COMMONSENSE "INFRASTRUCTURE" IS IN-BORN

COMMONSENSE "INFRASTRUCTURE" IS IN-BORN -

The essence of what anything means lies in what it means to us, which in turn lies in our 'EXPERIENCE' with it. Now, firstly, you cannot even talk about something which you haven't "had an experience of" in some way. Even if you conceive of an arbitrary, imaginary word, nothing like which exists in real, you still have experienced the phonetics of it.

What is the essence of 'steps' (of a staircase)? You would immediately narrow down and say - they take us up (or down), bit by bit. Now, there are so many aspects to steps - 1) the planes are parallel 2) they are made of marble or stone or whatever 3) they keep shifting to the right (seen across) 4) each is made of perpendicular dimensions etc. But these things are not quite the "essence" of steps. The essence is as is said above. How does one get to it? When one actually uses steps he gets the feeling - the experience - of being elevated or descended. He also moves ahead, but that experience is had even while normal flat walking. So the core of the essence of the meaning of steps is the bit by bit elevation or descendence, which occurs to us when we experience them.

Moving on further, can we experience everything? Jupiter and Saturn? Yes, as kids, we see pictures of them in the encyclopedia. Now, extending the above point in a sense, the bulk of every person's experience with a picture of Saturn is going to be the same. That there is a sphere and that there are circular rings around it. Some specifics may differ, but there will be a common core to all kids. This is where I am hinting at and going towards commonsense. Nobody is going to perceive Saturn as - "there is an arbitrarily shaped patch on the ring-plane, then moving above and to the left there is nothing (air), then there is a solid curved patch, then to its left there is a similar colour and material solid patch etc. So there is a commonality in the basic way in which all of us perceive things around us. There is some common perceptual machinery with which we absorb the data around us, to a certain minimal extent. This is a function clearly of our embodiment - combination of the locations and arrangement of our heads and other organs. This basic machinery contributes to WHAT and HOW we perceive the reality around us. Hence this cannot be separated from what we call our 'commonsense'. Yes, the fact that food is served in plates is not inborn, but rather learned and acquired, but the basal machinery to acquire that, which is inseparable from the common SENSE itself, is inborn.

This shows up in our experience with things around us, what they mean to us, and thus in what the essence of their meaning, and casually speaking, just their meaning, is. The observed is a function of the observer. Human commonsense is "human".