There are at least two different ways of defining Intuition. 1> Philosophically, it's essentially the same thing as ordinary Inference : deductive reasoning from general to particular, or induction from particular to general. 2> Popularly, the resulting instantaneous flash of insight (awareness) is thought to come from a source outside the person doing the thinking, primarily because little conscious effort was expended in cranking-out the answer.
Many religious people interpret some of their vague feelings and forebodings as supernatural communications from God, or from the dead, or from the future. In that sense it's often called Extrasensory Perception. The knowledge gained by these extraordinary means is assumed to be unobtainable via ordinary mental and physical processes. But the carbon-based brain is capable of computing feats that would shame a silicon super-computer.
Although I once accepted the dualistic mind/brain concept, my current view is that Intuition is just a special talent of the human brain operating on auto pilot. Unlike logical or mathematical reasoning, intuition reaches useful conclusions (guesses, approximations) while skipping most of the slow, boring, step-by-step procedures of rational thought that lead to more precise answers. Actually, the subconscious mind is capable of rapid, but rough-back-of-the-napkin, calculations from raw data to vital implications : ie. good or bad. When time is of the essence, accuracy yields to velocity.
Human intuition only seems supernatural because we are not normally aware of the subliminal logic pathways of our wetware calculator. Animal thinking is almost entirely of the subconscious variety due to their lack of introspection into their own thought processes. Human consciousness though is capable of self-analysis, which allows us to isolate, simplify, formalize, and digitize the complex circuits and algorithms followed by our analog thinking machine.
What we call Formal Logic is an abstraction of the natural logic circuits built-into our brains by the organizing powers of natural selection. What we call Intuition is simply the brain doing what it was programmed to do. Which is a sort of mental natural selection whereby weak memes are weeded-out from among the strong. Most of our strongest beliefs were not obtained by way of conscious reasoning, but by animal intuiting.
My current model of Consciousness and Reasoning is ultimately monistic. Matter and Mind are merely different forms of fundamental Information. From complex arrangements of mushy matter emerge the intangible phenomena we call mind and consciousness. Hence, Intuition is just one more step in the evolutionary ladder of emergence, as brilliantly designed (intuitively???) by G*D.
Subject: Intuition 
Wed Aug 05, 2009 9:22 pm
