Intuition

[granpa]

There is nothing magical about intuition. Intuition is simply the brain using inductive reasoning and massive parallel processing to determine the reasonableness (plausibility) of certain possibilities. You suspend your disbelief long enough to get a "feel" for how well the idea "fits" with everything else you know. Does it conflict with other things you know? Does it require that you make many other assumptions? Or would it, in fact, explain things that would otherwise be unexplained?

Intuition can't tell you whether a given idea is true or not, but if used properly, it does tell you whether that idea is reasonable or not. Occam's razor states that the most reasonable possibility tends to be the correct one.

It really is as they say: "you see what you want to see". And if you truly want to see what the facts say when they are allowed to speak for themselves then you will indeed see that too.

For some people, however, intuition is simply a cudgel to bash people over the head with to force them to believe what they believe. These people are not using intuition properly.

 

[davidivad]

i think that often people give up intuition for the grounding that logic has.

if i had an apple for every intuition i had that was wrong, i would have a bunch of bananas instead.

logically it makes no sense, but intuition says otherwise.

[granpa]

inductive reasoning is a valid form of logic.

You just have to be careful to maintain proper objectivity

[davidivad]

i am glad to hear someone say that.

it needs to be said.

we cannot simply drop our higher functioning in favor of 1+1=2 for every instance.

but the key therein lies objectivity.

the true foundation of science.

[granpa]

you seem completely convinced that intuition is somehow inherently irrational.

That is the opposite of the point that I am making.

If it is used properly and interpreted correctly intuition is entirely rational

Edited April 4, 2014 by granpa

[davidivad]

no

but you can hide rationality inside of an irrational statement.

i use this tactic quite often to communicate my ideas above the burning smell of rubber and grinding gears of a person not able to use intuition.

fact;

it is easy to add

it is hard to be objective.

[granpa]

whats irrational about inductive reasoning?

Edited April 4, 2014 by granpa

[davidivad]

to be more debatable, inductive reasoning can be misleading.

it must be tested and proven to be considered valid.

[granpa]

Ivtuition can't tell you whether a given idea is true or not, but if used properly, it does tell you whether that idea is reasonable or not.

 

how is "given the information I have available this is a reasonable possibility" not valid

Edited April 4, 2014 by granpa

[davidivad]

well,

the big bang is a reasonable possibility.

evolution is also a reasonable possibility.

big foot is a reasonable possibility too.

however, only the first two have the acceptance of the scientific community.

what is reasonable to me may not be reasonable to you, therefore a consensus must be reached.

is it reasonable to everyone?

[granpa]

so for you science is about reaching consensus.

I always thought science was about logic and reason

[davidivad]

science is a tool we use to measure the world we live in.

it can do no more than this.

it is up to us what it means.

we are the masters and it is the tool.

it can do no more work than we expend.

 

there is always another view that does the same thing.

Edited April 4, 2014 by davidivad

[Cosmobrain]

Intuition is like a brain fart

[davidivad]

yep, and it can get messy depending on what you have been consuming.

according to statistics.

[CharonY]

Intuition is not based on reasoning but very prominently on pattern recognition. It is much faster than deductive or inductive reasoning. Typical examples are, say, a mechanic that realizes that a passing car is defective before he/she realizes that it is because the motor has a weird rhythm. Or a chessmaster that knows at a glance who is going to lose, though it takes more time to reconstruct why it is the case.

In these examples the persons are experts on their fields and have accumulated sufficient knowledge that they can match new situations with patterns that they experienced and associated with certain outcome (e.g. defective motor).

 

In these situations intuition can be very powerful to make accurate and, more importantly, quick responses. However, once we step outside our zone of knowledge, intuition still kicks in but the decisions can be quite irrational, without you realizing. For example, if you have to choose between cars and have no idea what their specs mean, you may choose the blue one, just because blue happens to be your favorite color.

We are also great in post-hoc rationalizing and making things up. In the same example you may at some point learn that the specs of the chosen blue car are actually effectively inferior to the other one. But then you rationalize it by claiming that the intangible factors (e.g. handling and so on) are much better and that your choice was solid and rational. All the while not realizing that your initial impulse was just to get the blue one.

