Quote:
Originally Posted by RVCA
Good reason. My emotions have lead me astray many times.
I usually respect and agree with what you have to say, but I'm afraid that in this case, your input is a bunch of pseudological crap. A quick search of Google lead to the following definitions of "intuition".
Dictionary.com: direct perception of truth, fact, etc., independent of any reasoning process; immediate apprehension.
Answers.com: The act or faculty of knowing or sensing without the use of rational processes; immediate cognition.
Merriam-Webster.com: the power or faculty of attaining to direct knowledge or cognition without evident rational thought and inference
Correct me if I'm wrong, as perhaps I'm interpreting "intuition" too narrowly, but it seems to be directly "at war" with reason. Reaching a conclusion and forming some belief through intuition is vastly different than forming some belief through reason.
For example, a large majority of human civilization used to hold the belief, formed through intuition, that the Earth was flat. That just seemed to make sense, didn't it? It felt right. But through the use of reason and the acquisition of evidence, we now know that the Earth is not flat. This is one of infinite cases where beliefs formed on intuition are flat out unjustifiable, unprovable, and false.
That's not to say that reason and intuition are mutually exclusive when forming beliefs. I recognize that an intuition about something X might lead to the discovery and formulation of reasons to hold X true, but a belief formed solely upon intuition cannot be said to be "complementary" to a belief formed upon reason.
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Was the notion that the Earth was flat really intuitive? I think you could just as easily attribute it to reason. Here's an experiment: take the longest string you can find in the village. Maybe it's a mile long, if you live in a fancy sit-around-all-day and weave kinda village. Now, have three people with equal length sticks. Two are holding the ends of the string and are supporting it with their sticks. The third gets in the middle and sees if the string is higher or lower than his stick. If the string is at stick-level, this proves the world is flat!
Well, obviously it doesn't. While this process is reasonable, it hasn't been refined to the point where it would give us an accurate answer. But then, we never quite know how refined our process needs to be until we realize we've been wrong all along.
Reason and intuition both evolve. Maybe your emotions have burned you in the past, but your reason has probably burned you in the past too. That's why I'm saying it's not reason
or intuition, it's both, supporting each other, helping each other become more refined and subtle.
Some discoveries might be purely intellectual or purely intuitive. However, such a discovery is only really problematic if it poses a huge challenge to the other side. Wave/particle duality, for instance, is a giant intellectual leap that poses a huge challenge to many people's intuition. Similarly, the intuitive experience of 'synchronicity' challenges many people's reasonable belief that events in the universe are random and disconnected. But that doesn't mean they should be discarded at face value. It's simply a challenge to continue to dissect these phenomena and to question and refine the other side of the equation. If we have a powerful intuitive experience that doesn't sit well with our rational beliefs, maybe we should see if there are any blind spots or contradictions there. If we make a powerful intellectual realization that is intuitively incomprehensible, maybe we should see if there's anything we're not allowing ourselves to feel, or if there's some subtler aspect to life that we've been looking past.
Our intuition and intellect can both make mistakes. Mistakes are how we grow. Just because intuition and intellect are defined as polar opposites doesn't mean that they're 'at war.' That's like saying the wave and particle are 'at war' because they're opposites. Maybe some things are so far in the domain of reason that they'll never find an intuitive expression, like the square root of -1. But then, maybe some things are so far in the domain of intuition that they can't be rationalized or conceptualized. Who knows? All we can do is keep experiencing the universe.
Also, this isn't necessarily about forming beliefs. The scientific mindset will eagerly recognize that every belief is simply a hypothesis, open to revision. A person truly in tune with their intuition will recognize the same thing. This is just how I feel right now, the general impression I carry at this moment of the universe around me. It might change, after all, it has changed many times in the past. Living in the moment means to be open to novel ideas, which lead to novel techniques, which lead to novel inventions, and to be open to novel feelings, which lead to novel insights, which lead to self-reinvention.