Is Common Sense Worth Anything?

#240: Rush To Judgement?
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We're all too familiar with simpletons and cranks thinking they know more than 'the so-called experts'.  These are usually older men with too much time on their hands, gadflies who take on things like Global Warming, using outdated arguments that appeal to common sense.  For example, "our earth has seen much larger swings in temperature than a mere two degrees."  Their argument is usually buttressed with graphs that show thousand year ebbs and flows.  Meanwhile, the learned opinion of those who study precisely this question--and can easily debunk their argument--is ignored.

And yet, occasionally, the nay-sayers are right.  Cigarette smoke, for example, is now seen for what it is: carcinogenic, though 75 years ago there was no such consensus.

So, at the risk of following the crack-pots down one of their rabbit holes, I'm about to dunk on a philosopher's 'What is reality?' question.  And I'll make it short.

1. Philosopher Donald Hoffman thinks that humans evolved, not to discern a singular reality, but to see reality in the way that best furthers our species--which means we don't actually see reality, we see the version that best suits us.  Link.

2. Sure, there's something to this.  We occasionally mistake an ambiguous smile for permission to speak, say, when the smile's ambiguity is based on discomfort at our presence.  If we were more perceptive, we might have noticed this.

3. But the clincher is that if we 'see' a poisonous snake as a stick laying in our path, our species is about to shut down that openness to self-made reality one more time.

Does Hoffman doubt this obvious hole in his argument?  Maybe I'm missing something.  It just seems to me that daily life teaches us to home in on objective reality.  That's why babies, for example, burn their fingers, fall down, and in general do a lot of crying.  And the ultimate experience for young people--especially boys--is to prove that they can handle life, including the adversity that inevitably surfaces.  "I'm going to live for a week in the wilderness!"

Of course one can make the case that 'objective reality' is sometimes seen in a utilitarian manner, rather than as a wonderfully interwoven whole.  For example, when settlers first encountered tall grass prairie, did they spend days marveling at the many grasses and flowers in their myriad shapes and colors?  Maybe a few took a minute to take in that wonder.  And I've read letters, one written by a 16-year-old girl in the 1830s, that lean towards a fuller appreciation.  But in general, the pioneers chose to see land as needing to be plowed, and prairie as a nuisance that should soon disappear.  This, though, I'd say, is quite different from evolution directing humans to view reality subjectively.

Update: 8/20.  Perhaps Hoffman's theory is meant as a description of how we create meaning ("...our tribe uses signs painted on rocks to communicate; this gives us an edge over our neighbors who don't.")  But that's a stretch.