To begin a talk on nonsense I must first ask a question, as is often true. What is sense?

An agreement about consistent meanings or what might make meanings seem consistent. Agreements are often very difficult to reach. Indeed, they are.

I recently read that in Europe, “common sense” is referred to as “farmer’s sense.”

Sense is information gathering.

The smallest generally agreed truths? That would be a good baseline if we go with the rather more literal concept of sense.

People forget basics. We lose ourselves in overly complicated thinking and the end product is a rather twisted grasp on something that at best only weakly resembles reality. We need to ground our awareness, our daily thinking, in those often unspoken elements like the truth that we are all standing on the same planet. What do you think?

Light is bright? Even light has differing degrees of brightness, and the degree or perception of degree can be not so absolutely clear.

Is no light still light? No light is still light. We don’t have the ability to measure absence of light. We can detect things like black holes only through what they call black body radiation, or rather hawking radiation in that specific case, otherwise no light means it might as well not exist.

What does a night vision camera pick up? Infrared light, or ultraviolet light, depending on how it’s built or set to function.

Rather infrared since ultraviolet is heavily absorbed. True. infrared is much more reliable.

So if we consider sense as the information of our sense receptors, we have more sense receptors than we are ever consciously aware of. You have chemo-receptors in your bodies tissues that sense blood salt levels and carbon dioxide levels, but these never produce a “conscious” awareness in you, or almost never.

Oh! You meant “sense” in another sense! I mean sense in all senses.

Well, that makes sense then. I thought you meant the interpretations we give to sensual input. Can we identify a difference?

There is no nonsense. Everything is or has sense. In general, I would agree, but there is problem sense. Noise.

I often used to say that there is no such thing as common sense, but then I never had a term to replace it. Ah, perhaps we can come up with one.

I think the closest would be logic. Logic, math, you get into the field of paradoxes there and have to account for non-computables.

So we struggle to identify sense in any clear way, yes?

Everyone argues about it.

Common sense is, as we discussed it in school, all the info we can agree as fact to a certain level or better.

“Common sense” = basic social agreements about consistent meanings.

What is common sense to one person is totally irrational to another.

I don’t feel that we must consciously agree on what is “sense.” We can’t even define it really let alone agree on it, yet we still have the experience of something we consider to be sense. We experience that things make sense. Is this not so?

Have you ever had something that used to make sense to you, stop making sense for you? Why would you say that happened, or even could happen?

Because any experience is individual and not common.

New experiences make you see the world in a different way.

Sense is what we perceive as evident, perhaps.

It’s subjective to my views and earlier experiences, so it’s actually already reflected.

The capacity for experience is common. Experience as its own object does not exist. There is no experience without the subject and only subjects can be experienced. Is there any object to contrast a subject against? With increasing objectivity, you encounter increasing nonsense. In order to define something as an object, you have to begin eliminating potential relationships from it. Can you identify the object of a tree if you can’t pick it out from anything around it?

Bark, roots, branches, leaves.

We need edges? That is a commonly held view that we need edges, but evidence doesn’t back that up. We need relationships, points of view. These are not defined by the edges so much as by the elements that cohere in that place, the superposition that collapses to actualize that tree and which by itself is inherently not local.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~