SoM: Amnesia of Infancy

(Image Source: http://www.medicirc.org/images/infancy_off.gif )

Marvin Minsky in in the prologue of his book- The Society of Mind, describes common sense as an amnesia of infancy, which makes human beings forget the way they learned to do simple things such as putting blocks together to form a tower.







Its insanely hard to tell more than a I don't know, when confronted with the How of knowing certain things:

Q: How do you know that if you fall, you get hurt?
A: I fell for the first ever time in my life and I got hurt, so I know that.

Q. How do you know that?
A. I learnt it the first time

Q. How did you learn and how did you remember?
A. I don't know much except that I, like most sane living beings, including animals have something called a brain which tells me these amazing things, which I now would classify under common sense.

Not perhaps the best example to prove my point. But, the idea is that most things that we know today, as adult human beings converges to a point, where all seems to be common sense, the origin of which we don't know.

Perhaps, that is amnesia of infancy.