What is the Nature of Intuition? How reliable is it?
Let's start from an epistemological case.
BonJour includes intuition (or what he calls "rational insight") in his positive account of a priori justification. He claims that our intuition can independently justify necessary truth of a proposition.
e.g:
No surface can be red (all over) and green (all over) at the same time.
Quote:
"From a sheerly intuitive or phenomenological standpoint, what seems to happen is this. I understand the proposition and in particular the specific properties and relations involved in it: thus I understand or grasp (i) the properties redness and greenness, (ii) what it is for them to be features of a surface, and (iii) what it is for the presence of one of them to exclude the presence of the other in the way that the proposition in question claims. On the basis of this understanding, I am able to see that the relation of exclusion necessarily holds between these two properties and accordingly that the proposition in question is necessarily true and so, of course, true. Thus it is the insight into necessity that is, in my
view, primary, with the insight into truth being secondary and derivative."
However, Gilbert Harman in his review concludes that the red-green incompatibility merely shows that human being has a limited imagination. Quote:
"Consider something that looks red to one's right eye and at the same time looks green to one's left eye. How will it look overall? Does rational insight alone reveal that the experienced object will not look to be red all over and green all over?"
In other words, intuition is neither independent of one's experience (maybe one from a different physical world can perceive countless colors at the same time) nor reliable in justification.
This leads me to doubt the nature and reliability of "intuition" since this word has been and is being used by philosophers in nearly every discussion. Is intuition constructed by our experience, language or knowledge? Or a particular neuron circuit creates the illusion of intuition, the feeling of "that must be true"?
BonJour includes intuition (or what he calls "rational insight") in his positive account of a priori justification. He claims that our intuition can independently justify necessary truth of a proposition.
e.g:
No surface can be red (all over) and green (all over) at the same time.
Quote:
"From a sheerly intuitive or phenomenological standpoint, what seems to happen is this. I understand the proposition and in particular the specific properties and relations involved in it: thus I understand or grasp (i) the properties redness and greenness, (ii) what it is for them to be features of a surface, and (iii) what it is for the presence of one of them to exclude the presence of the other in the way that the proposition in question claims. On the basis of this understanding, I am able to see that the relation of exclusion necessarily holds between these two properties and accordingly that the proposition in question is necessarily true and so, of course, true. Thus it is the insight into necessity that is, in my
view, primary, with the insight into truth being secondary and derivative."
However, Gilbert Harman in his review concludes that the red-green incompatibility merely shows that human being has a limited imagination. Quote:
"Consider something that looks red to one's right eye and at the same time looks green to one's left eye. How will it look overall? Does rational insight alone reveal that the experienced object will not look to be red all over and green all over?"
In other words, intuition is neither independent of one's experience (maybe one from a different physical world can perceive countless colors at the same time) nor reliable in justification.
This leads me to doubt the nature and reliability of "intuition" since this word has been and is being used by philosophers in nearly every discussion. Is intuition constructed by our experience, language or knowledge? Or a particular neuron circuit creates the illusion of intuition, the feeling of "that must be true"?
Comments (171)
I think of 'intuition' as 'knowing without knowing how you know', which I think is consistent with Bonjour's use. He claims intuition plays a crucial role in the epistemic justification of beliefs, serving as foundational sources of justification, providing immediate and basic support for our beliefs while also recognising that intuitions need to be critically examined and subjected to reflective evaluation to ensure their reliability and avoid potential errors.
In any case, I'm with Bonjour. I take it that he's arguing for a rationalist view which accepts that there are necessary truths. Harman's response seems like typical modern relativism, which basically depends on the hypothetical argument that 'anything can happen' with the implication that there are no necessary truths. The idea of other possible worlds is often cited in support of that view, with the view of reducing what seems necessary truths to contingencies which just happen to be true 'for us'.
Finally, how could you discern if an intuition were really 'a neuron circuit'? Presumably such a circuit will not be labelled 'intuition' so you would have to judge what the 'neuron circuit' encoded or implied or meant by evaluating the data. And any such judgement would be, well, a judgement, which relies on just the kind of intuitive insight that Bonjour is arguing for.
Your simultaneous red and green scenario demonstrates how easily intuitons can be misleading.
Suppose you have a white piece of paper in a totally dark room. You have the ability to shine a monochromatic red light on the paper, or a monochromatic green light on the paper, or both lights on the paper simultaneously. What do you see in these three different cases of illuminating the paper?
You can play around with a fairly analogous situation at https://www.rapidtables.com/web/color/RGB_Color.html, where you can choose a color to be displayed in terms of levels of red, green, and blue by selecting integers between 0 and 255 specifying the intensity of your display's emissions of each RGB element. For example, when I put in 255 for red and green and 0 for blue I see a bright yellow. Assuming your color vision is normal I expect you will see bright yellow as well.
The situation is a bit different when we are talking about the color of an object when illuminated by white light. In the situations discussed above we are talking about emission spectrums. When we talk of the color of an object we are talking about absorption spectrums. The absorption spectrum of an object is an indication of what wavelengths of light are absorbed by the object and what wavelengths are reflected by the object. However, the principles involved are related. We might have a chemist design a pigment or combination of pigments such that when white light shines on the pigmented object only a narrow band of red wavelengths and a narrow band of green wavelengths is reflected into our eyes, and no yellow wavelength light is reflected into our eyes. I expect we would see the object as yellow, even though it is reflecting red and green at the same time.
Now about intuition... I've been talking a lot about it recently. I think intuitions are a matter of deep learning in the neural networks constituting our brains, and the reliability of our intuitions is situational and a function of what the training inputs to those neural nets has been in the past.
However, I don't know if you are really interested in a naturalistic understanding of intuition, so I'll leave it there for now.
Edit: IIRC the pigment example may yield the experience of seeing brown. (which in a sense is a 'dim yellow')
Edit 2: If you use the website I linked and enter R=120, G=120, and B=0 I predict you will see a brown square.
As for its accuracy, tests show intuition seems to right about 50% of the time, so youd have better odds through guessing
Can you provide a link to the testing you are referring to?
But suffice to say its not something apart from normal cognition, it just happens faster. You dont just know, you think you do.
However research finds that if someone is an experience in a field then their intuition about something regarding that field is reliable.
So I guess if you dont know anything about a subject then its no better than a random guess.
In my experience, intuition is much more than a recognition of a priori or logical truths, it's a fundamental way of knowing. An example - when he was running for president, people claimed that Barak Obama was not a natural born citizen of the US. Although I had no direct knowledge of the situation, I didn't believe those claims. Looking back, I can give reasons 1) in order to get has far as he had in the world, Obama must have had a birth certificate, i.e. proof of his citizenship 2) I judged that Obama is an intelligent and honest person who wouldn't lie. 3) I judged his opponents would lie or distort the truth for political advantage.
Another example - I've been paying attention to the war in Ukraine. Related to that is unrest in Moldova with the possibility of Russian invasion. That didn't make sense to me because I know the Danube River flows through Moldova and the Danube doesn't come anywhere near Russia, so the two countries shouldn't border each other. Turns out I was right about the border - Moldova and Russia don't border each other. But there is a large Russian population in Moldova which has broken away in a separate republic on the eastern side of the country. Russian troops have been stationed there as "peacekeepers." So, my intuition was wrong in this case, which I realized when I checked. I don't know why I knew the Danube flows through Moldova or that the Danube doesn't go anywhere near Russia. It's just part of the body of knowledge I've built up over the years.
That's the essence of intuition for me - based on 71 years of experience, I have a feel for how the world works, how people work. I have a body of knowledge that I've picked up mostly without formally learning it - just from observation and experience. I make judgements based on intuition - a non-specific understanding without specific justification. If it's important I'll go back and check to verify my judgment.
:up:
I don't think you can doubt about the nature of anything, including concepts. Nature refers to the basic or inherent features, character, or qualities of something. Everything that we can conceive has a nature. The only thing you can doubt about is the explanation, description, interpretation etc. by someone of the nature of something. And I believe that this is what you mean, isn't it?
Moreover, there are different kinds, aspects and contexts for "intuition". SEP has an article about 15,000 words about Intuition. And its first chapter talks about "The Nature of Intuitions". So, as you can see the subject is not so trivial that it can be confined in discussion like this one. Still, I believe that one can filter all that and talk about intuition in its common meaning, that is a direct perception of truth, fact, etc., independent of any reasoning process. Or in whatever similar description one can offer.
Then you cannot doubt about the reliability of something either, except if you refer to a context, purpose, aspect, etc. It's not reliable as or for what? From what aspect?
Using my intuition to know whether what I'm doing is right or wrong, to order a dish in a restaurant, to solve a mathematical problem, to create a relationship, etc. is very different from using my intuition e.g. to take an important financial decision, which might have catastrophic consequences.
Then, one can also look at the subject in a cool way. like Einstein, who has been reported to have said, "I believe in intuition and inspiration. At times I feel certain I am right while not knowing the reason.
