roastfreesteel@yahoo.com wrote:

tadchem wrote:

Aristotle relied on intuition heavily when he claimed that heavier
objects fall faster than lighter ones, so we know that 'intuition' is a
fallible technique.
Tom Davidson
Richmond, VA

That's a very weak argument. But your point is clear and I can imagine
a better argument to make that point. However it still leaves open the
issue of why some people are vastly better at deciding which empirical
tests to make. It is not random and it does not depend on what current
science indicates is likely.

I think that the question of intuition is really a smaller part of a
much larger question -- the question of how conscious thoughts of all
kinds arise in our brains.

Some time ago (and I wish I remembered the details better than I do)
experiments were conducted which indicated that decisions were being
made in our brains a fraction of a second before we were aware that we
had actually made the decision.

That, in itself, is not odd. It simply means that conscious thoughts
arise as a result of pre-conscious (if one doesn't like the term
sub-conscious) mechanisms of which the so-called conscious mind is
unaware. Clearly, it cannot be directly aware of those mechanisms of
thought, any more than the eye is capable of seeing itself.

If we really review the thought processes of our daily lives, most of
the decisions that we make are not arrived at analytically -- through a
process of conscious analysis. We just seem to do things -- almost
without thinking.

But, of course, we clearly are thinking -- because all decisions that
we make are the result of thought.

It's just that the majority of the thinking is occuring
pre-consciously.

But we don't think of the majority of those day-to-day decisions as
somehow "intuitive."

We tend, if anything, to think of them as, perhaps, habitual -- which,
after all, tends to mean -- "done without thought" -- just as
"intuitive" means an idea that's arrived at without thought.

But in neither case, of course, is there really no thought. I can
strike your knee and you can kick with no thought involved. That's just
a reflex. But you can't drive your car from your home to your office
with no thought involved. You have to be able to see, to take in
information about other vehicles, about where your car is, about where
stop signs and stop lights are. It simply isn't possible to do that "by
reflex." It is a thing that requires thought.

And yet for people who drive to work every day, it's not uncommon to
get behind the wheel of the car and then, twenty minutes later, to
suddenly find yourself in front of your office -- your conscious mind
has drifted off -- thought about other things. But somehow or other,
some part of your brain has, in fact, been paying attention to the
road, the cars, the lights, and has driven you to work.

You remember Susan Smith, the woman who murdered her children? I
remember very vividly, when everybody still believed that they'd been
kidnapped, and there was a news conference and she was talking about
the abduction and I remember her saying as the presumed abductor drove
off with her kids in the car how she got up and yelled after her kids
in the car, "I love you!" -- instantly, it couldn't have been more than
a fraction of a second, I thought -- she's lying.

Now, thinking back, I might say, analytically, what it was about those
words that led me to that conclusion. But in that quarter of a second,
there wasn't time for any conscious analysis -- for me to say, to
myself, "That's not an appropriate behavior, an appropriate reaction
for a mother who's watching somebody driving off with her kids."

Clearly, there was some kind of evaluative process going on somewhere
in my head -- as I imagine, somewhere in our heads, we evaluate every
statement that we hear everybody say all the time -- and that process
reacted virtually instantly at those words and hit the buzzer.

Now -- was that intuition?

Who knows? As far as I'm concerned, it's simply just part of the way
that my mind, and every other mind works.

There are probably a lot of people -- detectives, for instance -- who
are a lot better at telling when people are lying than I am. Their
buzzers probably go off more often and more reliably than mine. And
others who listened to what she was saying and thought, "Oh, that poor
girl."

Our pre-conscious brains are still, ultimately, prone to the same
garbage in/garbage out limitations as our conscious brains are.

If you're an Einstein, the "intuitions" are likely to be of a pretty
high calibre. But as a writer (and I think that it's probably true of
anybody who depends on those kinds of "flashes" for their work) a lot
of time you get those brilliant ideas, and you think it's going to be
gold, and then after a few hours or a few days you realize that your
brilliant vein has sort of petered out -- that it wasn't so great after
all. Another dud.

It's always a two-pronged process. You get the brilliant flash -- great
idea. Then you actually have to see if it really works.

NMS