"Common Sense" by Merlin Jetton

Merlin Jetton has an article at Rebirth of Reason on what Aristotle meant by "common sense" - which isn't what we usually mean by the term.

Nowadays common sense means something like - what normal people would agree on.

But for Aristotle, it had to do with integrated sensory processing. When we open a door, we typically feel, see, and hear the door. We naturally perceive all this info as coming from one source - even though it came from separate perceptual inputs. As Merlin writes:

Per Aristotle the senses are not integrated at the same level as thinking, but by what he calls the 'common sense'. He wrote very little about it, but held such integration to be perceptual. It could thus be attributed to nonhuman animals.

Merlin goes on to note that Ayn Rand's views are similar to Aristotle's:

"A percept is a group of sensations automatically retained and integrated by the brain of a living organism. It is in the form of percepts that man grasps the evidence of his senses and apprehends reality" (ITOE2, p. 5). That is about all -- various sensory data is automatically integrated into percepts. Her published works barely reach beyond that.

As Merlin writes, this level of cognition is shared by us with many animals. I think it's a hard level of cogniton to understand, because it all happens automatically, and you "just know" that the door is heavy and gray and squeaky. But with contemporary scientific tools, cognitive science is making a lot of progress on this stuff.

Wouldn't it be a chore
if you had to think about whether the door
was really the source of what you saw
and also what you felt with your paw?