 

Statistical choices are another example in which intuition usually fails. For example, rationally one should take bets once you get a better than 50% chances, as in the end you are likely to come out on top. However, humans dislike taking losses and hence the average bet people take is much higher, which is also irrational. Daniel Kahneman has published quite a bit on decision making and the follies of intuition.

 

At least in situation outside your expertise. And then there are things like selective memory which make you think that you made great (intuitive) choices (by forgetting the times where you screwed up) so that you try to apply intuition in situations where it really does not lead to good choices...

Edited April 8, 2014 by CharonY

[granpa]

pattern recognition is inductive reasoning

[CharonY]

Nope, just blind stupid association without providing evidence of conclusion. For the reasoning step you have to slow down and take apart the bits. Intuition would say take the left car, without you knowing why.

You could inductively conclude that the left car is faster because it looks like a sports car and that is what you want.

Truth could be that you just like the color of the car.

[granpa]

that would be an example of not maintaining proper objectivity when using intuition.

you see what you want to see and if you truly want to see what the facts say when they are allowed to speak for themselves then you will indeed see that too.

 

even with proper objectively intuition cant tell you whether something is true or not. It can only tell you whether it is a reasonable possibility

Edited April 8, 2014 by granpa

[CharonY]

Intuition does not give you time to distance yourself from the decision-making process. That is basically the definition of it. Once you start picking apart the facts, you do not use intuition anymore.

[granpa]

not sure what you are saying. I can spend hours using intuition to study a situation

 

Edit:

Sounds like your decision making process revolves around time.

Maybe your decision making process should revolve around making the best decision.

Just saying

Edited April 9, 2014 by granpa

[davidivad]

imagine the intuition of not buying the blue car and having to live with that horrid beige beast you mistreat because of the color.

what is truly the right color for you?

[SamBridge]

What it seems like is:

Intuition gives you a weighted idea of reasonable possibilities based on patterns you know.

Objective logic narrow's down the pool of possibilities you chose from to only a few, sometimes one, as fitting the patterns you observed. That is why although a mechanic would hear something wrong with a motor intuitively, they wouldn't know exactly what was wrong with it until they had a look and reasoned through what part is missing or damaged and how it affected the rest of the motor.

If it helps david, he can think of intuition as the "hypothesis" when starting a scientific experiment since you can't point science in any useful direction without already having some already established notion of what you should be testing in the first place.

Though, it would still not be logical to equate logic with reality, which, is why not every logical idea turns out to be true.

Edited April 9, 2014 by SamBridge

[Le Repteux]

Hi everybody,

 

I think that intuitions are the result of our mind being able to speculate, to take chances, in case a new idea would work better than the old one. Of course, such a liberty of action must be restricted so that we do not hurt ourselves, and this is probably why we usually choose ideas that are not too different from the old ones, and why we apply them progressively, but what kind of mind mechanism allows us to speculate with our ideas? Do we have a chance game going on in our brain? And if it is so, where is it located?

Edited June 17, 2014 by Le Repteux

[Bill Angel]

One problem with basing decisions on intuition is that scientists have determined that a bias towards optimism is hard wired into our brains.

An short explaination of this concept can be found here http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2074067,00.html

 

A review of an excellent book on this subject can be found here: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/jan/01/tali-sharot-the-optimism-bias-extract

 

I expect that the bias towards optimism is why people buy lottery tickets. Their intuition leads them to believe that they have a better chance of winning than would be indicated by the mathematical odds for picking the right number.

[Le Repteux]

One problem with basing decisions on intuition is that scientists have determined that a bias towards optimism is hard wired into our brains.

Of course we need to be optimistic when we take a chance, this is why the word "good" always appears before the word "intuition", but I am interested in the way the brain produces chance, and in the usefulness of such a process in our minds.

 

I expect that the bias towards optimism is why people buy lottery tickets. Their intuition leads them to believe that they have a better chance of winning than would be indicated by the mathematical odds for picking the right number.

When we look at the future, even if it is a speculative moove in itself, if we take a decision, it is always when we hope that it will work, never when we beleive that it will not. Any decision regarding the future has to be optimistic, otherwise we would never moove, isn't it?