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 -
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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