\Indeed, intuition and inspiration go together. That's why artists trust and used their intuition a lot. Technical people on the other hand trust more their reason, skills and expertise.
As for me, personally, I don't use my intuition often since I'm too rational in nature. :smile:
This gets at something I found highly questionable about the way you originally described the research results. Intuitions within certain domains can have very good reliability, when the neural nets underlying those intuitions have had a high degree of training on the way things in those domains work in reality.
Someone who understands the way development of reliable intuitions works, can then make relatively accurate judgements about the reliability of his own intuitions in relation to whatever the present situation happens to be. Furthermore, the reliability of one's intuitions can sometimes be tested to increase or decrease the confidence one has in the reliability of one's intuitions before deciding whether to commit to going with intuitions. Over time one can develop good intuitions about the reliability of one's intuitions.
IOW, doubting and logically evaluating intuitions can lead to having very reliable intuitions in the future. There is a synergy that can arise from the interaction of slow thinking and fast thinking.
Not exactly no, intuition is more just playing off what you already know hence why its reliable with an expert. Logically evaluating them wont take you anywhere.
Do you speak from experience? Have you tried improving your intuitions, and always failed?
I suspect this right - I have certainly had those stats pointed out in seminars on organizational pschology.
One complication with intuition is that it is an umbrella term to describe a range of different, albeit similar phenomena. The intuition of a doctor about matters of health are going to be far more accurate than the intuitions of a photocopier mechanic. Intuition benefits enormously form a person's background, age, experience, education. It practice, it may be worth separating experience and wisdom from sheer guesswork. The more we have seen and done, the more likely our intuitive speculations about something will be informed by a kind of wisdom.
Quoting T Clark
Indeed. Although 'way of knowing' might be too strong for me. I'd probably frame it more in terms of an approach to sense making. Or something like that.
Quoting T Clark
I think this is right.
What do you think of this? I've noticed that intuition seems to work better when you are feeling well and happy. There's something about the mindset required that for me makes it less accurate or harder to pull off when you are feeling down or troubled.
:100: Old school.
Amazon page, Lawrence Bonjour's Defense of Pure Reason (this was the philosopher mentioned in the OP):
I know it's a book that I will probably never get around to reading, but it rings true.
To the extent I understand the distinction you are making, I don't agree. As I've said before on the forum, I spent my work life knowing things and knowing how I know them. I paid a lot of attention to this issue. Observations and reason don't can't make knowledge by themselves. Measurements and observations don't come with ideas attached. Reason can test them, but it can't generate them. Ideas come from somewhere else. You get ideas by opening up your mind and seeing what comes out. If you do it with other people, it's called brainstorming.
Quoting Tom Storm
I haven't noticed that personally. For me, intuition is a very satisfying, sometimes exhilarating, experience. As I said, I see it as opening myself up to ideas that come from a part of my mind I'm not aware of. I don't know if you experience it like that at all. But it would make sense that that kind of openness would work better if you are feeling good.
There's no way to improve your intuitions apart from learning about something, and even then it's not a guarantee.
I suspect we are thinking of intuition differently.
For me, in the work I do (moderately reliable) intuition means being able to grasp almost immediately if someone has a hidden weapon on them or not and if they might be violent or not. Or if they are experiencing delusional thinking or psychoses. Or knowing if someone can do a very challenging job or not within seconds of meeting them in a job interview. I can generally tell when someone is suicidal whether they will act on it or not, based on intuition. I've gotten to the point when I meet a new worker I can often tell within a minute or two how long they will last in the field and what path brought them here - a relative, lived experience, etc. I think there are probably key indicators we can read but you need to be 'open' to them in some way and have relevant experience.
Discursive or conceptual cognition operates by casting concrete particulars in symbolic terms, which relies on general concepts or universals. But there is always a gap between the ideal rational cognition made possible by symbolic thought and the concrete totality. I remember being very struck by this when I moved from the high-school physics of vectors and formulas to university physics, where the plethora of approximations involved in real-world calculations were suddenly being considered.
So intuition is what bridges the gap between the cognitions made possible within discursive thought, and the reality that is being cognized. In essence, it is about making estimates that are based on information that is extracted from an idealized model of your perceptions. And allowing yourself to trust that faculty is also part of intuition.
YEA!!! Best rendition of the nature of intuition yet, I think.
Quoting Pantagruel
BOO!!! Extracted from a model? To build a model requires information, so, what .information is put in to build it, then extracted from it? Why not extract information from perception and build an idealized model from that?
Actually, this is probably what you meant to say. There is an idealized model of the information received from perception, it even has its own name; intuition constructs the model but does not use it, hence, the notion of being a bridge.
Quoting Pantagruel
Might I suggest the trust is misplaced?
Very interesting. Doesn't this reflect the distinction between mathematical idealisation and reality? The former allows for complete precision as a matter of definition, of which the reality is always an approximation. (I have in mind the argument from equality in the Phaedo.)
I think mathematics could be construed as the extreme limit of ideal-theoretical symbolization? The golden ratio appears in organic forms, but these instantiations are close approximations to the mathematical ideal.
Without delving too deeply into the informational aspect, what I wanted to emphasize was the way that intuition bridges the gap between the ideal-theoretical and the actual, especially as that relates to the need to operate and enact in the real world. I'm not saying information is unimportant, but information is inextricable from symbolization or encoding, and what I'm suggesting is that intuition is integral to the cognition of the differential between the concrete totality and its only-ever-partial or approximate conceptual cognition.
As for the trust being misplaced, good intuition is effective, so being committed to the accuracy of one's intuitions is an ontic-epistemological commitment. If I really believe in the truth of something, that is a practical commitment. Hypothetical truths are empty. Consciousness does not just believe truths, it instantiates them.
Right, learning is required and the consequences of that learning are not fully predictable. However, I'm not talking in black and white terms, of intuitions either being perfectly accurate or totally unreliable. I'm just suggesting that intuitions can be improved to a significant degree.
Were saying the same thing for all practical purposes, in language two centuries apart.
Except for the trust part; that I cant reconcile with disparities in language. My problem, not yours.
Well, knowledge is essentially self-justifying, right? It contains the framework of its own validation. Intuition doesn't. So what other option is there?
Interesting. I see you and as both talking about intuition as it has developed for each of you. Could you elaborate on what key differences might be?
Ill disagree with that. Insofar as intuition is a faculty, it must contain its own framework from which it obtains its validity. Knowledge, by the same token, is not a faculty, hence does not contain a framework at all. Knowledge is an end; the means are elsewhere.
Nahhh Im not getting into the belief/knowledge mudhole. I favor what you said about intuition, thats the important part.
Roger that. For my part, I favour a radical view of belief. I believe that belief is constitutive of consciousness in a real and fundamental sense, hence my contention of the importance of an "ontological commitment" validating that a belief is genuinely held.
As you said, a matter for another time.
:up:
Luck? Chance? Unconscious? Animal instinct? Energy? Intuition? Or ? :sparkle:
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Our senses take in a huge spectrum of information all the time. We only successfully process a small portion of that spectrum. Increasing our knowledge is one way to increase the portion of the spectrum we process.
At a purely neural level, an experiment showed that a cat's brain did not even register the input from a tone within its auditory range until that tone was subsequently paired with a significant event (feeding). So there could be sensory cues of which we are unaware but which could contribute to this kind of performative intuition.....
It. conveys a difference between having well trained intuitions and not having well trained intuitions although it frames it in magical terms of using the force.
That said, I've learned some Jedi mind tricks over the years. :wink:
Sure. To hold a belief presupposes the something to which it relates. There must be something that serves as the object of the belief, hence the necessary ontological commitment. Nevertheless, to hold a belief says nothing about the means of its origin.
I agree belief is constitutive of consciousness. But then, in humans, everything rational is constitutive of consciousness, so in that respect, there is nothing particularly significant in merely holding some belief or another.
Again, here we must agree to disagree. Which I hold to be a significant difference. :wink:
Im listening.
The difference between intuition and other means of knowledge may be hard to pin down to philosophical methods and rigour. That is because it different from rationality, which is the essential approach of philosophy, especially logic.
However, logic may be limited and the nature of judgement purely on the basis of rationality may not work entirely in the context of human understanding, which is more synthetic. As human beings, experiencing and navigating experiences there is the sensory, emotional and logical and intuition as 'inner knowledge' as a means of subjective processing of the external aspects and the objective in a meaningful way. The reliability of intuition may be how if acts as an intermediary between sensory and rational aspects, also in relation to personal emotions.
:up:
Yes, were only conscious of a tiny bit of each moments total data input collected by our being.
And of that fraction, an even smaller fraction is able to be rationally thought, named, explained, etc.
And of that immense amount we are able to collect, there must be more that is somehow beyond us. Stuff that perhaps animals can detect, or highly sensitive equipment.
(Or better yet alien cats with high tech tools lol).
Field theory might be relevant here somehow. We are influenced by the waves all around us (water, sound, electromagnetic )
We humans are like ice skaters flitting over a semi-frozen ocean that is endlessly deep
in terms of awareness, one could imagine.
