Tuesday, April 27, 2010

making sense of "the common sense"

So i had a clumsy moment , and then i hear some loud voice punching on my ear drums--"Where is your COMMON SENSE?"


"I do have common sense but probably thats not your definition of the terminology" , i yelled back.

( Yelling is like reflex action , when some one yells at you , you yell back.In this way it is similar to yawning, the consequences of yelling are most of the time worse than result of yawning though )

So we all have common sense.However, the "common" in it is quite misleading.There isn't a specific and "common" to all set of "senses" defined in "The Common Sense Bible" that people should possess in order to have common sense.Common sense is rather a set of "senses" that is  "unique" to an individual( this set overlaps or intersects to certain extent with other individual sets and one can argue that it is not unique at all ).And using this "set of senses" in our "common" or day to day life we find it so natural that we consider it as "common sense".People have common sense that seems natural and common to them and it is not the same as the common sense I  have, We all have common sense but it is not common to all of us.

Common sense is not something we are born with hard coded in our genes, it is acquired. Doing simple task as buttoning a shirt or balancing on single or both feet(walking i mean) may seem trivial today, but we had to learn it once upon a time

Brain is the best organ of all in Human body, the reason why there is war and why we do everything we do, good or bad (In fact "good" and "bad" are the creation of the brain too).It is interesting but complicated and the power and complexities of the organ "brain" continues to amaze many great "brains" even today.  It is our brain that learns each and every thing we do consciously or unconsciously with every repetition storing it in memory so that walking or cycling which once seems so difficult, becomes effortless ( not completely, you still need your voluntary will and muscle power ).It is amazing how the brain deals with the physics without you thinking about it, making you lean and move in direction that help you keep your balance.It creates an abstraction layer between things stored in the memory and our conscious movements.

Brain makes mistakes too, and while cycling you may fall, but again brain learns from this mistake and stores it in the memory.It is unlikely but possible that you may fall making the same mistake( probably the saying "Man makes mistakes but fools repeats them" was an indication towards the fact all brain except foolish ones learn from their mistakes).It is that people do not accept the fact that the best way of learning is by commiting mistakes because if they did the education system wouldn't treat failure as bad but as a step forward in the learning process.

We all have led a different life and had our own journey of learning by practicing and commiting mistakes since our birth to where ever we stand now in the road of life.So we have all acquired a specific set of sense, actually the learned memory of our brain which we apply every day in our lives.This is common sense and only things i find common here is that we all acquire it through a process of learning and that we all seem to find it natural once we acquire it. A person who spent his school days solving math problems may find a certain way of solving those problems as common sense while others may not.Similarly a person who never actually looked at those idiotic fashion magazines or paid attention to how people dress in TV or real life may lack fashion sense according to some others(fashion sense is a subset of common sense that some of us acquire as we grow up and so is civic sense and many others). So what may seem common sense to you , may not seem the same to me and saying  "you DONT HAVE COMMON SENSE" reflects nothing but the fact that you dont really understand common sense or you dont define it as i do or the fact that i misunderstood what common sense is (take your pick, i dont want to know which option you chose)

If you read the entire of this ****  and if it makes no sense to you , dont worry, even our way of understanding and looking at things is acquired and therefore not common (that tells you something about my  life , doesn't it? )

2 comments:

  1. I wake up sore sometimes when I sleep wrong. It can make me moody at times. :D

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  2. heh, nice to have you back roky, its been a long time

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