Jazz in F'sted and thoughts on common sense

 Common sense…that which is generally understood, universally acceptable to all. A sense that unites all others. 

Calvin and Hobbes had a quote: 
"I've got plenty of common sense! I just choose to ignore it."

Descartes stated that everyone has common sense but that it is rarely used well. Aristotle thought common sense resided in the heart. Hobbes thought man was no different from other animals and behaved likewise. 

Bacon describes normal human thinking and therefore common sense as being biased towards believing in lies.

Some claim common sense is built from shared experiences and shared emotions which may make it imperfect when trying to suss out the truth. 

But Vico came along and thought common sense came from the idea that the wisdom of the people evolves. 

Vico’s view of common sense puts it in a category that removes it from purely selfish motivations.

"Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen." Albert Einstein

At MIT there is an Open Mind Common Sense project whose goal is to build and utilize a large commonsense knowledge base from the contributions of thousands of people all across the Web. This data base which was started in 1999 is a repository for all the general knowledge most people possess.

The reason this project started is because computers lack common sense. The things we understand about our communities, ourselves, our family and friends still remains outside the scope of artificial intelligence. Computers have to be programed to understand how things look, feel and taste, how they behave, interact and the sensory knowledge we all share with out even thinking about it.

Although most of us don’t think about common sense it is that aspect of ourselves that provides us with the means to think like a person. We understand that giving a knife to a child can cause harm. We know how to get along and how to avoid events that might turn out negative. We use our common sense all day long to navigate our world. The physical matter residing in our skulls holds millions of pieces of common sense material. When you start adding up all the times we use our common sense it becomes mind boggling. 

Every human being all over the world is oozing with common sense….so why is it that when you watch politicians, predatory business and the extremes of behavior among the population does it make one wonder where it all went?

See ya next week