Understood.
Yes. Analog vs digital collection and processing of information becomes interesting in this respect. Analog collection of information captures an actual "imprint" of the real world. In which sense, there may actually be information captured which is unexpected or unknown. Neural networks are able to exploit such "hidden" information and extrapolate hidden connections. In fact, that is more or less exactly how they work. By contrast, digitization only encodes what it is specifically designed to encode.
Yes. One could take the difficult step of recognizing that there just might possibly but not necessarily be more than meets the eye (sensory data) and the intellect (splaining all that data).
For those adventurous souls, the question becomes how to enhance this possible source of info.
It comes down to the individual. Whether they stop at data from the 5 senses alone, or are curious to look for more / other sources.
In any case, I'm with Bonjour. I take it that he's arguing for a rationalist view which accepts that there are necessary truths.
I am with the rationalists too. I feel cynical standing on the relativism side. But building the foundation of justification on intuition, which as discussed by Darkneos,Philosophim and other users is derived from knowledge, seems question-begging.
That is the reason why I thought the notion of intuition should be elaborated, mainly in epistemology discussion.
I don't think we are.
Quoting Tom Storm
These are good examples. I've had similar experiences. When I would start a new project as an engineer, I would quickly scan all the information available, e.g. previous reports and regulatory documents. At that point, I could generally tell the future course of remediation - the environmental issues, other technical issues, legal issues and regulatory requirements. I wasn't always right, but I didn't need to be. What I needed at that point was a framework I could use to start organizing the information.
As for judging people - you can generally tell if someone is going to be a good engineer very quickly. One person we hired turned out to be dishonest and did some illegal things, but he was the best engineer we ever had. I was sorry to see him go.
Quoting Tom Storm
Yes. I think most of intuition is just paying attention.
Yes, it was the "or..." part that always bothered me. Intuition, or whatever you call it, is not something occult or supernatural.
I don't think there's any need to postulate processes other than mental ones, e.g. the Force or fields, in order to understand intuition.
Intuition does not provide justification, it identifies knowledge that needs to be justified, brings it to our attention. If it's something not important, not much justification is needed. As I've noted in previous posts, reason does not generate ideas, it tests them.
Yes, this is important. One of the most important things to know, to be aware of, is how well you know the things you know, how uncertain you are.
As I noted in my response to @Tom Storm, I don't think the differences are all that significant. I had struggled while I was trying to come up with examples of how intuition works in my own life. I felt like the ones I came up with were missing something. His examples really helped me get my hands around what I was trying to say.
Thank you! It is insightful to consider it as a pinpoint to the knowledge you need.
Yes. As an engineer, I would have to be able to document and justify the decisions I made in a design. If something went wrong, I'd have to be able to show that I'd done the work in accordance with standards of professional practice. Rational justification is at the heart of engineering.
:up: Thanks. The or isnt necessarily woo-woo voodoo, but I see your point. The term ESP is so loaded with negative connotations that its only used now as derogatory. Which is like closing the case before its even been examined at all. Kind of like
Quoting T Clark
kind of like you may have done inadvertently here lol.
Seriously though, for us here we could probably skip some tangential subjects such as this without any problems.
But if I were a scientist, I most definitely would not! (Especially if I had a big load of grant money.)
Theres the theory of the Noosphere, which is at the very least thought-provoking.
Ponder once more this diagram of electromagnetic spectrum. Information is passed via several frequencies mechanically. Im not aware of any proof that the human mind / body can pick up any info at these frequencies. But I definitely wouldnt close the book on the entire matter. :nerd:
By acquiring knowledge
I don't think so. For me intuition is just a type of sense making. It brings me no joy. It's just a brute fact of interacting with others. It reminds me a little of watching a movie you haven't seen before but knowing where the story will go and who will do what. No doubt this is based on identifiable patterns (gained by experience) that we can interpret quickly without fully understanding the process. Having worked closely with people for many years, I tend to be able to read them quickly and understand their process. But it is not foolproof and sometimes I am wrong.
:up: Thanks for your reply. I take it that analog = intuition and digital = analytical?
I think intuition exploits analogicity, yes, which analytic thinking cannot do since it involves working with an unknown.
There is more to it than simply acquiring knowledge. Tom Storm and T Clark brought up important points. TS brought up experience and TC brought up attentiveness.
Of course acquring knowledge from reading books is valuable and of course reading can result in development of intuitions in all sorts of ways. However, there are important aspects to developing intuitions which are a function of the means by which knowledge is acquired.
For example, I'm 99% sure TS would agree (though he is free to correct me if I am wrong) that he didn't develop the intuitive recognitions he has (e.g. that someone has a weapon) from reading a book. Instead those intuitions came from years of interactions with, and observations of, people. Attentiveness to body language and other nonverbal signals undoubtedly played an important role.
Similar for TC and his engineering intuitions. Attentive observations of the way things worked in the domain of his career resulted in the development of intuitions related to his area of expertise that are substantially better than just guesses.
Nope, that's pretty much it. Intuition is improved by acquiring knowledge. That's all.
Quite right. No reading or study involved. I'm fairly sure the intuition I know is acquired by paying attention to experience and being able to recognize key indicators, which are not necessarily consciously available to me.
Your intuitions about intuition could use some development.
If knowledge is justified true belief, then that is different than intuition. (Or at least the 'justification is of a different sort than what we typically think of as justification for a belief to be considered knowledge.)
Its not my intuitions about it its just the simple fact. Even what you cited before about observing people lots of times its knowledge, knowledge of body language.
Youre making it more than it actually is which is something a lot of people like to do.
Intuition is rooted in knowledge. The more you know the better it is. It honestly doesnt matter what you think about it, doesnt change what it is.
:up:
This is a good point to bring up.
Analog can preserve a more accurate representation, and per Nyquist's theorem, there are limits to how accurate a digital representation can be, as a function of sample rate. Finite bit depth of samples is another dimension of error in the case of digital.
Quoting Pantagruel
That is somewhat true, but my inner pedant insists that I point out some inaccuracies.
It may be the case that there is a degree of fidelity maintained, due to the somewhat more analog properties of neurons. However, spikes in action potential are a significant feature of our neurons. So there is an element of sampling, playing a significant role in the way our neural nets work.
Rather than an analog vs digital issue, it's more a matter of how is the hardware arranged, and what sort of information processing is the hardware well suited for. Neural networks, natural or artificial, are very good at pattern recognition. Much of the 'hidden information' results in recognized patterns which happen preconsciously.
Also, it's not exactly the case that "digitization only encodes what it is specifically designed to encode". There is a trivial sense in which that is true, in that digital hardware is designed to encode bit states and can only encode bit states. However, it is very much the case that digitally instantiated artificial neural networks, after training on whatever inputs were provided to the ANN, will have a great many bit states which were not determined by the designer. This article touches on aspects of this sort of information processing, that people who care about humanity's future might want to be aware of.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2017/04/11/5113/the-dark-secret-at-the-heart-of-ai/
Quoting Wayfarer
Quoting Pantagruel
I hope no one minds me going back to this part of the thread. There's something here I don't understand.
Both of you describe reality as approximating the mathematical ideal.
Isn't it the other way around? Isn't the mathematics a simplification of reality? When you fit a curve to your data, you don't say the data approximate the curve. --- I mean, you can, if you like, proclaim the simple formula a physical law, and explain the variance however you like, confounding this and that, and claim that in the right conditions the data would better "instantiate" the law. But you don't have to take that seriously. All you're saying is that the formula's predictions are pretty good, and in some circumstances even better. How is nature supposed to "instantiate" mathematics? Are we sure we know what that means?
You can say the same thing about, for instance, musical notation, that it's a simplification of actual music making. There was music before notation, before music theory. That musicians now play from a score, so that they in some sense "instantiate" that score in performance, changes nothing. They still do more in performance than is recorded in the score. It's a sort of ahead-of-time simplification of what a performance of it will turn out to be.
And the real question is whether logic is a similar simplification of reality -- or perhaps merely a simplification of the relations between our concepts. For instance, there's just no chance that color perception actually works the way it's suggested here -- there's the freaking dress, for example -- and we've all been in situations where we were perfectly willing to attribute two different color terms to an object. (Most recently, for me, a debate about a coworker's pants that I was dragged into.) The necessary exclusion of other colors by any color looks like a simplification of how we use our color concepts.
All these simplifications do good work and save real time and energy. They are useful approximations of reality, not the other way around.
:up:
I think the first captures an aspiration to (for instance) draw a perfect circle without a compass.
But I very much agree when it comes to fitting functions to data.
Very cool to hear about this. This kind of knowledge seems to play a huge role in life and maybe doesn't get celebrated enough by bookish types. I'm guessing that driving is the average person's taste of a high stakes version of this.
