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> people tend to make decisions based on intuition rather than reason. I think these types of article have a too-narrow definition of rationality. I think tha

by dmfdmf 10y ago

> people tend to make decisions based on intuition rather than reason. I think these types of article have a too-narrow definition of rationality. I think that emotions, feelings and intuition are subconscious processes but still part of the faculty of reason. The mistake is to think that rationality = conscious-logical-deduction but anyone who has solved some complex problem knows the experience of working on a problem or days, weeks, months or even years and then one day the solution just hits you, usually when you aren't actually working on the problem.

paulddraper 10y ago
Are you suggesting that reason include intuition? I don't believe that would ever be a helpful definition of the word. --- Reason is conscious; intuition is subconscious. Of course, they're related: reason can train intuition, and intuition can catalyze reason. But I disagree that a conversational distinction is inappropriate.
- dmfdmf 10y ago
  I'm not suggesting it, I outright stated it in my comment. My point is that potentially logical connections can (or must) be made subconsciously and that that is an aspect of how the faculty of reason works. Here is an example you experience every single day and even right now if you type a reply to my comment. If you want to express an idea in words you don't consciously and methodically select words from a dictionary, no. The words come automatically with nary a thought, you just issue the command to summon the words to express your idea. Without this ability you (and more specifically reason) could not function at all, ergo, intuition and subconscious processes must be a component of reason, reason being our faculty for processing information.
  - eternalban 10y ago
    I would think no rational being would argue that conscious psychological phenomena are disconnected from subconscious phenomena. It is eminently rational to note that we do not have a complete grasp of the inner workings of human consciousness and mind. > Here is an example you experience every single day and even right now if you type a reply to my comment. If you want to express an idea in words you don't consciously and methodically select words from a dictionary, no. The words come automatically with nary a thought, you just issue the command to summon the words to express your idea. > Without this ability you (and more specifically reason) could not function at all, ergo, intuition and subconscious processes must be a component of reason, reason being our faculty for processing information. To claim an equivalence between reason and intuition based on that reasoning would necessarily require that you also include irrational conscious behavior. Which I hope will show you that your position is, in effect, an empty proposition that sheds no light on the matter. Intutitive thought processes and rational thought processes, in my mind, have the same relationship as music and mathematics. Clearly there is a common ground, but they are distinct. Less whimsically, one may arrive at a decision based on intution that is subsequently validated by events. However, this arrival does not permit a retracing of steps to permit future decisions. Of course it is possible to extract a general law or principle from the experience, but that is not a given. Reason, on the other hand, is the application of extant, and formulation of new, systemized understanding. However that should not be taken as a measure of the superiority of reason to intution, for it is equally true that intution can at times give us wings to go where reason can not take us.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
    I think the words we use to think about how the mind works help limit our understanding. For example, we refer that part of though, or intuition, whatever, that we don't do consciously (what does that even mean) as occurring subconsciously. If I understand correctly when people say 'subconsciously' they are refer to what happens outside of our awareness, as in like you say we don't sit there with a dictionary or a bunch of idea reference books and flick between the pages in order to form a thought. But why the term subconscious. sub- 1. a prefix occurring originally in loanwords from Latin ( subject; subtract; subvert; subsidy); on this model, freely attached to elements of any origin and used with the meaning “under,” “below,” “beneath” ( subalpine; substratum), “slightly,” “imperfectly,” “nearly” ( subcolumnar; subtropical), “secondary,” “subordinate” ( subcommittee; subplot). I conjecture that using the word subconscious causes a linguistic trap that results in us undervaluing what goes on in our minds. Also I think what most people think of when they think of thinking is merely the subvocalisation[1] or internal dialogue we run in mind. Here I agree with what you've written that, actually all, logical connections are done with intuitive reasoning. NB I'm a complete armchair amateur at philosophy / psychology / neurology. Of course everyone's got a consciousness so we're all experts. Right. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocalization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocalization
- smallnamespace 10y ago
  It's likely that Descartes would've disagreed with you on this point. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rationalism-empiricism/#1.1 http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rationalism-empiricism/#1.... Intuition is a form of rational insight. .... The Intuition/Deduction Thesis: Some propositions in a particular subject area, S, are knowable by us by intuition alone; still others are knowable by being deduced from intuited propositions.
  - dmfdmf 10y ago
    Good. That makes me even more confident that I am right. I disagree with some of his math so its a draw anyway.
    - jasonkostempski 10y ago
      Solid reasoning.
      - dmfdmf 10y ago
        Its Bayesian but the rhetorical trick is that I didn't tell you how much it increased my confidence. ;-)
- pmichaud 10y ago
