Common Sense Voices

[coberst]

Common Sense Voices

I claim that one cannot enter, for the first time, into the territory of some domains of knowledge while listening to common sense voices. Our common sense will immediately reject some facts because those facts are contrary to common sense.

You must still these instinctive reactions because common sense knows nothing about many things. The physicist must still her common sense reaction at the results of some experiments regarding the inner working of the atom.

The inner working of human nature can be as mysterious to common sense as is the inner reality of the atom.

We can see only what we are prepared to see. Common sense does not prepare us to see many things. We have to creep up on certain matters and withhold judgment until we are intellectually sophisticated enough to judge their reality.

[HermesThePhilosopher]

I have enjoyed reading some of the threads you have started Coberst, reminds of Marcus Aurelius - nice observations! There are far too few replies to them too...

I agree with you here on common sense. Often has been the time I have found my own "common sense" lacking, and dismissive of new knowledge. Only on occasion does my intellectual intuition work
I generally like to approach a new topic by getting the main points quickly, then sitting on it and reassessing later whether I should keep digging.
It has been my experience of forums/the internet that this common sense suffers almost total failure. I think people are not in the habit of learning from computers, so tend to view almost everything written on the net as a challenge to their own knowledge and beliefs.

But anyways, please keep up the interesting threads

[coberst]

Thanks Hermes

I agree that most forum members consider anything written on the Internet forum is not a challenge to learn something new but is a challenge to engage in combat. I guess that our educational system must have handcapped us with this attitude. The desire to learn something new seems to be the last instinct we see.

[Moontanman]

My first few years on the Internet were spent burning Google up. There was so much I wanted to know and so many different ideas and opinions about what was and what wasn't true it was like an orgy of facts and figures running through my mind. I dreamed of typing the key board. I would move my hands in my sleep as though i was typing.

For someone like me the Internet was almost heaven on earth. After a while I earned that not everything was necessarily true and some of the stuff was out right BS. I then went on a journey of figuring out what could be trusted and what could not.

Every thing with in my areas of personal knowledge or expertise was soaked up first then i slowly branched out trying to learn and understand, separating the wheat from the chaff.

I have found that the idea of challenging something some one says is a great way to learn, to figure out if they are just another BS artist or if what they are claiming has a grain of truth. Not being in a position to actively test much of what I read and see on the Internet it helps a lot of watch and participate in the challenge of ideas and opinions.

I see no other way to know if what we read on the net is truth or simply some one else's idea of BS. I have seen many ideas fail that test on this forum that I really didn't have the knowledge to figure out on my own. I think the template of challenging ideas is a great way to learn and grow intellectually.

[HermesThePhilosopher]

You make a good point Moontanman, unlike a book where one can not reply to the author, on the net we have a good opportunity to engage in debate and to question what someone says.

I think, however, that in the search for new information and instant gratification (which I am totally guilty of) people tend to not digest what other people say on the net. With a book we are forced to sit, wait, contemplate what has been written. And whilst we cannot talk directly with the writer, we can converse in our minds with what they said. The immediacy of the internet allows people to jump to, and post, conclusions very quickly.

Perhaps a new dialectic custom needs to be developed, a new tradition in keeping with rate and nature of communication?

[Turtle]

Originally Posted by HermesThePhilosopher

Perhaps a new dialectic custom needs to be developed, a new tradition in keeping with rate and nature of communication?

I think so, but rather I expect the customs to arise synergetically, which is to say we don't know how the system operates by looking at the parts. The best laid schemes o' mice an' men gang aft a-gley and Gutenberg's Bibles come write to mind.

Originally Posted by Coberst

I claim that one cannot enter, for the first time, into the territory of some domains of knowledge while listening to common sense voices.

The road to perdition is paved with good intentions and unsupported claims. Get a good map; that's common sense.

[coberst]

Originally Posted by Moontanman

I see no other way to know if what we read on the net is truth or simply some one else's idea of BS. I have seen many ideas fail that test on this forum that I really didn't have the knowledge to figure out on my own. I think the template of challenging ideas is a great way to learn and grow intellectually.

I must disagree.

The Internet forum is a great place to discover new and interesting ideas but is not a good place for learning anything significant

It is my opinion that learning is best done at the knee of the best thinkers that history has to offer us. We can see only what we are prepared to see and by standing on the shoulders of these giants one can see further and faster than any other means I have heard of. The goal of every word I post is to convince readers to go to the books of these giants and thus to become self-actualizing self-learners.

To depend upon learning from the Internet means that one must have a means for determining the degree of trust to be given to a voice on the Internet. Generally it is a case of the blind-leading-the-blind.

I post on the Internet not for the purpose of teaching but for the purpose of arousing the curiosity of the reader. You do not need to know much about the value of my writing but when you become serious about learning one must find the best source available.

I suspect that our educational system has driven us away from books and serious learning but this is a learning handicap that we must work our self out of.

[coberst]

Common sense—the unreflective opinions of ordinary people

[Turtle]

Originally Posted by coberst

Common sense—the unreflective opinions of ordinary people

Sound judgment not based on specialized knowledge; native good judgment. common sense - definition of common sense by the Free Online Dictionary, Thesaurus and Encyclopedia.

[coberst]

Common sense—the unreflective opinions of ordinary people

This is the definition from my Webster's and this is what I meant in the OP by the phrase "common sense". Like most words one can find many different definitions apparently.

Many people think that common sense is not common; they must be thinking about the definition "Sound judgment not based on specialized knowledge; native good judgment". I am inclined to agree.