I remember the specific moment I decided to trust my intuition. I was in college, at the library studying, and some guy came in and dropped his books on the next table over from where I was and dropped into a chair. I glanced over and thought to myself, dumbass. And then I upbraided myself -- Why do you do that? Don't be so quick to judge. Don't jump to conclusions, you don't know that guy. After a while he left and I left shortly after. I was heading for the stairs that were right next to the elevator and he was standing there, repeatedly pushing the down button. We were on the second floor. I decided right then that whatever I had picked up on when I first saw him, I was right. Dumbass. Probably hungover dumbass. I have trusted my intuition ever since.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I see your point. I suppose what I meant to say is that mathematics allows for utter precision, whereas, in reality, things are generally not mathematically precise. To paraphrase Bertrand Russell, we model the world mathematically not because we know so much about it, but because we know so little. It's only those aspects which can be quantified that provide mathematical certainty. Although obviously since Galileo, this approach has provided an absolutely astonishing amount of progress. (the subject of Eugene Wigner's often-quoted essay on the Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences.)
This also resonated with me:
Quoting Pantagruel
This is reminiscent of platonic or Aristotelian realism, where the concept or idea or universal - these are not synonyms but that's not important at this point - is what can be grasped with rational certainty but the actual object is an imperfect realisation of the idea or form. That is the basis of Aristotle's hylomorphic dualism which is having something of a comeback.
I am not talking about bit states, I am talking about the objective data (information) which is digitally encoded. Since data is being specifically symbolically encoded, digital neural networks have only that known data to work with. Versus an analog system which works with a "signal" whose total data properties are not necessarily so restricted. You can talk about bit states being "information", it is a level of abstraction below that at which artificial neural nets actually operate, part of the underlying mechanism and addressed via back-propagation, which is a function of error-correction, which is determined at the top informational level.
I think we are talking past each other to some extent. We can hypothesize about some sort of neuromorphic hardware which maintains analog fidelity to a greater degree than current artificial or natural neural networks do. However, I'm skeptical that such a system can be practically implemented.
There is neuromorphic hardware under development, but from what I've seen, much of what is under development uses spiking/sampling. Spiking necessitates a loss of fidelity to a representation of an analog signal due to the the fact that maximum spike frequency cannot be infinite. Now, as is the case with the digitized audio that we listen to all the time these days, the loss of fidelity with a spiking architecture might be for practical purposes undetectable. However, I think it important to recognize that any sort of information processing is going to result in some loss of fidelity in the processing of an analog input.
Still, if you can cite something discussing a practically implementable information processing system which maintains analog fidelity, I'd be interested in taking a look.
Quoting Pantagruel
I referred to bit states to make clear that we are talking about digital information. Yes we can combine bits to represent numbers, but any digital representation of a number is going to have a finite bit depth, and I think it important to keep in mind, the loss of fidelity that comes with such encoding.
In the context of considering our sensory and information processing apparatus, there is strong evidence that we do not have some ideal 'purely analog' system. Simply considering the fact that our visual system relies on discrete rod and cone cells, producing outputs in the form of spike trains, points towards ideal analog representations not being what our brains have to work with.
Yes, I'm aware of the eventual loss of accuracy that results from extensive analog processing. I'm talking at a purely theoretical level where what is being processed by the neural network is already pre-sliced data. My hypothesis would be that the brain in fact operates simultaneously in a way that is analogous to digital processing (when "conceptually-constrained" information is processed) and also in a way that is more analog in nature (since, qua organic entity, we are, in fact, in contact with the universe at an "analog" level). And that intuition can be productively construed as an exploitation of information that may be embedded in our "overall sensory input" but not as yet conceptually construed. I gave the example of a cat's brain, which exhibits no indicative activity in response to a certain "hearable" tone until such time as that tone is paired with a recognized event. Thereafter, the tone is "heard" (manifests in brain activity).
Quoting wonderer1
That fact that the visual system is already highly evolved and differentiated doesn't mean there aren't other aspects of exploitable analogicity. The complexity of actual connections between things in the world is anybody's guess. I'm certainly not limiting the possibilities to whatever might be the current state of the human visual system. It works well enough, for a bipedal ape.
Certainly.
Quoting Wayfarer
That's very nice, but there's a lot more to say. We only can know a little because of the creatures we are. Bandwidth is small and reality is big.
Quoting Wayfarer
Or, again, the other way around. Nothing can "really" be measured, but only approximated. We can call what we end up with certainty or precision, but it's really usability, since processing power is also limited. That math is more precise is the whole point. I'd like to say that simplifying the world or experience into a usable form just is the mathematical impulse. It's not that some aspects of the world can be measured and some can't. Everything can be turned into math.
And the mathematical impulse to simplify and make computable -- that's also obviously what's going on with logic.
It's funny how when you read Plato, he talks as if these are all the same thing -- you know, the way he'll say "those of you interested in philosophy and mathematics, in music and astronomy". That is, those of you who have noticed how we simplify the world in order to think about it and recognize that we could do the same thing self-consciously and perhaps improve our reasoning.
@Wayfarer @wonderer1
I want to add that this is not the only option.
I'm interested in @Pantagruel's suggestion that there may be more of the analog input in the system than the digitized projection of that reality. That's really interesting.
But in a general way you could choose to self-consciously do something *different* from what your hardware does on its own, and I think this is kind of the goal in practices like meditation and phenomenology. The question that arises is how far back into the simplification process you can get, and we keep finding that the answer seems to be, not as far as you might have hoped. There are things your brain's going to do whether you like it or not.
But that still leaves some options. Can you catch it in the act? To some degree maybe you can, and again that's where I see meditation and phenomenology, but again the issue is how early in the process you catch something before it gets simplified for you.
But you may also be able to learn how your brain simplified and that in itself can be valuable.
And you can make some effort to un-simplify, to re-complexify.
Lots more to this.
Yes, it is an interesting aspect of things to consider. My knowledge of human hearing is not very up to date, but what I recall is that for low frequency sounds the system generates nerve impulses in sync with the incoming low frequency components of what is heard. So hearing may be a good sense to consider, in looking for analogicity in human neural processing. There might be some sense to be made of why we find music so affecting by looking into that. (Not something I've really thought about before, so there may be all sorts of relevant research out there that I'm not aware of.)
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I've never been enough of a meditator to have much to say about what understandings might be reached through meditation. However, in the vein of doing "something *different* from what your hardware does on its own", I find conversations with diverse people to be a good way of getting my brain out of the ruts it is inclined to ride in on its own.
I think you're downplaying the faculty of reason here. 'Bandwidth', obviously a technological analogy, refers to the rate at which information can be transferred. But that may not have much to do with the question of why 'the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics'.
One passage from Plato's dialogues that I have recently re-discovered is the 'argument from equals' in the Phaedo. To paraphrase: At 74b, Socrates asks, "do not equal stones and sticks sometimes, while remaining the same, appear to one person to be equal and to another to be unequal"? The point being that sticks of equal length appear both equal and unequal, i.e., they appear to be and to not be equal.
Sticks that appear to be equal and unequal are imperfectly equal. However, the recognition of the sticks as imperfectly equal requires knowledge of perfect equality - otherwise, in virtue of what are they being recognized as imperfect? "Whenever someone, on seeing something, realizes that that which he now sees wants to be like some other reality but falls short and cannot be like that other since it is inferior, do we agree that the one who thinks this must have prior knowledge of that to which he says it is like, but deficiently so?" (74d)
This knowledge must be acquired before the recognition of the sticks as imperfectly equal, i.e., before sense perception; therefore, acquired before birth.
It is traditionally said from this and numerous other passages that Socrates (and Plato) hold that this faculty is acquired before birth, in line with belief in the pre-existence of the soul. In today's terms, however, I don't think it would be too outlandish to say that the faculty is innate. But even that is controversial: the empiricist dogma of 'tabula rasa' still has a very strong hold on naturalism. (This is why, I think, there is such controversy about platonism in mathematics.) The empiricist account will generally be 'well, we see many things that are equal or near equal, so we acquire the idea of equality from experience'. But the rationalist rejoiner might be that, were we not able to perceive the abstract 'equals' by reason, then no amount of experience will convey that insight. Furthermore that this is simply one example of the innummerable kinds of cases where we are able to derive conclusions based on foundational notions of 'equals', 'not equals' 'same as', 'different to', foundational to logic and mathematics.
@Darkneos seems to be trading on the ambiguity of the term 'knowledge', What he said makes no sense if you consider knowledge as being JTB, but if you think of it as being know-how, then it does make sense.
I think you have it exactly backwards. On cursory examination two stones or sticks may appear to be of equal length, shape or size, but on closer examination and measurement it will be seen that they are not exactly the same.
Reflection on this and on the obvious fact that no two things are ever exactly the same leads to the counterfactual notion of perfect equality as an imaginable and not logically contradictory possibility, but which does not seem to be possibility of this world.
We don't need to have a prior idea of perfect equality in order to notice that there are always differences, however minor they might be, between actual things.
All I can say is what the research behind it shows which seems to bear out better than mere philosophical speculation.
You mean, Socrates, or 'the argument from reason', has it backwards. (I am quoting him.)
Quoting Janus
But you do need to have the ability to grasp what 'exactly equals' means.
