Talk:intuition

Link to ESP

Intuition is a word used quite often, but I wonder if it's many users consider the fact that by definition they're also including ideas of ESP, which the general scientific community does not accept. I hear scientists speak of "knowing intuitively" about something, but I would almost wager that the scientist would dismiss most cases of ESP as coincidence or otherwise explain away an event they do not understand using "rational thought."

It can't be had both ways. You can't believe in intuition, and then not believe in some form of ESP.Bimbamboom 14:07, 13 August 2007 (UTC)

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I don't know it I am not doing this right, but I couldn't find the instructions I needed about discussions. A book could be written about intuition and many have been, like M. Poisson's "On Intution". It is pretty complex. Apparently it has other definitions also. The following is my explanation of what I see and not a proof.

We push many automated processes into the subconscious and they may not be readily available. We push ideas there too, and sometimes can't remember them. Intuitions are ideas or thoughts. We wouldn't say that thoughts are ESP, though. Thoughts come to us all day long. I suppose a simple definition of an intuition is a thought we hadn't had before. Sometimes they seem reasonable and sometimes not. From what I can tell, Einstein was referring to those thoughts that don't seem reasonable when he said. "If an idea doesn't seem wrong at first, there is no hope for it."

Again, from my reading I find that we have a non verbal logic and vision logic, which is an unconscious processing. When a thought comes that we consider an intuition, we can than evaluated it. The it can stand on it's own or fall. Likewise emotions have a thought or thoughts that go with them. We can get to the thought to see what it is telling us or correct it, if it is unreasonable. In short feelings are subject to reason also, and not beyond evaluation.

When we change our thoughts about something, it changes our feelings about it. An obvious example is the anger we might have for someone. When we find it's a mistaken identity, our feelings change or if we find out that he is really a descent person. Any irrational thought, even subconscious, will make us feel uneasy. That is an intuition that is more or less physical, gut reactions and feelings. They announce that something is wrong and has to be looked at. It may be an actual illness, a problem that needs to be solved, that we pushed into the back of our minds, or a situation that needs changing.

Recognizing people is sometimes an unconscious process. My understanding is that recognizing an error in math is done unconsciously and then comes up into our consciousness. If there is no time delay, we may or may not call it intuition. If it is a deeper construct, that is one qualification for being a valid intuitive thought.

Intuition should have more definitions to fit different models, but science doesn't seem to doubt that non verbal logic and vision logic are powerful additional tools to conscious reasoning. Aristotle said that we are not thinking without intuition. I suppose he had a rational definition. Einstein said, "The only real valuable thing is intuition." His definition seems close to mine.

Here are some quotes that give a snippet on brain function and imagination, though it is mostly information showing intuition is used in literature and that it probably has other connotations and definitions.

"Intuition (philosophy), the act by which the mind perceives the agreement or disagreement of two ideas." http://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:intuition&action=edit&section=1

"Even if you use: Intuition (knowledge), understanding without apparent effort." ibid.

That says "without apparent effort." That's because it is a subconscious process, not that there is no effort. Somewhat similar is paradox or apparent contradiction. Even scientists and rational folk are using paradox to mean contradiction, put contradiction is another word. Many are using contra-intuitive, also, when we have a perfectly good word, irrational. Need I say that intuition does not mean irrational. The real problem and my question is, why do we have to many words that are cognitive dissonant. They use that in hypnosis. Common sense used to mean the sense ordinary people have and educated idiots don't have, although the educated can also have common sense. We have to remember that scientists are not necessarily linguist and mathematical analisis is only for math. In other fields they use similar techniques, but they are not the same as in math. Intuition is used to develop math as well as use math.

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1."Eliminativists such as Patricia and Paul Churchland argue that while folk psychology treats cognition as fundamentally sentence-like, the non-linguistic vector/matrix model of neural network theory or connectionism will prove to be a much more accurate account of how the brain works." Wiki on Eliminativism

2."Arturo Uslar-Pietri, in presenting his term for magical realism, always kept its definition open by means of a language more lyrical and evocative than strictly critical, as in this 1948 statement: "What came to dominate the story and to leave a lasting impression was the view of man as a mystery surrounded by realistic data."

3."If anything, BrainMeta seeks to awaken people to the fact that the full potential of consciousness has not yet been realized, and that in order to begin realizing it, we must potentiate our consciousness, and ultimately, transcend our human consciousness. This may be brought about in many different ways, and while spiritual insight is important for awakening one to the latent potential of consciousness, the most important way for fully realizing this potential will be through the use of science as a tool, or more specifically, through the adequate understanding of brain mechanisms and the manipulation and enhancement of the human brain and its functioning, in order to make it more than human."

