Intuition is a “superpower”
thepulse.one
thepulse.one
Intuition is analytic reasoning (and inductive as well) on steroids, but also done subconsciously, that's why it seems mysterious for some. A simple example is the moment of every episode of House M.D. when the actual answer comes: it's not magic, it's the brain continually re-examining information (analytic) and building models (mostly inductive) in the background.
Also, that site is two articles away from claiming the Earth is actually flat.
> A simple example is the moment of every episode of House M.D.
House M.D. was based on Sherlock Holmes, who uses inductive, rather than deductive reasoning. e.g. conclusions are not based on analytic reasoning of all the facts, but rather are supplanted by leaps of imagination, which made the series so compelling.
Intuition is inductive reasoning. Because it's not solely analytic, it can also result in answers that are also completely wrong.
Allow me to rephrase with more detail then: intuition is a mix of strong analytic and strong inductive reasoning running non-stop in the background of consciousness.
Sherlock Holmes used abductive reasoning.
Deduction: cause + deductive rule -> effect
Induction: (cause + effect) x many times -> deductive rule
Abduction: effect + deductive rule -> possible causes
A neat thing about reasoning is that we tend to use all three, too. Abduction → Deduction → Induction ... in cycles.
More on topic with the OP: to me, intuition is what happens when we skip through these steps. It's the heuristics we use to make good decisions when we don't have the time to "abduce" possibilities, "deduce" the likely answer(s), and "induce" the evidence of our deductions.
Seems like OP has fallen into that trap.
For whatever it's worth, I don't think Inspector Lestrade would appreciate the difference, so Holmes needn't bother either.
This is how I feel things are, that I have an analytic task that I'm not directly conscious of, but I worry about whether it's normal or if people are trying to convince me it's not when it is. Isn't there a pervasive narrative that rational thinking is conscious and the subconscious is irrational and emotional?
I tend to feel like emotions are in the foreground and clouding my ability to listen to the analytic part of my brain which is not directly accessible but most likely chugging along on something.
Often when I'm listening to something, like in a video call at work, my conscious mind just glazes over or is occupied with irrelevant things, but when it's time for me to talk, it's as if an assistant suddenly handed me some talking points that were prepared.
He admittedly leans on anecdote more than large studies but it all seems very plausible to me. When your conscious brain tells you everything is fine, but your intuition tells you something is wrong, you should "listen to your gut" because it (your subconscious) has likely picked up on as signal your conscious mind ignored.
Everyone from sales/marketers to con-men to actual predators knows how to manipulate the signals that the conscious brain focuses on, but it's much more difficult to trick the unconscious with social signals.
I am not an expert in the field so take with a grain of salt, but it seems to match up with my experience that "trusting your gut" when you meet a new person and get a "bad vibe" is generally good advice.
So your "I've got a bad feeling about this" intuition might be because your subconscious picked up on somebody's suspicious behavior, or maybe it's just because you're in a different cultural environment than you usually occupy.
There are multiple examples in that book of ways in which a predator will tailor their behavior in ways to make the victim feel social pressure to act in ways that would facilitate harm to the victim. eg. tailgating someone through a secure door by making them feel rude for not holding the door for you.
At the same time, some of the most valuable life experiences come from pushing yourself outside your comfort zone. I'm not sure what the solution is. Maybe the advice is better expressed as "learn to listen to your intuition" rather than "always follow your intuition"?
My Pocket Oxford Dictionary --which requires a rather large pocket-- defines "intuition: immediate apprehension by the mind without reasoning". If we don't believe in miracles, we seem to have only two possibilities: either the reasoning required is so short and standard that it is hardly worth being recorded or mentioned, or the "immediate apprehension" does not amount to much. In the first case "intuitively clear" means "obvious", in the second case it probably means no more than the absence of obvious counterexamples. In both cases, mathematical texts "recommended" for their appeal to the reader's intuition should be ignored, for such texts promote non-reasoning instead of better reasoning.
Despite the above, there are still people that believe that intuition is a good thing; there is no point in arguing with them for they prefer to believe in miracles.
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Source: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/E...
They say "trust your gut" for a reason. Your gut acts almost as a second brain like the article mentions. Without going into too many details, it is a good basis of intuition because of the feelings that emerge from it whether right or wrong in the future, but best in the present moment.
Your gut is your wisdom. It's your "gut reaction" to something that goes deeper than our conscious minds can go in a split second with many traits like past experience, sympathy/empathy, and even predictive ability. It would make sense that intuition is seen as a sixth-sense because of it.
It would be cool to understand how to improve our intuition. Perhaps it is... why people who are more careful with their food choices, engage in regular exercise, stay hydrated, and constant capture of knowledge may have stronger intuition than others. Or perhaps it is the very nature of individuals who can accept the reality of the world better than others for a more plausible outcome. Which of course is much different than skepticism as it would be more stoicism at that point.
My gut is definitely planning something suspicious on its own.
You can talk about it as some sort of magic choice maker all you want but it's not wisdom, it's automatic responses controlled by your unconscious mind.