Well, yes, it doesn't matter who the proponent is; the point is that the argument has it backwards (in my view).
Quoting Wayfarer
I would say that all you need is the ability to see difference and similarity, and to examine enough things which look superficially the same, like fallen autumn leaves for example, to realize that exact similitude does not occur in nature.
It's just the other side of the coin; once we can recognize similarity and difference, and understand that there are degrees of similarity, then the idea of perfect sameness follows dialectically as an (apparently) unrealizable possibility.
It's the same with roundness, squareness, sphericity and cubicity and so on. It's also the same with colours: there is no perfect red, yellow, orange, blue, green, purple, black, white, or any other colour or tone; there are millions of possible variations.
The reason I mentioned the argument from equals, was in relation to the earlier question of the nature of mathematical intuition and the ability to grasp abstractions. The argument from equals is one of the canonical arguments for universals. I just think it is a fairly simple and direct way of pointing that out.
I tend to agree with you that abstraction (or generalizing from particulars) relies on language. We know at least that the ability to report doing it certainly relies on language. Dogs see objects as kinds, though, even if not consciously or explicitly. They see stairs as to be walked up or down, doorways as to be walked through, balls or sticks as to be chased, bowls to be eaten or drunk from, streams to be swum in or drunk from, food of the right kinds as to be eaten, and so on.
Quoting Wayfarer
There are other ways of explaining those abilities; from the basic capacities for counting and recognition of entities and kinds of entities that we can also observe in animals. I find those explanations more plausible that the notion of reason as something that comes from a transcendent realm to bless only the humans. To me, that is human exceptionalism; one of our biggest problems, or more accurately the source of most of our major extraordinary problems.
Darkneos is trolling for now. I'm not seeing any reason to reward his trolling with further responses.
I like "being know-how".
I agree. This got me thinking back to the night I met one of my girlfriends.
I was in a bar shooting pool when my friend Barb, and her friend Meri came in. I wrapped up the game of pool I was playing and went and joined them, and spent the rest of the evening talking to them. We walked out together and a big, rough looking, obviously very drunk guy walked out at the same time, taking out his car keys. I can't recall the details of what was said, but Meri very matter of factly told the guy that he was too drunk to drive, and that he needed to call a cab to drive him home. The guy went back into the bar to call a cab.
It's very much a "You have to have been there." situation, but Meri handled this guy twice her size perfectly. To me then, it was like watching magic. I would have expected to get belligerence in response if I had tried something similar, but somehow Meri intuitively recognized a means of getting compliance.
At that time Meri was working on finishing up her Ph.D. in marriage and family therapy, and undoubtedly her education played a role in her insightful handling of the situation, but things happened so quickly and smoothly that I think Meri had to have been going nearly purely on her intuitions about people, and not consciously recalling what various texts had to say.
I have huge respect for the sort of intuitions that Tom is talking about.
Interesting. You may be making less of it than it actually is. I fully agree that intuition is related to knowledge in that one is always intuiting something in some context, and that the more detailed knowledge you have, the more intuitive knowledge becomes possible. But it is the entire nature of intuition that it extends if not transcends the current limits of what can be discursively extracted from the context. The expert diagnosis of a very experienced MD versus an intern for example.
:up:
May I ask your background? Based on our earlier discussion I can see that you are scientifically insightful.
Sure. Academically I have university courses in maths, physics, and astronomy, a degree in literature with a minor in philosophy (one course shy of a major). I also have a college diploma in programming and have been a computer systems administrator and analyst since 1996. Currently I'm an electronic medical records specialist and privacy officer.
Fundamentally, I am a melioristic-optimist. I believe that human actions have a real effect on the universe; and, all things being equal, assuming capability (and responsibility) is inherently more reasonable that pessimistically denying it.
:up:
I guess I'm a melioristic-optimist as well, although I didn't know that terms before today.
Intuition is a kind of knowledge. Has anyone really claimed it is more than that? If not, I'll do it now. I see intuition as that sense of the world, the ring of truth, that underpins all knowledge. I've described this before here on the forum. I carry a model of the world around in my head. I visualize it as a cloud lit from within that contains everything I know. Not just things I've learned formally, but anything I've picked up living in the world through observation, imagination, reasoning. Everything is there - electrons, elephants, love, lemmings, tomatoes, tetrahedrons, dogs, diamonds, galaxies, goldfish, integration, ice cream, Occam's razor, the Peter Principle, Murphy's Law... And everything is connected by strings of memory, history, logic, proximity, coincidence, analogy... If I wiggle and idea here, a bell rings somewhere over on the other side.
And that dumbass turned out to be Osama Bin Laden. True story.
Plus science has frequently proven human intuition wrong on a number of subjects and stances about the world.
Calling it a ring of truth is just wrong.
Thats not what the research shows again. Without any sort of training or knowledge its no better than a coin toss.
You and I disagree.
I don't think you read my reply. I agreed with you, intuition is integrally related to knowledge. I just don't see it as a trivial occurrence.
Excellent example. To me it seems that socialization is the supreme 'art.' The conceptual aspect of philosophical conversation would be only a tiny aspect of this. In you situation, the bodies involved play a huge rule. I think we agree that most of this skill is radically tacit. [ Heidegger (as you may know) is famous for emphasizing the centrality of this circumspective 'autopilot' understanding. 'Logocentrism' is a bit tainted by ambivalence toward Derrida, but before or beyond all of that (and Derrida personally -- though on the whole I like him) the critique of logocentrism seems completely respectable to me. Is there no 'knowledge' in Coltrane's music (or in a great painting or a work of architecture) ? Or (as Whitman might point out, picturing a lean man with sweat on his back) in the confident chopping of firewood ?
My mistake
For sure. My second wife is a master of sociability. I emulate her as much as possible. It's an art but it can be learned.
:up:
Am I right that you're wrong, or wrong that you're right?
I've been mulling over your post and I don't have a simple response to it. I might spend some time actually looking at the Phaedo and then start a thread on it. In the meantime, I have some remarks.
1. I think it may not be possible to resolve our differences, because I am not sure they can be expressed cleanly, that there's some proposition or set of propositions you hold true and I false, for instance. Maybe, but I have my doubts.
2. There is a broad sense in which you seem to believe there is a world of concrete particularity, accessible to the senses, and a world of abstract generality, accessible to reason. It looks like there's little room for disagreement; I can't taste or see or touch the relation of equality, only things that are or are not equal.
3. That's not so far from Hume's observation about causality, but he didn't conclude that we can learn through rational insight what we cannot learn by looking; he concluded that the belief in causality is in some sense a fiction, a useful simplification.
4. If Plato's argument is right -- not clear to me yet -- if the concept of equality is unlearnable, then we might also conclude that we have no such concept, rather than concluding it must be innate.
5. "But of course we have the concept of equality!" --- We are adept at doing the things that having a concept of equality was supposed to explain, certainly. But if we cannot have such a concept, then the explanation must change.
6. It seems to us we see the entire environment before us, like a high-definition movie on a screen, our visual field. This is false. There is no such rendering of our environment present anywhere in our brains, and could not be. The truth is that we move our eyes frequently, much more than we are aware of, and we see a section of about a degree or two of our visual field clearly each time; the complete visual field is patched together without our awareness, giving the impression of a seamless whole.
That's an example of how an explanation can change to make something impossible possible.
7. The assumption that we must have the abstract concept of equality to judge whether two sticks are the same length suggests a computational model of the mind, with abstract rules being applied to concrete cases as they come up. I have my doubts.
8. Presumably the argument against materialism will continue before birth: if it's not a concept that could have been learned, it will also turn out to be a concept evolution could not have provided us with.
9. As you see it, Plato provides a dispositive argument that equality cannot be learned, but we have the concept, therefore ... If that argument is watertight, there's no need to consider empirical evidence, which could only mislead us.
10. On the contrary, I'm inclined to look at the research. Mathematical concepts have always been a central focus of developmental psychologists from Piaget on down to today. Parents and teachers spend time teaching children how to count, how to recognize shapes, similarity and difference, and so on, or at least providing them the appropriate setting for learning those concepts.
11. At what age do children actually acquire the concept of equality? What does the proto-concept look like, and how do they use it? Are there differences between cultures?
12. Mostly I think making claims about what can be learned and what cannot without looking at the development of children is worse than a waste of time.
As I said, I may post something about Plato, just because it might be interesting, though, not because it would lead to anything.
Not sure about "transcends". I talked about this in @wonderer1's thread, the difference between not reported and not reportable, and the difference between not reportable in principle and not reportable as a practical matter. I get the feeling you're alive to the issues here, hence the careful phrasing.
On the other hand, I'm a little puzzled by the hint that it must be intuition that extends. Is the idea that conscious processes can't extend because whatever hasn't been discursively extracted from a context can't be by conscious analysis? By definition? I almost see an argument there, but it's not clear, and that's probably on me.
Quoting Pantagruel
Isn't there a study from years ago showing that AI is better at reading x-rays than most radiologists?
