Tldr: Write an effortpost on the subject of human intuition by February 10th, we will pick the winner by poll, I will donate $200 dollars to a charity mutually agreed upon with the winner
I've been thinking a lot about the subject of intuition lately, due to some life events. What do we know without knowing we know it, what can we communicate without knowing we communicate it. When I'm thinking a lot about something what do I want to do? Read a bunch of Mottizens thinking about it too! So, on a whim while thinking about the fact that great works like the Oresteia, Frankenstein, and Rousseau's best work were the result of competitions; I've decided to launch my own little essay competition and see if anyone bites.
The basic rules are thus:
-- Write an effortpost on the topic of Intuition. Standalone or in the CW or side threads; only rule is effort. Intuition can be as broadly or as narrowly defined as you like. Effortpost we define informally, but I'd say it must be at minimum 2000-4000 characters that is substantially your own original work. No ripping off another post, of your own or someone else's. An original summary/condensation or retelling of someone else's thesis is fine. How will we be able to tell? I'm kinda counting on the crowd here, especially if we get a little competitive fire going. I wouldn't count on slipping anything by the peanut gallery here.
-- On February 12th, as long as we have at least three entries, I will publish a poll, and we will select a winner. If anyone has a suggestion for a better method of picking a winner, I'm open to it. I'm thinking a poll would be better than just raw upvotes, but I'm open to other possibilities.
-- Once a winner is selected, I will work with the winner to select a charity, and I will donate $200 to that charity. I say I will work with the winner, I'm not donating $200 to NAMBLA or Mermaids UK or the StormFront Charity Fund just because somebody wins a poll. I will do my best to be reasonable, but there are some lines I'm not gonna cross here, and IDK there might be legal issues in some countries. I will post some kind of digital receipt in all likelihood, unless it's something like give the $200 in cash into the collection bin at church or to a homeless man or something. I'm sure for most here, the bigger thing will be winning, and being acknowledged as the winner.
So why? The mood just sort of struck me. And how do you know it will really happen? You don't, except that I spend way too much time hanging around here so you can figure I'll probably stick to my word. And anyway, you'll get even more motte street cred for being the guy who got welched on than you would for being the guy who got $200 donated to mosquito nets or whatever.
I'm curious to see what a bit of direction and effort could bring out, or maybe we need chaos. We'll see if we get three.
Please bring up any questions, or rules I haven't considered.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Disclaimer: I didn't feel up to the task so abstain from the contest. This annotated quotedump is at most a sketch for future work.
My thesis is the opposite of @felipec's: all human thought is intuition, and attempts to distill rational thought from intuition serve at best some communicative role; at worst, they are delusions. In both cases, rationality – and conscious thought – is born out of pain of stubborn mismatch, and principally amounts to a rigid pattern on intuition's surface, a tool to communicate with oneself to channel the powers of the whole – either to reduce noise in the system or to suppress doubts, affirming preconceived errors. Don't believe anyone who claims to rely on conscious mind only: he who has tricked himself has only deceit to offer you too.
Logically – of course, per the above that's a somewhat hypocritical label – my assertion relies on the problem of reason being groundless. Truth is philosophically intractable. On the highest level of abstraction, we do not have a principled way of choosing a metaphysical paradigm, assuming the universal ontology or epistemology. If we commit to the maximally expansive sort of common sense that respects replicable observations of any kind – the first, and the gravest, concession to intuition – it seems we should prize mathematics and, perhaps, physics. Well, millenia into the game, we do not have watertight foundations of mathematics, and indeed have two good reasons to believe they are unattainable; by the same token we cannot have ironclad logic. It certainly doesn't feel this way, which is why people have tried to build a mechanistic, interpretable system for truth-determination, but from Ramon Llull's Art to Leibniz's Calculus ratiocinator to Cyc they have all flopped miserably.
If we concede once more, limit ourselves to truths of the observable world and well-tested heuristics like Occam's for divining them, in the limit (and why not go to the limit, considering prior paradigm shifts from gathering more fine-grained data?) they require infinities to resolve. On an even more applied level, philosophy of natural science has largely dispensed with the notion of provability in favor of falsifiability; and even that is being supplanted by degrees of uncertainty – and second-order, and N-th order (un)confidence intervals in a tangle of interdependent methods and concepts...
The point that I'm trying to make here is that by virtue of having no grounding, reason also has no bottom – when in doubt, you can dig deeper, ask more foundational questions, escalate your demand for rigor in an infinite regress, to arbitrary levels, even beyond the theoretical attainability of an answer. Or, in practice: you can deny conclusions and hold on to your preconceived notions so long as you are not politically coerced to stop.
Knowable truth, therefore, is a political matter, as my recent interlocutor @hbtz has so eloquently put it: «The truth exists with respect to a human intent».
One of the most interesting aspects of the aforementioned intent here is that it's an intent to stop asking questions – because intuition has provided you with answers that feel satisfactory. * The institution of science (see @TheDag's contribution) is a powerful system for collective precommitment to a legible standard of satisfaction, circularly defined by the «consensus» of people who seem to intuitively believe (i.e. have halted their skepticism) on issues of words meaning something, Occam's Razor, knowability of mathematical truths and metaphysics which allow empiricism. On certain well-trodden topics where such consensual coercion is no longer possible due to power dynamics, it is possible to perpetually filibuster with «no consensus reached», and the institution of science has ceased its operation. As with filibuster, conspicuous appeal to procedure only reveals the competitive infirmity of one's case, but it is motivated by a ferocious intuitive sense of being in the right.