4."It is inevitable that in the near future, neuroscience will unleash a veritable revolution in consciousness and its study, that will result in a paradigm shift orders of magnitude larger than any in science preceding it." http://brainmeta.com/

5."Gerd Gigerenzer argues that most decision theorists who have discussed bounded rationality have not really followed Simon's ideas about it. Rather, they have either considered how people's decisions might be made sub-optimal by the limitations of human rationality, or have constructed elaborate optimising models of how people might cope with their inability to optimize. Gigerenzer instead proposes to examine simple alternatives to a full rationality analysis as a mechanism for decision making, and he and his colleagues have shown that such simple heuristics frequently lead to better decisions than the theoretically optimal procedure." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounded_rationality

6."Isn't truth inherent in man?" I interjected. "You once told me that progress is made only by intuition, and not by the accumulation of knowledge." "It's not as simple as that," replied Einstein. "Knowledge is necessary, too. An intuitive child couldn't accomplish anything without some knowledge. There will come a point in everyone's life, however where only intuition can make the leap ahead, without ever knowing precisely how. One can never know why, but one must accept intuition as a fact." http://intuition-indepth.blogspot.com/2007/11/einsteins-intuition.html

7."Often you have to rely on intuition.” Bill Gates

8.“Intuition (is) perception via the unconscious” Carl Gustav Jung

9.“Intuition will tell the thinking mind where to look next.” Jonas Salk

10."Intuition becomes increasingly valuable in the new information society precisely because there is so much data.” John Naisbitt

His first book Megatrends sold more than 9 Million copies. He is one of only fourteen nonfiction authors who had has more than one book as #1 on The New York Times bestseller list since its beginning in 1946.

• Assistant Secretary of Education to President Kennedy
• Special Assistant to President Johnson
• Former visiting fellow at Harvard University, visiting professor at Moscow State

University.

• Current faculty member at the Nanjing University in China
• Distinguished International Fellow, Institute of Strategic and International

Studies (ISIS), Malaysia -- the first non-Asian to hold this appointment

• Recipient of 15 honorary doctorates in the humanities, technology and science

11.Jules Henri Poincare 1854 – 1912 French mathematician, theoretical physicist, and philosopher of science. Poincaré's famous lectures before the Société de Psychologie in Paris (published as Science and Hypothesis, The Value of Science, and Science and Method) were cited by Jacques Hadamard as the source for the idea that creativity and invention consist of two mental stages, first random combinations of possible solutions to a problem, followed by a critical evaluation.

12."An absolute can only be given in an intuition, while all the rest has to do with analysis." Henri Bergson Major French philosopher 1859 - 1941

13."A woman's guess is much more accurate than a man's certainty." Rudyard Kipling

14."All thought must, directly or indirectly, by way of certain characters, relate ultimately to intuitions, and therefore, with us, to sensibility, because in no other way can an object be given to us." Immanuel Kant

15."I would rather trust a woman's instinct than a man's reason." Stanley Baldwin 1867 – 1947 British Conservative politician, statesman

16."Logic sometimes makes monsters. For half a century we have seen a mass of bizarre functions which appear to be forced to resemble as little as possible honest functions which serve some purpose." -- Henri Poincare

17."Listen to your intuition. It will tell you everything you need to know." Anthony D Angelo Collegiate EmPowerment Company founder

18.“I feel there are two people inside me - me and my intuition. If I go against her, she'll screw me every time, and if I follow her, we get along quite nicely.” Kim Basinger

19.“You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you'll discover will be wonderful. What you'll discover is yourself.” Alan Alda

20.“You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. What you'll discover will be wonderful. What you'll discover is yourself.” Renee Descartes

21.“Imagination decides everything” Blaise Pascal

22."Intuition comes very close to clairvoyance; it appears to be the extrasensory perception of reality” Alexis Carrel 1873 – 1944) French surgeon, biologist and eugenicist

23."How often people speak of art and science as though they were two entirely different things, with no interconnection. An artist is emotional, they think, and uses only his intuition; he sees all at once and has no need of reason. A scientist is cold, they think, and uses only his reason; he argues carefully step by step, and needs no imagination. That is all wrong. The true artist is quite rational as well as imaginative and knows what he is doing; if he does not, his art suffers. The true scientist is quite imaginative as well as rational, and sometimes leaps to solutions where reason can follow only slowly; if he does not, his science suffers." — Isaac Asimov Fiction and non-fiction writer, biochemist