Herbert Simon concluded decades ago that intuition is kind of a myth, that it's overwhelmingly a matter of experience, and perhaps some habits that make knowledge more accessible. But there's no preternatural insight. Your comparison of the intern to the experienced MD makes sense with that understanding as well, without mythologizing intuition.
Been really enjoying reading your thoughts in this thread.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
A relevant article.
A big advantage AI has over humans for tasks like this, is the ability to be trained on such a huge dataset without getting bored and quitting.
To put it bluntly, of course I'm not. The "evidence" you provided at the beginning of the discussion was based on an incorrect understanding of what intuition is. I, and others on this thread, have demonstrated that your understanding is too limited. There's a name for a logical fallacy when you can't win an argument, you fall back to a more limited position that's easier to defend.
It's not a limited understanding, you're just trying to make out to be more than what it actually is and I'm showing you the research doesn't support you.
So in this case you're just wrong. Intuition isn't some special knowledge, it's rooted in what you already know and is prone to bias as well. It's pretty much "thinking super fast" to where you reach the conclusion so quickly that it feels like "knowing" but it really isn't.
Like I said already, it doesn't matter what you THINK it is that doesn't change the reality of what it is. All you and others here have shown is that you REALLY want magic to exist, but humans just aren't special bud.
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
That is Platonism 101, isn't it? The 'argument from equals' is one among many of the arguments for the Forms. I've never really gotten across all of the material, which is voluminous and subject to millenia of commentary. But I sense a deep issue which I've been exploring throughout my engagement with philosophy forums.
Very briefly I see the whole issue as being bound up with the nature of the reality of intelligible objects -
what kind of existence they have. Consider for example the nature of number and of universals. When I first signed up to forums I had the intuitive view that numbers are real but not material, i.e. they are the same for all, but can only be grasped by a rational mind. * My reasoning was simply that numbers, unlike sense objects, are not composed of parts, and do not come into and go out of existence. It seemed obvious to me that they possessed a kind of higher truth, but I learned that it is mainly rejected nowadays because it is at odds with empiricism - that what is real is grounded in, and must always refer back to, sensory experience. See the essay, What is Math, Smithsonian Institute:
Speaks volumes, as far as I'm concerned.
This issue goes back to medieval times and the debate between scholastic realism and nominalism. Nominalism won the day, and 'history was written by the victors.' Nowadays our culture is so steeped in nominalism and empiricism that we literally can't understand realism (in the traditional sense. The modern outpost of scholastic realism is of course neo-thomism).
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
But the impression is the reality! We experience ourselves and the environment as a unified whole - that is almost as undeniable as cogito ergo sum. This a specific subject in philosophy, namely the subjective unity of perception. That was subject to commentary by Kant, but it's also an aspect of the hard problem of consciousness. See Jerome Feldman, The Subjective Unity of Perception.
-----
* I found an excellent early essay, Frege on Knowing the Third Realm, Tyler Burge.
Yes, I said if not transcends meaning as a limitation. That's the funny thing about language. If you're not careful, it can sound like the opposite of what you mean.
I have an further example in mind, but I want to think on it a bit further....
The research applies only to the limited meaning you incorrectly applied to it, as we pointed out to you during this discussion.
Quoting Darkneos
You can say it over and over again, but that doesn't make it true.
Quoting Darkneos
This just shows that you ignored everything other people said in this discussion.
Quoting Darkneos
Do you really think that the only way you can think other than by reasoning is magic? Also, capitalizing letters doesn't make you more correct.
Pattern recognition in neural nets. Pretty simple to explain recognition of equality these days.
Of course Plato wasn't in a position to understand this, and fabricated his ideas without sufficient basis for knowing what he was talking about.
Sometimes philosophy looks a bit like ancestor worship.
That "limited" meaning is what it actually is. Like I said, it doesn't matter what you think that doesn't make intuition more than what it is.
Is there anything that you are an expert in?
It might be harder to recognize the sense of intuition being discussed here, if one has never developed expertise in something.
:100: My sentiments exactly!
It is weird how one generation's rebel becomes the stumblingblock conformity of the next. One funeral at the time ! But Hegel is probably right that the errors tend to snowball into something less silly -- for those who can bear to drop the errors and move on, of course.
As a person who learned some angular math, I'd say it's much easier to be a bad philosopher than a mediocre mathematician. Yet I love good philosophers more than good mathematicians. What they are trying to do (some of them) is beautiful and (to me) essentially human.
:up:
I studied neural networks for a little while, and we might also add that human intuition is the raw ingredient (if I'm correct that it was supervised learning based on a dataset of human diagnoses.)
I would think human intuition was a huge component of the training ingredients, but I would think there was a fair bit of slow thinking thrown in as well - in reaching a diagnosis to tag each X-ray with. I'd guess that in some cases there was evidence in addition to the X-ray. E.g. biopsy results.
In any case, you bring up a good point - that the training data involves more than just the X-rays.
:up:
League of Legends. I've played so much that I just develop a "sense" about situations that happen in game. However that sense is from years of experience and game knowledge to the point that breaking down a situation in game would take a detailed report of every factor, piece, etc, behind it.
It's thinking, but really really REALLY fast to the point where it feels like you just know but when you break it down you see it.
You bring up a good point too. I was sloppy in my terms. I meant basically that models trained on human decisions are 'parasites' on human skill (including slow thinking) that impressively learn which experts to trust (in what proportion, etc., tho in a nonlinear fashion.) FWIW, I was primarily interested in the math details of SGD and backprop. I whipped up software for exploring the math basically, wasn't terribly interested at that time in applications. I typically approximated functions. Very cool that the same function has so many algorithmic expressions --justifying the set theory conception in terms of a set of ordered pairs.
Tis true, and now I'm wondering now, what role my body being there played. I'm a big guy too, but she had only known me for a couple of hours.
I'd love to know what thoughts went through Meri's head. Would she have done the same if it had been just her and Barb there? I'd guess yes.
Ah but part of the calculation, because she saw that he saw that you were with her -- carrot and the stick.
Quoting wonderer1
Ah, but was there time for thoughts ? It'd be nice if we had a Life Computer to examine alternative futures safely, because we could always rewind.
I was very interested in the applications but not so much the math. My best friend in college was still in school working on his M.S. and I looked through his copy of Parallel Distributed Processing when visiting one weekend. It changed the course of my life enormously.
About six months later (36 years ago), in a manic state that scared the shit out of me, I intuited an explanation for a lot of idiosnycratic things about myself (including social issues), in terms of hypothesized variations in low level neural interconnect structure. I only recently found out, that some years back evidence that fit my hypothesis well has been found.
I think I became a bit dissociated, with one part of my brain yelling, "This makes so much sense!" and another part of my brain yelling something like, "You don't have anywhere near the educational basis to think this hypothesis merits serious consideration!" Over three days I became pretty out of touch with reality due to this shouting match going on in my head.
It took a year for me to get over the fear of being in that mental state and reach the point that I was willing to risk allowing myself to think about such things.
I would think so too.
I'd love to know what thoughts went through Meri's head. Would she have done the same if it had been just her and Barb there? I'd guess yes.
wonderer1
Quoting plaque flag
Ok, I was lazy with my language. How about, "What intuitions arose?"
I wonder about trust. Barb and I had known each other for years. Meri, being a great observer of people, I'd guess she recognized Barb's trust in me while we were in the bar. I hadn't asked for her number or anything at that point though. On one hand, I think it was rather bold of her to assume I would step in. On the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised if she 'knew' I had her covered.
You might find this title of interest.
That's interesting. I don't know League of Legends. I'm not good at games requiring super quick response times.
On the matter of expertise, and its relationship to intuition; I'd say video games provide a pretty 'thin' training set. Intuitions developed from playing a videogame don't tend to be very useful outside of video games.
Having expertise in something a lot more complex than a video game, might help you get a better grasp on the nature of intuition.
Can you post an excerpt of what in particular you see as pertinent?
I only got a bit past, "But was this only a poetic metaphor or can we really say that the genetic code is a true molecular language?", and saw that the author was likely going to give the wrong answer.
Regardless, it does bring up a couple questions. Do you think DNA is *about* something? I.e. does DNA have intentionality? Is a question of, "What is meant by intentionality?", involved in determining whether or not something is a language?
It's the book Plato at the Googleplex, Rebecca Goldstein. It's a reflection on the role of Plato both historically and culturally up until the present (hence the title!) It combines analysis of some of Plato's teachings with reflections on what relevance they have for the present day, including rather whimsical imaginary modern dialogues where Plato encounters computers (a google chromebook in particular) among other things. Of course Goldstein is not starry-eyed, she recognises Plato as the beginning, not the end, of philosophy, and the significance of all that has been discovered since. I see it as relevant, because I think it dispells the idea that, because Plato lived 2,500 years ago, his ideas are archaic or superseded. Of course in some ways they are, but some of them are of perennial interest.
