Touche’. Couple this awareness with those emotions mentioned above of pain, pleasure, worry, and various passions that at least appear to be unique to our species, along with fear and foreboding and anxiety, and the ability to find humor in it, and write poetry and music about it, and we may begin to close in on the things that most of us (I would hope) can begin to acknowledge are in the zone of the Common Denominator.
Is there some unifying term that says all this?
I would add: language. Not *a * language obviously, but language in and of itself. It seems to be pretty deeply hard wired inot us, to use language, usually speech, sometimes gestures, and in rare cases, written words (well it was rare, in only a few places has written language developed, of course it’s spead since then). We have the common concept of language, and grammer, this is why in 14whatever a European could meet an American “Indian” and they could learn to speak to each other; they had a basic concept in common.
They just get the problem twice as bad. 
I’d bet that every human has experienced religion on some level. Even the staunchest atheist has had a brush with mystical thoughts every now and then.
And every human who is not brain dead and who is over the age of 3 has experienced abstract thought.
That got to be another one, we’re the only animal that laughs. And I’ve alway thought it had everything to do with being the only one that knows it’s going to die.
Beautifully put!
I know music seems like something **everyone **experiences, but we can’t rule out all the people who are totally deaf. And there are also hearing people who don’t care about music.
And happiness? I’m sure there are many people in the world for whom happiness isn’t even an issue. Even historically, it became an issue only relatively recently.
I think the only answer is: the potential for abstract thought. I use the word “potential” so as not to rule out people who are asleep or in a coma, or babies. And as a consequence of this abstract thought, I would include knowledge of our own mortality.
To go along with worrying, I’ll add fear. It controls a lot of what we do and don’t do even if we are not conscious of it. FEAR!
Wait! I’ve got another one. The female orgasm!
Ok, now there are untold numbers of women lining up to say that is far from a common experience…
But what I mean is our experience of sex as something other than reproduction. Sex seems to play a number of roles in other animals but in humans it is distinctly divorced from reproduction. We’re the only mammals that don’t have an estrus cycle. And we have female orgasms. Sometimes…
That has to figure in there somewhere.
Be careful. You might offend any undead posters.
Here’s one-puberty?
And here’s a goofy one: Stubbing a toe? Heh. I only say that because I stubbed my toe today for what seems like the 500th time in my life and even though I seem to be taking more than my fair share of stubbed toes, I would bet everyone shares that particular happening. Then again, I guess there are some people who don’t have toes so I guess that’s out too.
bordelond hit the nail on the head right off the bat (as they say in the vernacular). The only thing that sets homo sapiens apart from other primates is the degree to which we are social. We alone of all other life forms on the planet earth build societies which not only endure but change on a timescale far greater than our individual lifespans. (The elephants and the bees and the ants and the other higher primates do have lasting societies, but they don’t change.) The foundation of this is that information is passed from one generation to the next, but with modifications (a social analog, if you will, of what happens to genetic information). This allows the society to actually evolve.
For starters, we all learn from out parents/legal guardians/caregivers how to behave in our respective societies - i.e. right from wrong and bad from good. Every society has such a behavioral dichotomy, and it’s called a “moral order.” In fact, it’s the one and only essential element every human society must have, or else the whole thing collapses on its ear, because if there weren’t right-from-wrong, there wouldn’t be anything to pass on to the next generation. :: pauses for breath :: Anyway. So learning our society’s moral order - the social norms - is your great Common Experience, Zeldar. Everything else is just a subset of that, like the posts about loss of loved ones: we all have to learn how to deal with death, and we are taught by others in society how to deal with it. Anyway, there’s loads more I could say about this, but I think I’ve made my point.
“It’s every parents dream to outlive his child”
-Homer Simpson
How about the common experience of dealing with the force of the earth’s gravity?
From birth everyone must learn to cope with it’s benefits (keeps you in place) and it’s drawbacks (hurts when you fall).
Until a human is born in space or on another planet, it is an experience we all share.