  I agree that those are useful words to distinguish. I also think it's worthwhile to have a thing called "rationality" which maybe means "doing the best possible thing with your brain given your goals," which has to include both of what we're calling reason and intuition [1]. But I wanted to say some words here to flesh out the subject in a little more detail. "Reason" and "Intuition" may be separate, incomparable types. I think of Reason sort of like a technical spec -- a description of how a system should work, which leaves the implementation details as an exercise for the reader. I think most people use the word Intuition, meanwhile, as a catch-all to mean "anything that's not consciously executed logical reasoning (and probably not sensory processing either)." Underlying all these are the implementation details I mentioned I above--the actual "algorithms" our brain is executing. How you actually implement "reason" can make it better or worse, faster or slower, and I've found that people can make significant gains by changing the details of what they are doing with their minds. More broadly, I think people are capable of having significantly more access to their "unconscious" than most people realize (hence the scare quotes around the word ;)), and further that those nonlogical processes can also be different, and yield better or worse, faster or slower results. (To justify "significantly more access" a little: consider that 200,000 years ago, no one knew how to do formal logic, but all the required machinery was there between our ears. We did stuff back then that was a primitive type of reasoning just because we had no basis or training in doing better. Today we have decades of training and a culture that supports such things. If you've been educated at all, you've had years of training in reasoning. How much training have you had in introspecting on what we're calling here "unconscious" processing? Probably none or not much! I claim that training in this area can allow a person to have much richer and higher quality "intuitions.") Anyway, many people sense that the processes they are executing aren't reliable, and some of those come to believe they must rely on what they think of as reason, to the exclusion of their other faculties like emotions. That makes sense, but I think the stronger move is to understand, in detail, what your mind is actually doing, learn what those processes are good for, and where they are weak, and finally change and improve the processes where appropriate. There's a lot of interesting work going on in this field, and we're just getting started! [1] I'm the managing director of the Center for Applied Rationality, a nonprofit in the bay area, so I spend an unusual amount of time thinking about this stuff.
  - 10y ago
- ktRolster 10y ago
  Emotions are stored logic loops (sometimes they need to be debugged).
- jomamaxx 10y ago
  "Reason is conscious; intuition is subconscious." Conscious or not, it can still be reason. 'Hunger' , 'fear', 'lust', 'anger' are all part of the reasonable human calculation. If you set your mind to just 'conscious' decisions, we'd have been dead a long time ago. Consider autonomous functions: are you 'reasoning' your heart rate and breathing right now? And yet, somewhere, somehow, you're 'deciding' to keep your heart at a certain rate while it's warm, and another when you are in need of more oxygen, and another when it's cold. So autonomous functions are perfectly reasonable.
- eikenberry 10y ago
  Reason is mostly subconscious like all our mental facilities. That is not a good distinction. That it has good reasoning behind it is the only good distinction.
whybroke 10y ago
How would you go about showing that emotions, feelings and intuition produce good results without proving that very idea rationally? While intuition may be useful to get good results (perhaps it is the subconscious quickly applying some pattern that has worked in the past) there's no way to know a particular use of intuition worked unless you go back later and rationally analyze the results. And more importantly, there's no reason to believe intuition works at all unless we either 1) understand it on something like a neurological psychological level (I would not hold my breath waiting for this) or 2) do some statistical modeling of it's reliably.
- meric 10y ago
  Forget reason, rely only on intuition, and there will be no 'working' or 'not working'. Stop thinking and end your problems. (Tao Te Ching, chapter 20) Isn't that what we are all after, having no problems? Is there any point in time where in reality you are more than sensory signals entering your consciousness? Is everything not a mere an illusion of your mind? Letting intuition figuring everything out is effortless, why dwell on illusions? Thus there is no use for reason.
  - whybroke 10y ago
    Reason will give you the math to build the pyramids. Irrationality will make you think it is a good idea.
    - meric 10y ago
      Ahh yes, but it is intuition that gave you these words. :)
- ordu 10y ago
  > And more importantly, there's no reason to believe intuition works... Yes, there is. Humans are alive, they survived the evolution and they used intuition much more frequently then rationality. Logic was invented by greeks less then 3k years ago and before there was no way for rationality to exist. Intuiton does works in most cases. It is the apparent fact.
eevilspock 10y ago
Intuition and the ability to reason are components of intelligence. But they are distinct. Intuition is certainly not reason (though it could be reasonable) and reason is not intuition (though to some people it comes intuitively).
jdietrich 10y ago
Intuition can be tuned by the tools of rationality. Professional poker players infrequently calculate odds consciously, but they have a very strong intuitive sense of probability and game theory. Study and practice allows them to instinctively recognise the expected value of a scenario. Physicists and engineers develop an intuitive understanding of some very complex and counter-intuitive phenomena.
eikenberry 10y ago
I agree that thinking of these things in isolation is not that useful. That understanding how they interrelate is as important if not more important than understanding them in isolation. I also agree that rationality and intuition are not the opposites they are describing them as, the opposite of rational has always been emotional. Intuition plays a part both in rational and emotional decisions, it is orthogonal to that dualism.