For instance there's also a good Goldstein piece on Kurt Gödel on Mathematical Truth. She says
As I mentioned to @Srap Tasmaner, I find platonic realism interesting - the fact that there are real abstractions. They're not just 'in the mind' but also //not// 'out there somewhere'. That, I find extremely interesting.
Quoting Pantagruel
Kant differentiation between 'transcendent' and 'transcendental' - 'transcendent' refers to objects or beings that lie beyond the realm of possible experience or knowledge, cannot be known through sensory experience or empirical investigation. Examples include God, the soul, and the ultimate nature of the universe. Kant says that attempting to understand or make claims about transcendent beings is beyond the scope of reason.
'Transcendental' refers to the conditions and knowledge - what must be the case for knowledge to be possible. Transcendental inquiry seeks to examine the necessary structures and principles that make knowledge and experience possible. Kant believed that our minds possess a priori cognitive faculties that shape and structure our experience of the world including space, time, and the categories of understanding (e.g., causality, substance, and quantity), which provide the necessary framework for us to perceive, understand, and make sense of experience.
It's a distinction worth reflecting on, because the latter is more in keeping with naturalism, but also illustrates the sense in which what we know exceeds the bounds (=transcends) what we can empirically validate.
Ah that makes more sense. When I first clicked the link, it too me to an article on biosemiotics.
Looks interesting. I've got another of Goldstein's books on my to read pile.
It's endlessly analyzable right ? I guess we've got millions of years of R & D hidden away from our 'conscious'/linguistic investigation and (in some situations) control. At the beginning of relationships, there's the moment of the first kiss, letting 'I love you' slip out, all kinds of stuff.
I was attracted to her before witnessing the 'magic', but wasn't considering asking her out because I knew she was going to be leaving the country in a few months. She was here on a Fullbright scholarship, and part of the terms were that she return home to Finland for two years after completing her studies. I figured I was going to be heartbroken when I decided to ask her out, and that intuition was sure as hell right, but that was the best three months of my life.
To guess as the adventure of those three months, I go back in time to something similar in my own life, that started long ago ---and which has somehow lasted, though not without storms that even the battered ghost of Bukowksi would respect. For me it was/is a musician, not really the scholastic type, which might help keep me grounded, remind me there's more than concepts. Watching The Bear together at the moment. Great show about chefs.
What I love about Popper is his respect for creativity and intuition. The (mysterious) source of a hypothesis doesn't (shouldn't) count for or against it.
I can relate to some degree in my own way --- something along the lines of a shouting match..invasive compulsive thoughts -- but I was living a crazy life, folly of the young weed, basically asking for trouble...
Actually video games are pretty complex but they only appear simple to the average viewer. League isn't just response times, there's so much more knowledge and thinking that goes into it. Just look at pros. I've played for years and even I don't have the skill or mental game.
Also I said intuition is limited to the area of knowledge you are using it in. Without any knowledge to draw on you're just tossing a coin.
But this can't be entirely true. Strictly speaking, there hasn't always been discursive knowledge. I would say there is a pre-discursive intuition, which is a general kind of knowing how. Like a proto-human who is expert at hurling stones. He doesn't have a discursive understanding of gravity, or ballistics, but he does have an intuitive grasp of these things. Then there is a post-discursive intuition, in which the subject-matter of discursive understanding itself can become an object of the intuitive faculty. Intuition fills in the blanks.
For example, people intuitively want to believe that heavier objects fall faster than lighter ones. Scientific thought seems to chide this. In fact, relative to any particular object, a more massive object is more strongly attracted than a less massive object, so this intuition has a substantial basis. The intuitive truth is simply not perceptible at human scales and conditions.
It is entirely true. Intuition says heavier objects fall faster, science proved that wrong. A more massive object isnt more strongly attracted, if anything a less massive object is, its how the moon orbits the Earth along with our satellites. This intuition has no basis.
There is no general knowing how. You could call it biology since we are all humans and all prone to similar behaviors. He doesnt have an intuitive grasp in throwing stones, more like he learns after throwing many stones. Intuition doesnt fill in the gaps, again research shows this isnt the case. You are still committing the mistake of intuition being magic when we know now it isnt.
You are still making it more than what it is, the matter is settled currently.
It has always surprised me how many people are not aware of their own thinking processes. Unaware that their consciousness and reason are just a small part of their mental life and that most of what we think, feel, know is not a function of those two limited processes. It's certainly something you see all the time here on the forum. So, I guess you could say you're in good company.
Yes, I kind of assumed this was the extent of your scientific understanding.
1000 tonnes attracting another 1000 tonne mass at a distance of 1 meter realizes 66.743 Newtons of force. 1000 tonnes attracting a 1 tonne mass at a distance of 1 meter realizes .066743 Newtons of force.
Granted, the partial intuition of the greater force exerted between greater masses is offset by the greater inertia, which is ultimately realized in the complete intuition (realized by Newton) that Force equals Mass times Acceleration.
So all that is really "settled" is your lack of intuitive comprehension of basic physical concepts. Hence, I suppose, your disdain for intuition.
I think individual variation in cognitive strengths and weaknesses plays a big role that few people are cognizant of. Most people aren't going to see a need for the sort of cognitive testing that I've had done on myself, and therefore most people likely lack an intuitive understanding of the role that variations in cognitive faculties between individuals play in the way those individuals understand things.
The first time I took a WAIS block design test, the person conducting the test commented on how much better it is giving the test to engineers. I had subjectively felt that I was performing slowly, when in fact I was doing the tasks quickly. I realized that I had previously just assumed that everyone has the same visuo-spatial abilities that I do. It is still difficult for me to imagine being without visuo-spatial abilities like mine, because those abilities play such a big role in much that I do.
I think something similar may be going on with many of the extremely language focused philosophers. Some say thinking is impossible apart from language, and maybe for them that is much moreso the case, than it is for me. However I wonder if there isn't a deficit in visuo-spatial abilities involved, with having such a point of view.
Not sure what you are getting at, if you aren't aware of it then there isn't really anything you can do about it. Intuition isn't something you can control much like thoughts. Though intuition is also a limited process, again you're trying to make it out to be magic or some thing when it isn't.
We are products of genetics, environment, culture, and upbringing as well as experiences. That's pretty much about it.
Though most of what we think and feel and know is due to consciousness, without that you don't really have anything else. Sure your body could be alive but without awareness you won't really be able to do anything. Not saying consciousness in the "woo" sense, just stating a fact.
I don't really have disdain for intuition, but I don't really care for people making it out to be something like magic or transcendent when it's more just thinking fast. My knowledge of physics doesn't change that.
The same applies to Newton, we don't really fully know what in his life led up to that nor does it change what intuition is. I'd also be willing to bet there wasn't anything special about him realizing this, he was just the first one to say it.
You are oversimplifying it. Discursive knowledge didn't appear all of a sudden out of nothing. It was assembled - based on intuitive insights. No point arguing. The vast majority of the thread is from people who have a genuine interest in examining intuition.
Intuition is a notoriously ambiguous term in philosophy, and in this case definitions will become especially important. BonJour calls it "rational insight," and I think he is getting at a basic dichotomy between two ways of knowing. The English derivatives for the two ways of knowing are 'ratiocination' and 'intellection'.
Ratiocination is the intellectual operation which consists of composition or synthesis, and decomposition or analysis. It is the operation of the discursive mind which puts things together and pulls things apart. All formal systems of reasoning and logic are meant as aids to ratiocination, and in our world today ratiocination is by far the dominant intellectual act. It is so dominant that when folks like BonJour reference intellection ('intuition') our culture tends to balk!
Intellection is the intellectual operation which consists of simple apprehension. It is that moment when you "see" something, or when the dots finally connect. It is a kind of intellectual perception. It can apply to simple concepts, but also to more complex relations which are understood immediately.
For those who doubt the existence of intellection, I would simply point out that ratiocination presupposes intellection, and could not exist without it. This is because syllogistic reasoning always presupposes terms and concepts. They are the atomic building blocks of syllogistic reasoning, and they cannot ultimately be known by ratiocination or discursive thought. For example, we can question the premises of an argument and require our interlocutor to defend each premise, but this process of questioning premises cannot go on to infinity. At some point there must be a simple, non-composite manner of knowing which is capable of grounding ratiocination and discursive argumentation.
Admittedly I am only skimming the surface, but I should also address your basic conundrum that intuition is fallible, and therefore could not be capable of justification. The first thing to note is that pretty much everything that is capable of justification is also fallible. Just because we can find an example where intuition goes wrong does not mean that intuition is inherently unreliable. The second, longer answer, is that the distinction which divides knowledge from opinion also applies to intuition, and it is just as difficult and subtle. Intuition can be mistaken just as opinion can be mistaken, but intellection* and knowledge cannot be mistaken. What is the difference between intellection and intuition? The difference is, I aver, as slippery as the difference between knowledge and opinion. Yet we must hold that intellection exists if we are to hold that ratiocination is possible.
* "Intellection" is merely the word I have chosen to signify X, where "X is to intuition as knowledge is to opinion."
