pizza.

I remember watching all of that and feeling a little boggled by it. I felt that it was teaching me a very important philosophical lesson, perhaps more important than anything that anyone had said in class.

 

[Landau Roof]

Concerning the original question: What is Common Sense?

I'd say that the phrase 'common sense' refers to what people know about the universe simply by living their lives, prior to any specialized initiatory instruction that purports to reveal its inner secrets.

People eat and sleep, they fall in love, they do whatever it is that they do every day. There's a great deal of information about the world implicit in all of that.

I still remember sitting in a philosophical class discussion where several people were insisting that the physical universe was just a phenomenal illusion, a mental construction. Then the class finally broke up and... everybody left the room through the door! Nobody walked through the wall! Nobody just thought themselves home, instead they went to the parking garage and fished around in their pockets for their car keys. Somebody even suggested that everybody go out for pizza.

I remember watching all of that and feeling a little boggled by it. I felt that it was teaching me a very important philosophical lesson, perhaps more important than anything that anyone had said in class.

I would think that what was meant was that we, our physical selves, are part of this illusion and are therefore subject to the rules within the illusion. So even if it could be proven that the physical universe is a mental construct, you'd still have to pay the pizza boy for the pizza.

 

[Yazata]

Regarding time and 'cavemen' (who probably rarely lived in caves), I'm sure that anatomically modern humans in the high paleolithic had a fairly sophisticated idea of time. What they lacked was a metric by which to measure its passage in numerical terms. (Clocks in other words.) But they certainly knew about 'earlier' and 'later', and could roughly estimate it by how high the sun was in the sky.

Even early paleolithic hominids such as Homo erectus probably had some idea of time. They would set out on hunting and gathering expeditions, presumably with the knowledge that doing so had something to do with eating later.

Even my sadly departed dog seemed to have some nonverbal idea of time, anticipating different events that regularly happened at different times of the day.

 

[Yazata]

I would think that what was meant was...

Probably so.

My point is that no matter how outlandish somebody's metaphysical theories are, they are still going to walk through doors and not through walls. They aren't going to jump over the moon. They will eat and sleep and scratch their butts the same as everybody else. And they won't have a whole lot of difficulty interacting with people whose metaphysical ideas might be radically different than theirs, so long as conversation sticks to the events of everyday life and stays away from metaphysics.

In other words, despite all the differences in metaphysical interpretations, everyone is already on the same page in a strong and fundamental way.

 

[C C]

Concerning the topic itself, with the side-mention of time apparently introduced somewhere...

Commonsense is adequate judgement-making and knowledge for dealing with and navigating successfully through everyday affairs, often imprecisely detailed, that some population or community imprecisely as well professes to agree with. To explore removing the word from that area of its original or usual function is sort of like changing the meaning of the word "drought" to "rainfall" so we can misleadingly feel that non-irrigated crops are doing fine after a long period of dryness. The technical nomenclature of some new project could appropriate the symbol "commonsense" for a very particular definition of its own (as an image editor does "toolbox"), but unless that aberration is denoted from the start, mundane usage is the assumed context.

Accordingly, commonsense doesn't apply to phenomenal / inferred occurrences, models, objects, circumstances that aren't normally apprehended without special instruments / methods; and doesn't apply to devised, artificial systems that are so complex or esoteric that they tend [at least initially] to alienate the exoteric, familiar interests, needs, and goals of humans. A person with such informal, "good" commonsense has the potential to act wisely in response to a generalization outputted by a formal, critical-thinking, specialized enterprise. But that synoptic tidbit has to provided by those trained, skilled experts. [Example: "Don't go by the traditional belief that if it tastes good and is satisfying to you then it must be healthy -- eating that stuff in that quantity on a daily basis will eventually give you heart disease."]

Time is the organization and relational framework of events. Whether that's a human-invented scheme or something taken to be ontological and independent of intellect / perceptual consciousness. Not the narrower idea, component, characteristic, etc of a "flow" which is optionally subsumed under the broader concept of time. The former can be discarded without eliminating the latter. Analogy-wise for instance, if one claimed that a completed railway or its division into individual segments of track was "flowing", it would be a classification error. The claim should instead revolve around something flowing/moving in or on the railroad (i.e., trains). A railway still under construction would be half a different matter ("growing block-universe" view, etc [the future does not exist]). Certainly a situation like in one of those old cartoons, where a work-crew keeps carrying the same two pieces of track alternately in front of a locomotive for it to travel over, would be a different matter (though that's probably a far more imperfect metaphor for the "presentism" view [only this moment exists]).

