We use reason as a fundamental tool, and far, far better than any other species, to be sure. But as Einstein said “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”
And so, given all of modernity weighing itself upon you: to truly, intuitively take on board a given point of view back before it had much rational merit in terms of popularity.....you deserve an absurd amount of credit.
And so, given all of modernity weighing itself upon you: to truly, intuitively take on board a given point of view back before it had much rational merit in terms of popularity.....you deserve an absurd amount of credit.
I have to agree with you MinigHabit, and you put it really well. As a fiction writer, I've been spending a lot of time thinking about the performance of the logical mind compared to the intuitive mind. And because I get to experiment with both risk-free in my creations, I get to test out a lot of theories. For many tasks, and especially those with lots of complex inputs, the intuitive mind is far more successful. So you'd think we would trust it more. Here is why we don't:
Our logical mind is like following a path in the daytime. We can look back at our thought processes because they were conscious. We can even map out our path by writing down our assumptions that led us to where we are. And using many tools, we can gain confidence in our prediction of the path ahead. Reason, being a largely conscious process, is subject to conscious scrutiny and gains our conscious trust.
But our unconscious mind is where intuition comes from. It's like a black, inscrutable pool that, like some mystic well, delivers forth images of our future, much more more accurately than our reasoning mind ever could. But we can never see how it does it. This strange gift within us is beyond our logical analysis, and despite its superior performance historically, we find it hard to trust.
Simply by recognising these aspects of weighing reasoned motivation against intuitive motivation helps us trust intuition more. Knowing that our uncertainty comes from inscrutability, rather than poor performance, is of great value. To reinforce that, it is sometimes helpful to remember how often our heart has been right about what someone is like, and how often our reasoning has let us down when judging the nature of someone.
But intuition is different from hope, and very different from desire. There are no clear instructions for telling these things apart. And fear can look a lot like intuition saying no, when this is not the case. Learning to discern intuition from our other emotions, learning to trust intuition, and explore the sources of other emotions is just as important to success as education and training the logical mind. And fortunately it is just as rewarding as well.
This is super deep. I think more than ever, we are finding that Descartes' Ghost in the Machine paradigm just isn't satisfactory. We aren't sophisticated calculating machines. The human brain is most wonderfully complex thing in the known universe. The astounding levels of calculation it achieves, and at such miniscule power levels to the greatest of supercomputers....
There is more to us than that. Our minds are magnificently opague. How we encode sense data into our neural nets, how we bottle the results up into emotion, human feeling, love, loss, intuition, fear, loathing, the creative impulse, the desire to grow, to achieve, to risk, to want. The complexity of the human spirit and all of our social relationships and inventions therein, like language itself.....It's all at the core, intuitions which become wisdom which get past down to form an almost a priori baseline of understanding for the future generations to press on from....
So I went to this AI vs IQ event in Chicago a few months back with some tremendous panelists like leaders of the IBM Watson initiative and folks of those ilk.
And the general feeling that I got was that we are asking the wrong questions about AI. It's not that they are going to replace us. Because they are not us. They blow us out of the water in terms of processing huge amounts of structured data very quickly, or pure rationality. There are definitely places where humans are very weak, like in making statistical inferences or understanding what makes us happy. So the key is to use AI to augment where we are weak.
AI has evolved tremendously in the last 50 years. But it has barely moved the needle in terms of consciousness.
And it all starts with what makes us different, truly unique. And that is intuition, consciousness itself. Like Carl Sagan said, we are made of star stuff and are a way for the universe to known itself. It's one thing think of one's self as a collection of atomic stuffs. It's totally another to go from that to knowing, to consciousness.