People who lack intellectual self-awareness are often unaware of how their thinking processes actually work. I have found that's true of people who dogmatically reject the value of intuition.
I think I agree. Can you clarify something? What does an awareness of how one's thinking process look like? Do you have an example? In other words, are you talking about an awareness of one's biases and limitations, or an awareness of sound thinking in general and being able to compare sound thinking with one's own process?
Again, youre not seeing what intuition is and want it to be more than it actually is. Or rather something other than it is.
In short intuition tells you what you already know, because its just fast thinking. Its why when tested, experts were found to be reliable in their intuition compared to randos.
You just cant admit that youre wrong
The vast majority of this thread is wrong about it. It really is just thinking fast and is drawn from experience.
Not to mention the success of it is prone to confirmation bias.
There are no intuitive insights per se, like I said its just thinking albeit really fast .
IMO youre examining a settled matter and trying to make to more than it is
Interesting. If intuition is thinking it is thinking without reasoning or analysis. I guess that's why it is also called a gut feeling.
What is the part of intuition that is 'already known'? Can you give an example of this in action?
Quoting Darkneos
That makes sense. Not everyone's intuition on a given subject is going to have equal weight.
:up:
Some chimps know how to crack the nuts, and some chimps don't.
Of the chimps that don't, the smart ones are the one's who are watching and learning.
A lot of what I've written in this thread is a description of my own experience using my mind. Earlier in this discussion and in other discussions I've described my experience of intuition as a cloud of knowledge, lit from within and containing everything I know and have experienced - all connected and interacting. I recognize that visual imagery like that has a big role in how I think. Although my thinking is strongly verbal, I visualize my thinking as ideas, thoughts, words bubbling up from a spring from a source I can't see or feel. That invisible source feels as much like me as the part of me I can be aware of.
I have been criticized by more philosophical types that my philosophy is too dependent on introspection, which they find suspect. I've started at least five discussions that examine what different types of mental process feel like from the inside. I've said many times that the focus of my intellectual life is on knowing things, knowing how I know them, and knowing how certain I am of that knowledge. Knowing what knowing feels like is a big part of that.
This is fun. I could go on and on.
Quoting Darkneos
Your thinking is rigid and dogmatic. And wrong.
Do you know what being wrong feel like?
[irony]It hasn't happened yet. I'm curious to see what it would feel like.[/irony]
Have you seen that TED Talk? If not, I get the impression that you would appreciate it.
Indeed. As I said earlier, definitions are important when dealing with such an ambiguous term.
@Darkneos seems to be under the impression that by "intuition" we are talking about a knack, a kind of practical knowledge similar to phronesis. For example, he thinks the knack he has developed with respect to League of Legends is intuition.
Of course the word 'intuition' is sometimes used to convey a knack, but the OP is clearly not inquiring about a knack. The OP says:
Quoting Charlie Lin
What is being referred to here is grounded in speculative knowledge, and not merely in practical knowledge. Specifically, it is the simple (non-composite and non-discursive), speculative act by which BonJour grounds his epistemological position of Foundationalism. It is something like intellection.
I couldn't agree more. There was another thread some time ago questioning the philosophical validity or usefulness of definitions. I couldn't get involved. Without definitions, what else is there? If nothing else, you have to define what it is you are agreeing to discuss....
I'll take a look.
No, it's just showing what it IS.
That's not what the research shows.
Already known in that you're aware of the result of the intuition not the thought process leading to it.
As I noted, the research you referenced studied your misconception of what intuition is.
That's really interesting. What things feel like on the inside has never captured my imagination. I'm not even sure what that would mean experientially for me. However I do have an intuitive grasp of my process. :wink: To some extent I know my limitations, my attractions and repulsions, my biases, my patterns, my omissions and my strengths.
Mostly when it comes to intuition or thinking I have instant access to a thought and it generally has no feeling attached to it or anything additional to the thought itself. Maybe this is why I don't care much for poetry and you do - it's in how we are wired to experience things. Or something like that. Do you think there is a connection between intuition and a love of poetry? Curiously, I am not very interested in stories or plots in books or films. I am more interested in language, atmosphere and character.
But at the same time, the way you see things and the way I do are often very similar. We both have a use what works pragmatism.
Quoting Tom Storm
That's a really good question. It opens up a bunch of issues for me. I'll just keep it simple and say yes, the importance of intellectual self-awareness for me is related to the way I think when I'm reading or writing poetry. That kind of thinking has a purity and depth that are blunted with my regular old every day thinking.
I appreciate your dichotomy. But after all what exactly is intellection, after removing all inference reasoning (inductive,deductive,abductive)? It seems to me nothing left but definition of notion and reference of object. e.g
Bachelor is unmarried.
This is a table. (poiting at the table)
In other word, intellection is some sentence that I understand immediate when I get the meaning of each composition of them meaning of 'bachelor', 'unmarried' 'table'. In your terminology 'presupposed term and concept'.
I am skeptical this notion would be what BouJour and other foundamentalists (for example George Bealer) propose as a foundation for knowledge(take it as justified beliefs). For one thing, the truthness of such propositions seems too trivial to be a souce of evidence. The proposition 'bachelor is married .' despite its trueness takes me to no further belief. Additionally, it is true that the fact that even such proposition can be fallible does not follow that it cannot be the source of justification, but it obviously does not grant any positive epistomolocial status, right? So maybe in case ratiocination is available it should be prefered and we should be more careful when intellection is applied.
Anyway thanks again for your explaining the notions of ratiocination and intellection. And I am quite curious the history of these notions in philosophical discourse, since I have rarely encountered them in readings. Have a good day!
The first thing to remember is that intellection and ratiocination are intellectual acts, not sentences.
When trying to understand intellection I think the modern mind must begin with that last sentence of my post, "We must hold that intellection exists if we are to hold that ratiocination is possible." Ratiocination without intellection is like a house without a foundation.
Quoting Charlie Lin
The apprehension of simple concepts is only one form of intellection, but it is perhaps the easiest to understand. So yes, apprehending the meaning of a term such as 'bachelor' is an instance of intellection. This is not to say that we automatically understand what a bachelor is without experience, evidence, arguments, etc. Yet two people could be presented with the exact same evidence and arguments, and one might make the jump to understand what a bachelor is while the other does not. The first has intellected the meaning of 'bachelor' while the second has not.
Quoting Charlie Lin
Syllogisms are built up piece by piece. If you do not understand what a bachelor is, then you will be unable to understand every argument which makes use of the concept of bachelorhood. Furthermore, every single argument presupposes a number of atomic concepts. Thus if you have no atomic concepts to work from, every single argument and conclusion in the world will be inaccessible to you. Because of this it is a grave mistake to suppose that the intellection or understanding of concepts has no epistemic value.
It is sometimes helpful to note that arguments have, at minimum, two premises and one conclusion. Think of modus ponens and modus tollens, which are two of the most basic kinds of arguments. But if you drill down and try to defend each premise of an argument with a set of second-order arguments, and each premise of the second-order arguments with a set of third-order arguments, and so on, you will have arguments (of ever-increasing cardinality) unto infinity and your conclusion will never ultimately be justified. Arguments themselves presuppose a non-argument (non-composite) foundation, and just as arguments presuppose terms, so too does ratiocination presuppose intellection. This is especially relevant to foundationalists like BonJour.
...It would be like saying, "I am going to build a house out of bricks, and every brick will rest on two lower bricks!" For some reason it never occurs to our age to ask the question, "Won't the bottom bricks have to rest on something other than bricks?!"
Quoting Charlie Lin
A lot of philosophers do think that intellection is a kind of induction, and I am sympathetic to that idea. But induction is a very mysterious and ill-defined thing. It is not even clear that it ought to be called inferential reasoning.
Quoting Charlie Lin
I am currently deprived of my physical books, but one philosopher who tackles this with BonJour in mind is Dr. Michael J. Winter. If memory serves, he has a chapter in a book or edited volume devoted specifically to this topic, and he grounds the account in a form of induction.
Intuitions, in the philosophical sense, are what one intellectual immediately grasps of the situation (whereas, in colloquial speech, it can also mean 'going with your gut'): this is why it is sometimes called 'an intellectual seeming'.
Intuitions, like reason, are fundamental to the way by which we come to know the world and, as such, are presupposed as reliable as opposed to determining how reliable they actually are. For example, if I start noticing that my intuitions are causing me to stray incredibly far from the truth (to the point, perhaps, that I am endangering myself constantly), then that is itself an intuition. Likewise, to say that intuitions are reliable or unreliable is to intuit that--thusly, the very affirmation or denial of it presupposes it in the first (and that's why I like to think of intuitions are simply inevitable).
Because you can never know a single thing without intuiting, I find epistemic conservatism to be quite appealing; that is, that one should use their intuitions until they can be countered with evidence that demonstrates their unreliability (which would itself use other intuitions).
Perhaps why we inevitably use intuitions is because there is much more processing occurring when we view reality than what we have introspective access to and, thusly, we can't retrospectively cognize 100% accurately at why we intuited what we did (at a deeper level).