What you're really talking about here is the subconscious making changes to your body, and those changes being sent out and reported back via the vagus nerve.
You can train that unconscious mind, but it's the same old lazy system one that operates 95% of your mortal existence: It's not literally your gut, that's just how you're experiencing it.
If knowledge is your brain...wisdom might be your gut. This isn't the first nor last time I've seen similar claims. Here's even a recent study on this:
> “We found that lower levels of loneliness and higher levels of wisdom, compassion, social support and engagement were associated with greater phylogenetic richness and diversity of the gut microbiome,” said first author Tanya T. Nguyen, PhD, assistant professor of psychiatry at UC San Diego School of Medicine.
> The authors said that the mechanisms that may link loneliness, compassion and wisdom with gut microbial diversity are not known, but observed that reduced microbial diversity typically represents worse physical and mental health, and is associated with a variety of diseases, including obesity, inflammatory bowel disease and major depressive disorder.
https://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/pressrelease/wisdom-loneliness-and...
I'm not flipping between the two. I truly believe that your gut & the old idioms behind it have actual scientific evidence towards intuition.
If you are aware of studies please post them, otherwise we can't claim it has "actual scientific evidence" if there aren't any literal studies
>The present study aimed to investigate the association of loneliness and wisdom with the gut microbiome
There are 2 definitions on intuitions that I see out there in the wild, one is wrong, one has merit.
1. The good intuition is what k by Malcolm Gladwell describes in his book "Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking" and it's based on true, proven expertise.
2. The bad one is often the product of anxious behavior, where someone comes up with hundreds of possible scenarios prior to the fact, and then, post-mortem, when the IRL outcome matches one of those hundreds scenarios there's the "I knew it" moment.
Hipotesis and assertions have an element of Intuition, but they are worthless without any action; and plain stupid if the actions are now hedged/diversified.
The second one I think is more like thinking or imagining or scenarioizing and like you identify I think that can be an expression of anxiety... But it can also be what people do deliberately in brainstorming or policy planning sessions to come up with all the possible kind scenarios they might face.
The psychic of precognitive intuition is similar to your definition 1 in the you're basing interpretations on sort of accumulated experiences, so the thinking without thinking the learned procedural memory, subconscious associative.. but it's important to make the distinction that those interpretive functions are distinct from the sensory functions: where the data is actually coming from. You're not generating the data from your subconscious experience you're sensing the data that is coming ostensibly from outside of you (I don't really understand how that part works but I have some theories) and then you are using your interpretive apparatus that includes the things which you list into your definition 1 to aid you in interpreting that data into some usable form.
it's understandable if you've never heard of that to wonder what it is. But it's not understandable nor smart to assume it's bogus if you don't know what it is. You should try it and it's really quite simple
It's this:
https://thepulse.one/assets/uploads/2021/06/InnerBalanceCohe...
It's the emergence of more coherent patterns in the wave measurements of your heart's activity. You can apply the same concept to your brain so with a EEG you can see all those little different seismic looking channels and you can achieve some more coherence in that. Less entropic patterns more regularity more of the channels beating in sync with each other. That's one way to talk about more coherence. And you will physically and subjectively experience the difference. So please don't talk about something you don't know if it's focus. You just have to learn what it is. You don't want to discourage other people from knowing it. It's not bogus at all only those red flags that were getting in your way of knowing what that reality is are bogus.
Anyway, if you are engineer or EE or signals person and in any way into sort of self-tracking I could really imagine you getting into this in a big way and becoming sort of an advocate for it. You can even order your own ECG EEG machine for cheap on the internet so you can sort of practice to get yourself into coherence. In order to get yourself into coherence there's a number of different exercise you can do and you can find them by searching online. And the benefits of being in coherence are sort of like meditation but it's also sort of different.
I've done it a few times and I intend to do it more. I should it's really good. I don't have a machine but you can still practice the exercises and sense the difference. I should do it more. I encourage you to try as well
EDIT: in my view, the most rigorous examination and definition of intuition comes from Rosmini, and overlaps with that of Polanyi, but the latter is much easier.
Polanyi is easy. He wrote a trio of short, accessible, and engaging books outlining his ideas: Science, Faith, and Society (1946), Personal Knowledge (1958), and The Tacit Dimension (1966). He was a true polymath, and very up-to-date with psychological science of his day; I would be interested in your thoughts as a specialist.
Rosmini is hard. He was a very bad writer, and wrote very long books, all of them referring to each other, which caused him a lot of difficulties[0]. His magnum opus is Theosophy, and all of his works will eventually lead there. My first book of his was Principles of Ethics, which convinced me of the value of his work, and I’m still trying to untangle the others. If I had to summarize his idea of intuition, it would be “analogical participation of the subject in the objective order of being.” Also crucial is that this capacity is innate.
