I was arguing about intuition with a friend of mine. She was arguing that intuition was a sense - it gave you access to information that your normal 7 (or whatever the number is, I can never remember what the senses past the basic 5 are) didn’t. I was arguing that it was a subconscious reasoning process which didn’t neccesarily work by conventional logic.
Naturally, neither of us had cites because that would require effort, which is more than a casual IM argument warrants.
However, I thought it was an interesting subject and would make a good GD. Hence this post.
So, what is intuition? Is there a generally accepted theory on it?
(This may not be the right forum for it, but it feels like a GD)
All the information that our sense receive is encoded in our brain and is accessible by our mind from the very moment we are born and perhaps even before.
Because our senses are designed to detect differences in the stimuli that they receive (this is why when you are trapped somewhere smelly after a while you cant smell it any more) sometimes data is defined as being irrelevant and filed away.
But our subconscious keeps track of this data and, like the rest of the brain, searches for patterns in it. When a pattern is found we develope an intuition: a feeling about a certain issue that does not seem to have a basis in fact but that nevertheless feels accurate to us.
This subconscious pattern recognition ability is used when we sleep. This is why memory experts (like Kevin Trudea) suggest that you literally ‘sleep on’ complex issues.
A practical example of this when someone is sneaking up on us real quiet like and we get a feelling that they are there. What prolly happens is that sounds that the person makes are encoded by our conscious mind as irrelevant or otherwise we are simply distracted. Our unconscious mind, which has more time to work on the problem, recognises that the noises fit the pattern for someone sneaking up on us. So we get a feeling that they are there.
That correlates very closely with what I believe. I’m not convinced that we remember everything, even on an unconscious level, but other than that we’re basically in agreement. You just expressed it better than I did.
(I’m not entirely sure what I was thinking when I wrote ‘does not neccesarily work by conventional logic’. That happens to me occasionally.)
Someone wrote a book about that, “the user illusion” by Tor Norretranders.
The brain takes in about 8,000,000 pieces of info a second, but only gives about 7 pieces to the consciousness. Those 8 million are filtered, and given to the consciousness as insight or intuition based on extremely subliminal info or past experience (i think that is what he said, i read it a few years ago).
People assemble unconfirmed information in unreliable ways, correlate that information illogically, make decisions based on those correlations using inconsistent methods, and produce pragmatically useful new knowledge. This process is called intuition, by those with verbal skills. Those less skilled in rhetoric refer to it as dumb luck. It is the primary source of human progress.
Then what makes you call it ‘a process’? Is this just metaphorical?
I consider intuition to be another term for inductive reasoning, and the problems which face induction (that is, formulating it symbolically) similarly would face intuition. However, while ‘normal’ inductive ‘reasoning’ allows us to explain, perhaps, why we feel that such-and-such is the case, intuition would stem from free-floating feelings of certainty.
If I have induced something, I have a definite (that is, I can tell you) experience set that I worked with. If I intuit something, I get the same accompanying feeling of certainty, yet find no experience set to offer up. The case is complicated by repeatedly and deliberatly relying on intuitive feelings for actions and finding those predictions [more or less] successful. Thus, like MrAndrewV, we might consider that we have some underlying method of induction that is going on (subconsciously, as the case may be). Of course, the proof for this would entail inductive reasoning over the experience set just mentioned (‘testing’ our intuition). But this is affirming the consequent deductively; it could also be that we are simply inclined to forget the times we intuited incorrectly (and thus would also cause a positive indication of ‘intuition’). So I don’t care to speculate on what ‘actually’ happens.
To Muppeteer: ‘Feminine intuition’ is just like the other kind. Or rather it is a subset of one’s intuition. The only difference is that girls and women are socialised into being more in touch with the emotions of themselves and others.
In other words women have a better intuition for a person’s feelings because they are making more of an effort to notice how someone is feeling and thus their minds classify information that relates to a person’s emotions as important where are an unemotional male ( in the same situation will subconsciously write the info off as irrelevant as thus never notice it.
Guys: This is why when your girlfriend tells you that she is ‘just fine’ you assume she is telling the truth and she gets pissed off because she thinks it should be obvious from her body language that she is actually hurt, depressed, feeling fat or whatever.
in the same situation will subconsciously write the info off as irrelevant as thus never notice it.