On the matter of actually being correct (as one can be), I recommend reading Andre Borovik's Mathematics for makers and mathematics for users, which touches on Kahneman's System1/2 dichotomy in a more affable way:
Rich Sutton argues with regard to the bitter lesson of AI research that
In humans, those meta-methods are what intuition is made of. And regarding its opposite, @self_made_human describes current attempts at aligning AIs as
– well, human delusion of «thinking step by step» and such fits here too. Barring simple degenerate cases and deterministic toy algorithms, we do not know which eldritch algorithms have nominated the next step as self-evidently logical and fit for the office.
And that's okay. The procedure, in moderation, helps the shoggoth remember how to move.
* Terminating the regress of rational search has a therapeutic dimension too.
As a Russian PUA guru/grifter Denis Burhaev had inartfully claimed in his book «Another Chemistry», a well-formed human mind is a cyclic graph with inbuilt intuitive attractors:
I’d never heard of intuition in mathematics - that’s a fascinating perspective.
As I said to @felipec elsewhere, I wonder if rationality or conscious thought can be seen as a sort of overarching myth which we use to coordinate. Every human mind has its own tangled threads, and rationality is a sort of weave we use to impose order on them, similar to religion or social customs, just more defined.
I know the left often decries capitalism as a religion - but what if mathematics, physics, and economics really are a new iteration of these classic religious myths?
They bind people together, coordinate action at a large scale, loosely get people to share some moral valence (albeit worse morals than religion did imo). The main difference to my mind is that there is an inherent logical structure behind them.
Perhaps this logical structure prevents the sort of fervent, faith based belief that older religions engendered. Then again, maybe we simply need to wait until we can find the synthesis between the vehicles of religion and rational structures.
Intuitionism is a massive topic in mathematics that I will not be able to do justice to – I suggest you check out Intuition/Proof/Certainty section in Reuben Hersh's «What is mathematics» that Borovik references, and Hardy on Ramanujan (@FiveHourMarathon you too could look intot that) and Grothendieck's «Reaping and sowing». But that's only scratching the surface.
Mathematics is obviously (I suppose) the pinnacle of rigorous human analytical reasoning, yet it's also where we most clearly see the raw dominance of intuitive, illegible thought. We still cannot formalize insight, because it comes from intuition that precedes all our formalisms, from the darkness that comes before.
Voevodsky, in a typically Russian Messianic attempt, strived to close the domain, and died trying.
A useful thought. It reminds me: there's a theory that our self-consciousness is just an encoding procedure for building efficient and densely connected episodic memory that enables adaptive behavior (that still arises not from narratives but from statistical inferences that narratives we tell about ourselves merely give form to). Yours is a model for the societal level.
Well they do provide a consensus reality, and pretty clearly a more accurate and adaptive one. (Not so much consensus morality). The question is whether the common «atheist, rational, empiricist» worldview is substantially informed by mathematics etc. as such, as opposed to journalistic and educationist narratives weaponising their prestige. See pic.
/images/16763397190461392.webp
Ahh a fellow Bakker fan eh?
And again fascinating points here. I’m not sure I grasp the theory about densely connected episodic memory, but it sure does sound smart.
In terms of your image, I’d say that science started off more in tune with object level reality/mathematics, and has been bastardized after we destroyed the elite class. It’s like a religion that has thrown open the gates to its priesthood.
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I see the same fervent faith-based beliefs among self-described rationalists. The only difference is that it's harder to prove them wrong, precisely because more often than not the beliefs are correct.
It's a sort of hot-hand fallacy: if rationality has gotten these 99 things right, what are the chances than the next is going to be wrong? Has to be zero. Right?
Of course, most people are not going to agree, because most people don't see anything wrong with the prevalent orthodoxy of their time.
But logic itself is not set in stone, there's many. See One Right Logic. If you based your entire epistemology on "logic", but turns out many beliefs rest on a feature that other logics don't share, well... You may very well be believing false things that are impossible to prove in your logic.
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I don't see how that is opposite. I believe the conscious mind has no control whatsoever, the next step is decided by the subconscious mind, an almost infinitely complex process the conscious mind has no access to (and evolutionarily had no need to). So whatever the conscious mind thinks it's deciding is an illusion.
In my view the question is not consciousness vs. unconsciousness, it's intuition vs. analytical thinking.
Analytical thinking is thinking slow (System 2), intuition is fast thinking (System 1). However, the one deciding to switch gears to analytical thinking is also the subconscious mind, which uses prior training to make that decision, so it's using intuition to decide to not rely on intuition. And at which point will the subconscious decide to stop engaging in analytical thinking? Intuition will be used to decide that a satisfactory answer was reached as well.
So yes, all human thought is ultimately intuition, but analytical thinking is the special case in which the agent does a deeper search which is more computationally intensive and thus appear "slower" to us. Usually this deeper search is forced by a hint that the initial "automatic" response might not be correct.
But the important point is that all thinking builds up intuition, and this is not a view generally accepted. Many people deride intuition as if the conclusions reached by it were not as valuable as those reached by analytical thinking. I think that's the important starting point for discussion.
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