Paul Davies: "Peter Lynds's reasonable and widely accepted assertion that the flow of time is an illusion (25 October, p 33) does not imply that time itself is an illusion. It is perfectly meaningful to state that two events may be separated by a certain duration, while denying that time mysteriously flows from one event to the other. Crick compares our perception of time to that of space. Quite right. Space does not flow either, but it's still 'there'." --New Scientist, 6 December 2003, Sec. Letters

Robert Geroch: "There is no dynamics within space-time itself: nothing ever moves therein; nothing happens; nothing changes. [...] In particular, one does not think of particles as 'moving through' space-time, or as 'following along' their world-lines. Rather, particles are just 'in' space-time, once and for all, and the world-line represents, all at once the complete life history of the particle." --General Relativity from A to B

Hermann Weyl: "The objective world simply IS, it does not HAPPEN. Only to the gaze of my consciousness, crawling upward along the life line [worldline] of my body, does a certain section of this world come to life as a fleeting image in space which continuously changes in time." --Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science ​

 

[Landau Roof]

Probably so.

My point is that no matter how outlandish somebody's metaphysical theories are, they are still going to walk through doors and not through walls. They aren't going to jump over the moon. They will eat and sleep and scratch their butts the same as everybody else. And they won't have a whole lot of difficulty interacting with people whose metaphysical ideas might be radically different than theirs, so long as conversation sticks to the events of everyday life and stays away from metaphysics.

In other words, despite all the differences in metaphysical interpretations, everyone is already on the same page in a strong and fundamental way.

And that, my friend, is a pretty good definition of 'common sense'. There have been others here too, I should point out.
@C C - I need time to absorb your remarks. You are correct about the side mention of time. I started this thread because someone in the recentest time thread tried to wallpaper over his wafflings and resort to common sense as a reason he believes in time and the flow thereof. So rather than sidetrack that thread, I began this one. I got your distinction between time and time flow, but I want to study your response more to really understand what you are saying. So you are of the non-existent time flow school of thought? Perhaps by the time you can respond to this, I will understand, but could you please clarify/simplify your views of 'time' itself? Thanks.

P.S. I hope you will visit the time flow discussion and share your views there.

 

[C C]

... C C ... I got your distinction between time and time flow, but I want to study your response more to really understand what you are saying. So you are of the non-existent time flow school of thought? Perhaps by the time you can respond to this, I will understand, but could you please clarify/simplify your views of 'time' itself? Thanks

I wasn't really endorsing any particular view such as eternalism, growing past or presentism. Just expressing what you indeed "got": That there's a popular tendency to conflate "the flow of time is an illusion" with "time is an illusion". Which isn't or doesn't have to be the case. The rest was just a very brief attempt to elaborate on that distinction with an everyday analogy. If taking the view that all events exist (the analogy of the railroad tracks and its segments), then what could be moving from one segment of track [moment] to the next? Certainly not the railway (time) itself.

Paul Davies: "...what meaning can be attached to the movement of time itself? Relative to what does it move? Whereas other types of motion relate one physical process to another, the putative flow of time relates time to itself. Posing the simple question “How fast does time pass?” exposes the absurdity of the very idea. The trivial answer “One second per second” tells us nothing at all. Although we find it convenient to refer to time’s passage in everyday affairs, the notion imparts no new information that cannot be conveyed without it. Consider the following scenario: Alice was hoping for a white Christmas, but when the day came she was disappointed that it only rained; however, she was happy that it snowed the following day. Although this description is replete with tenses and references to time’s passage, exactly the same information is conveyed by simply correlating Alice’s mental states with dates, in a manner that omits all reference to time passing or the world changing." --That Mysterious Flow; SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, Sep 2002​

In one of the former quotes Hermann Weyl suggested that it was his "consciousness moving up the worldline of his body" that provided the flowing illusion. But I don't wholly agree with that. Because to avoid any state (or moment) of the brain throughout its continuity being ontologically special (as the "present now" is conventionally claimed to be special), each one of the brain-states corresponding to awareness would have to be cognitively "turned-on" together, so to speak. [That is, NOT like a series of figurative light-bulbs taking a turn at figuratively "glowing", but all glowing simultaneously and perpetually.] Each of those brain-states would be confined to its own duration [of cognition] that is relationally interwoven into the one before and the one after in the sequence. Accordingly, there would be no "overarching" consciousness for / of the entire "history" of a human brain / body from fetal development to death. Merely the feeling corresponding to each brain-state that its instant of perception alone is "real" and the appearance of shifting to the next interval of cognition because of the order / relational connection to it. (Actually, identification and understanding (thoughts) of anything based on language would be extended over several brain-states; a word and its underlying meaning can't be expressed in one "moment", much less a sentence.)