[0] You can read his biography, he was extremely controversial in his time. His work was (exhaustively) consistent with the ancient and medieval philosophy of the Church, but was absolutely devastating for a certain kind of neo-scholasticism which was the dominant mode of exposition in the Church at the time. This led those theologians to accuse him of liberalism, modernism, secularism, Deism, freemasonry, etc., and all of those groups were happy to claim that the most ambitious corpus of philosophy and theology that the Church had produced in the modern era was an endorsement of their views. Since his work is so difficult, it took a very long time for anyone to recognize that neither of these interpretations were true.
For example, a liver is defined by a particular process of filtering blood, moreso than by its material components. That's why we can talk about artificial livers (or other organs) as still being a liver even if it is made from completely different material components than a natural liver.
this 'superpower' idea is as stupid as saying that 'freedom' and 'personal choice' can make you immune to virus.
I'm not sure we mean construct in the same way but for me intuition is a construct in the sense that you interpret the data.
That's the same as saying visual data from your eyes your brain is interpreting that and you're constructing which is the sense in which it's a construct... You're constructing a picture of the reality of the visual landscape around you based on that sense data.
For me intuition is another sense (a sixth or extra sense like they say in this article) and and when I'm operating or experiencing the sense I am interpreting the sense data. One thing which makes it different to other senses is that in other senses the interpretation happens almost seamlessly and imperceptibly. Except when you do things like maybe optical illusions or other things which reveal the nature of the you interpretive perceptual apparatus or whatever you want to call it.
When I use my power then it's very clear that I am getting data and interpreting...it is almost two separate processes.
The issue is that my subconscious mind is so quick to recognizing patterns in the environment/current situation and previous experiences that my conscious mind struggle to keep up.
I had an issue today, where a co-worker had made a mistake, which happens, but now we have an angry customer. Almost right away I know what the problem is, but it takes me 45 minutes to actually dig into the problem, only to confirm that I'm right. If you're debugging in the middle of the night, having a mind that can tell you exactly where to look, even if it doesn't know why, is magnificent. When people want answers to "Why?", it's less helpful.
I have a theory that these feelings are more tied to the primitive parts of our brains/bodies. Especially if something causes danger/stress/exertion. I liken it to a hunter going through a jungle and they experience a dangerous/stressful experience, the brain puts a bookmark for all of the environmental stimuli that are present at that time/place. So when the same stimuli are experienced again the quick, primitive part can say "something isn't right, no time to explain!"
Intelligence is a precisely defined thing that you can't just attach new dimensions to.
On top, a key feature of higher reasoning is mid- to long term prediction. It does not seem clear to me how intuition would help in planning behavior beyond the current situation.
I mean everyone is always arguing about what intelligence is or even means, especially on here, so I find this a very strange thing for you say.
That's not an easy task.
Which don't agree on a single definition. See for example:
My argument is: There are established dimensions of intelligence. There are arbitrarily many potential new dimensions. Coming up with anything and calling it intelligence is not hard and not automatically helpful.
The hard part is coming up with something new that makes sense in the context of all the existing findings.
1. Crystallized intelligence - stuff you have memorized. This breaks down further with memorized vs experienced, with the latter leading to "wisdom", which really breaks down to how Asimov broke down knowledge - not only knowing the thing, but knowing how you know the thing is true. Because I am dumb, I can't think of a single good example. But it would be something like "We know an object in motion stays in motion because {PERSON} did an {EXPERIMENT} and {PERSON} is credible and you can replicate the {EXPERIMENT} like so". That's "true" knowledge.
2. Fluid intelligence - working memory. The number of things you can keep in your mind at the same time. Declines with age, or maybe disuse, we don't really know.
IQ tests are out there. Working memory are out there too in terms of how they affect/correlate with life outcomes and/or IQ. I am obsessed with this topic, but I find nothing concrete past "sleep enough, exercise, learn things, some things, maybe music, maybe lang, we don't know."
Also there should be a type of intelligence - conceives abstract ideas that are not just composed of things they have learned.
There has been research, though, suggesting that when it comes to certain kinds of decision making, involving complex scenarios with lots of uncertainty, decisions made on intuition often are associated with greater satisfaction later.
So I think there's something to it.
The other tricky thing is that this is relatively difficult to study from a cognitive perspective. By its nature it's pretty vague but it also involves things that are difficult to capture in a lab. Creativity is sort of like this as well -- everyone has some sense that there's a thing such as creativity or generativity but studying it turns out to be difficult because it's hard to measure.
My personal difficulty with intuitive decision-making is that because by definition almost it involves subconscious factors, it's difficult to know what to make of it, or when it is good versus bad.
For example, you'll find a lot of articles here on HN and elsewhere about being rational in your decision making, and not letting emotions guide you. So is that "overriding intuition"? On the other hand, I think part of why intuitive decision making can be helpful sometimes is that sometimes there are factors that are difficult for you to fully appreciate the weight of, and your "rational" processes might not entirely grasp the significance of them. So you might later on look back and think "oh yeah that was way worse than I thought at the time; it's no wonder I wanted to avoid it so badly." But how do you know which scenario is which?