24."It is often held that scientific hypotheses are constructed, and are to be constructed, only after a detailed weighing of all possible evidence bearing on the matter, and that then and only then may one consider, and still only tentatively, any hypotheses. This traditional view however, is largely incorrect, for not only is it absurdly impossible of application, but it is contradicted by the history of the development of any scientific theory. What happens in practice is that by intuitive insight, or other inexplicable inspiration, the theorist decides that certain features seem to him more important than others and capable of explanation by certain hypotheses. Then basing his study on these hypotheses the attempt is made to deduce their consequences. The successful pioneer of theoretical science is he whose intuitions yield hypotheses on which satisfactory theories can be built, and conversely for the unsuccessful (as judged from a purely scientific standpoint)." Co-author with British astronomer, Raymond Arthur Lyttleton (1911-95). — Sir Fred Hoyle

25."My view of the matter, for what it is worth, is that there is no such thing as a logical method of having new ideas, or a logical reconstruction of this process. My view may be expressed by saying that every discovery contains an 'irrational element,' or 'a creative intuition,' in Bergson's sense. In a similar way Einstein speaks of the 'search for those highly universal laws ... from which a picture of the world can be obtained by pure deduction. There is no logical path.' he says, 'leading to these ... laws. They can only be reached by intuition, based upon something like an intellectual love (Einfühlung) of the objects of experience.' (1959)" — Karl Raimund Popper The Logic of Scientific Discovery: Logik Der Forschung (2002)

26."The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery. There comes a leap in consciousness, call it intuition or what you will, and the solution comes to you and you don’t know why or how." — Albert Einstein

27."When the logician has resolved each demonstration into a host of elementary operations, all of them correct, he will not yet be in possession of the whole reality, that indefinable something that constitutes the unity ... Now pure logic cannot give us this view of the whole; it is to intuition that we must look for it." — Henri Poincaré

28."Wisdom is a river that runs deep and slow. Inspiration and intuition are lightning flashes reflected on its surface." — Anonymous

29."In Barbara A. Robinson, Mind Bungee Jumping: Words of Life, Love, Inspiration, Encouragement and Motivation." (2008)

30."The human mind treats a new idea the way the body treats a strange protein; it rejects it." — Sir Peter B. Medawar

31."The [human] brain is the only organ in the known universe that seeks to understand itself." Richard Restak

32."The implications of brain plasticity for understanding our senses, our consciousness, and the essence of what it means to be human are nothing short of staggering." "The second theme is what I've come to think of as a negotiable reality. We are wrong. Our brains construct our reality, molding every input to what we expect, what we imagine, what we wish for. Our brains have minds of their own." Faith Hickman Byrnie

33."As you see, I do not treat the creation of fiction, that to say the invention and development of fantasies, as a form of abstract thought. I don't wish to deny the uses of the intellect, but sometimes one has the intuition that the intellect by itself will lead one nowhere." J. M. Coetzee (born 1940) is an author and academic from South Africa. He is now an Australian citizen and lives in South Australia. A novelist and literary critic as well as a translator, Coetzee has won the Booker Prize twice and was awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature.

34."I have trusted to my intuition to find the subjects, and I have written intuitively. I have an idea when I start, I have a shape; but I will fully understand what I have written only after some years." V. S. Naipaul

35."The way in which mathematicians and physicists and historians talk is quite different, and what a physicist means by physical intuition and what a mathematician means by beauty or elegance are things worth thinking about." Clifford Geertz (1926 – 2006) highly influential American anthropologist known mostly for his strong support for and influence on the practice of symbolic anthropology. He served until his death as professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey.

36."There is no logical way to the discovery of these elemental laws. There is only the way of intuition, which is helped by a feeling for the order lying behind the appearance." Albert Einstein

37."Thus, in a sense, mathematics has been most advanced by those who distinguished themselves by intuition rather than by rigorous proofs. Felix Klein http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_Klein

38."Einstein leaned forward, "… it is not a religion that teaches that man is made in the image of God—that is anthropomorphic. Man has infinite dimensions and finds God in his conscience. This religion has no dogma other than teaching man that the universe is rational and that its highest destiny is to ponder it and co-create with its laws. There are only two limiting factors: first, that what seems impenetrable to us is as important as what is cut and dried; and: second that our faculties are dull and can only comprehend wisdom and serene beauty in crude forms, but the heart of man through intuition leads us to greater understanding of ourselves and the universe." http://intuition-indepth.blogspot.com/2007/11/einsteins-intuition.html

39."[Mathematics] unceasingly calls forth the faculties of observation and comparison; one of its principal weapons is induction: it has frequent recourse to trial and verification; and it affords a boundless scope for the exercise of the highest efforts of imagination and invention." -- James Joseph Sylvester

40."The analysts try in vain to conceal the fact that they do not deduce: they combine, they compose ... when they do arrive at the truth they stumble over it after groping their way along." --- Evariste Galois