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Notes -
Intuition in a Scientific Age
As part of @FiveHourMarathon’s intuition contest, I thought I’d write a bit about the role of intuition in our lives, and especially the modern world.
First off, to define intuition I’ll go with Wikipedia’s first line: Intuition is the ability to acquire knowledge, without recourse to conscious reasoning. This definition to my mind includes things like instinct, but is much broader as well.
Depending on your side of the aisle in the Culture War, intuition is seen in many different lights. According to pop psychology, those who value hunches more are more likely to “hold religious or paranormal beliefs,” AKA be right-coded. On the other hand, many leftist artists believe that unconscious intelligence is a key component of good art. Either way, the main place intuition comes into conflict with our modern worldview is when it comes to science, as my fellow contestant @f3zinker has pointed out.
To truly understand why so many scientists nowadays disdain intuition, we must return to the roots of the Scientific Revolution. During the Enlightenment science flourished due to a shift from a symbolic view of the world, to a view which saw the universe as a piece of clockwork machinery. Before this change, the vast majority of our understanding of the world was rooted in intuition or gut feelings. If someone saw a crow after or before an event, that omen would be seriously interpreted by those in the community as having explanatory power. In the Roman Empire, augurs were some of the most handsomely paid and powerful officials. Caesar himself was Chief Pontifex for many years.
Science came in to change all that, and insisted that instead of relying on gut feelings and hunches, we needed to double check everything we see and experience through empiricism and repeatability.
Unfortunately this shift left intuition in an odd place. Nowadays the word conjures an image of crystal-energy healing ‘free thinkers’ that simply say ‘intuition’ when they want to reject whatever claims they don’t like, and put forth the claims they prefer.
However, I’d like to return to the definition I listed above: Intuition is all about acquiring knowledge without conscious reasoning.
For most of the pre-modern period until today, conscious reasoning was king. We saw how incredibly powerful our intellect, channeled through science and industry, could make us. We mastered forests, rivers, vast oceans, and are even making headways into the cold void of space. Yet something has slowly begun to creep into our faith in conscious reasoning.
Rationalists as a whole have banded together over this issue - that of unconscious biases. I’d posit that the true role of intuition as defined in this post is our intelligence or understand removed from conscious thought.
Clearly the evidence of bias itself is a powerful reason to be suspect of conscious thought. Yet even before the modern era, the idea that our conscious awareness is only a small part of who we are has been quite common. Hinduism, Taosim, even Judaeo-Christian religions posit that we have some essential essence or soul that guides us, irrespective of what we think is going on in our heads.
The task of reconciling the unconscious mind with conscious reasoning is one of the great projects of the modern era, and to my view one of the most critical. Political unrest, tribal activity, lack of scientific understanding, and all sorts of societal ills have their roots in our unconscious. Most people with anti-social or criminal tendencies don’t get there from proper reasoning, they act based on instinct, on the conclusions they come to in a snap of judgment.
We have attempted to directly reconcile modern science with intuition a number of times, most notably in the work of Freud, Jung, Lacan, and others. Unfortunately this type of study seems to bring out incredible amounts of backlash, and modern psychology has more or less written off the unconscious mind as something that is definitely important, but not able to be studied. Instead we simply work on it indirectly through imprecise drug treatments, and ineffective talk therapies.
Some pop psychologists like Daniel Kahneman have tried to describe the differences between ‘System 1’ type thinking and ‘System 2’ type thinking. The former being automatic, quick, and involuntary, whereas the latter would be more considered and conscious. However, these types of pop psychological analyses are consistently lacking in rigor, and seem more focused on selling books than actually providing satisfying answers to deep questions.
Many modern thinkers are attempting to bridge this gap, but there as of yet are no great thinkers after Lacan who have instituted a new paradigm to study.
The first step, one most Rationalists have already taken, is to accept that our conscious minds are not as infallible as we would like them to be. Unfortunately, as seen with the FTX fiasco, many in the Rationalist community seem to go full circle. They acknowledge that the conscious mind is fallible and prone to bias, then think that because they are aware of this they can ignore their intuitions and unconscious mind through the sheer power of ‘Bayesian’ reasoning. Social situations and finding bad actors like SBF are a key example of how trusting our gut and intuitions can provide a boon where the conscious mind may fail.
To truly reconcile intuition and gut feelings with the modern scientific paradigm, we need bold new theories. We need thinkers who are willing to branch out, brave social approbation, and work to find the common ground between religion, myth, science, and the unconscious mind.
Traditional religion yes, but "paranormal beliefs"? Its possible my understanding about what "right-coded" means is incorrect but I don't think any belief in the paranormal or supernatural outside of traditional religions is right coded.
This is quoted from the link, I haven’t checked the study’s methodology though.
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I think this doesn't appreciate how important intuition is.
Also you dismiss System 1 and 2 rather quickly. The important point of thinking slowly is not just that you arrive to more a "correct" conclusion, but that if you think slowly enough times, that thinking gets encoded into your System 1.
When you are driving your are not mindlessly making "involuntary" dumb decisions. Those decisions are based on all the slow thinking you did when you were being trained to drive.
Chess master players also make fast "involuntary" decisions, but these decisions are anything but dumb.
Consider how Einstein started his journey into general relativity. He explained his "happiest thought" of his life when he considered the equivalence of free falling to zero gravity and realized they must be the same phenomenon. How did he arrive to that thought? Intuition.
A toddler could not arrive to Einstein's happiest thought, only a physicist with thousands of hours of experience could, so his intuition wasn't dumb. The fact that this thought was "involuntary" doesn't make it any less valuable than considered, analytical, conscious, "voluntary" thoughts.
I believe most scientists have their most revolutionary insights in a similar way: they come "involuntarily" from "nowhere". The only thing special about Einstein's happiest thought is that he recognized it.
Most people don't introspect how they think, but any experienced mediator (mindfulness) knows that thoughts come from "nowhere", all of them. There's no such thing as "voluntary" thoughts. And it's no surprise that most mediators agree that free will cannot possibly exist, as do most neuroscientists, and philosophers (if you ask them about libertarian free will).
Therefore it stands to reason that this admiration we have for scientific "voluntary" analytical, conscious thinking, is just an illusion,
Strange, I thought I was giving intuition a fair shake.
See, I have practiced Buddhism for a while and I agree with this statement. That being said, conscious thought or rationality or whatever you want to call it is clearly real, and has effects on the world. Something can be an illusion and still change the way people act/behave.
The way I see rationality is essentially a shared fiction or mythos that groups of humans indulge in because it helps us coordinate very precisely on meanings, measurements, etc. If rationality didn’t matter at all and you fully bought into the idea of it being a pointless illusion, why even have this conversation?
I see the three things as different.
Consciousness: doesn't control anything
Analytical thinking: more thinking, takes more time
Rationality: structured rules for thinking
I'm not saying rationality doesn't matter (although I think it's overrated), I'm saying the idea that thoughts can be consciously generated is an illusion.
Consciousness exists, but all it does is observe. It doesn't control anything.
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just a nit pick, but Buddhism explicitly rejects this and that rejections forms the basis of the separation of Buddhism and other Hindu associated religions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatt%C4%81
True! I will edit that to be Hinduism instead. Buddhism I know rejects the ego and self as a false construct. There's probably a more interesting take on it from an intuition standpoint.
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While that is broadly true of Buddhism, there were historically Buddhist sects like the Pudgalavada who believed in something very much like a Western conception of a soul. From the linked article:
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