by dmfdmf 10y ago

paulddraper 10y ago

Are you suggesting that reason include intuition? I don't believe that would ever be a helpful definition of the word. --- Reason is conscious; intuition is subconscious. Of course, they're related: reason can train intuition, and intuition can catalyze reason. But I disagree that a conversational distinction is inappropriate.

dmfdmf 10y ago
I'm not suggesting it, I outright stated it in my comment. My point is that potentially logical connections can (or must) be made subconsciously and that that is an aspect of how the faculty of reason works. Here is an example you experience every single day and even right now if you type a reply to my comment. If you want to express an idea in words you don't consciously and methodically select words from a dictionary, no. The words come automatically with nary a thought, you just issue the command to summon the words to express your idea. Without this ability you (and more specifically reason) could not function at all, ergo, intuition and subconscious processes must be a component of reason, reason being our faculty for processing information.
- eternalban 10y ago
  I would think no rational being would argue that conscious psychological phenomena are disconnected from subconscious phenomena. It is eminently rational to note that we do not have a complete grasp of the inner workings of human consciousness and mind. > Here is an example you experience every single day and even right now if you type a reply to my comment. If you want to express an idea in words you don't consciously and methodically select words from a dictionary, no. The words come automatically with nary a thought, you just issue the command to summon the words to express your idea. > Without this ability you (and more specifically reason) could not function at all, ergo, intuition and subconscious processes must be a component of reason, reason being our faculty for processing information. To claim an equivalence between reason and intuition based on that reasoning would necessarily require that you also include irrational conscious behavior. Which I hope will show you that your position is, in effect, an empty proposition that sheds no light on the matter. Intutitive thought processes and rational thought processes, in my mind, have the same relationship as music and mathematics. Clearly there is a common ground, but they are distinct. Less whimsically, one may arrive at a decision based on intution that is subsequently validated by events. However, this arrival does not permit a retracing of steps to permit future decisions. Of course it is possible to extract a general law or principle from the experience, but that is not a given. Reason, on the other hand, is the application of extant, and formulation of new, systemized understanding. However that should not be taken as a measure of the superiority of reason to intution, for it is equally true that intution can at times give us wings to go where reason can not take us.
- TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
  I think the words we use to think about how the mind works help limit our understanding. For example, we refer that part of though, or intuition, whatever, that we don't do consciously (what does that even mean) as occurring subconsciously. If I understand correctly when people say 'subconsciously' they are refer to what happens outside of our awareness, as in like you say we don't sit there with a dictionary or a bunch of idea reference books and flick between the pages in order to form a thought. But why the term subconscious. sub- 1. a prefix occurring originally in loanwords from Latin ( subject; subtract; subvert; subsidy); on this model, freely attached to elements of any origin and used with the meaning “under,” “below,” “beneath” ( subalpine; substratum), “slightly,” “imperfectly,” “nearly” ( subcolumnar; subtropical), “secondary,” “subordinate” ( subcommittee; subplot). I conjecture that using the word subconscious causes a linguistic trap that results in us undervaluing what goes on in our minds. Also I think what most people think of when they think of thinking is merely the subvocalisation[1] or internal dialogue we run in mind. Here I agree with what you've written that, actually all, logical connections are done with intuitive reasoning. NB I'm a complete armchair amateur at philosophy / psychology / neurology. Of course everyone's got a consciousness so we're all experts. Right. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocalization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocalization
smallnamespace 10y ago
It's likely that Descartes would've disagreed with you on this point. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rationalism-empiricism/#1.1 http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rationalism-empiricism/#1.... Intuition is a form of rational insight. .... The Intuition/Deduction Thesis: Some propositions in a particular subject area, S, are knowable by us by intuition alone; still others are knowable by being deduced from intuited propositions.
- dmfdmf 10y ago
  Good. That makes me even more confident that I am right. I disagree with some of his math so its a draw anyway.
  - jasonkostempski 10y ago
    Solid reasoning.
    - dmfdmf 10y ago
      Its Bayesian but the rhetorical trick is that I didn't tell you how much it increased my confidence. ;-)
pmichaud 10y ago
I agree that those are useful words to distinguish. I also think it's worthwhile to have a thing called "rationality" which maybe means "doing the best possible thing with your brain given your goals," which has to include both of what we're calling reason and intuition [1]. But I wanted to say some words here to flesh out the subject in a little more detail. "Reason" and "Intuition" may be separate, incomparable types. I think of Reason sort of like a technical spec -- a description of how a system should work, which leaves the implementation details as an exercise for the reader. I think most people use the word Intuition, meanwhile, as a catch-all to mean "anything that's not consciously executed logical reasoning (and probably not sensory processing either)." Underlying all these are the implementation details I mentioned I above--the actual "algorithms" our brain is executing. How you actually implement "reason" can make it better or worse, faster or slower, and I've found that people can make significant gains by changing the details of what they are doing with their minds. More broadly, I think people are capable of having significantly more access to their "unconscious" than most people realize (hence the scare quotes around the word ;)), and further that those nonlogical processes can also be different, and yield better or worse, faster or slower results. (To justify "significantly more access" a little: consider that 200,000 years ago, no one knew how to do formal logic, but all the required machinery was there between our ears. We did stuff back then that was a primitive type of reasoning just because we had no basis or training in doing better. Today we have decades of training and a culture that supports such things. If you've been educated at all, you've had years of training in reasoning. How much training have you had in introspecting on what we're calling here "unconscious" processing? Probably none or not much! I claim that training in this area can allow a person to have much richer and higher quality "intuitions.") Anyway, many people sense that the processes they are executing aren't reliable, and some of those come to believe they must rely on what they think of as reason, to the exclusion of their other faculties like emotions. That makes sense, but I think the stronger move is to understand, in detail, what your mind is actually doing, learn what those processes are good for, and where they are weak, and finally change and improve the processes where appropriate. There's a lot of interesting work going on in this field, and we're just getting started! [1] I'm the managing director of the Center for Applied Rationality, a nonprofit in the bay area, so I spend an unusual amount of time thinking about this stuff.
- 10y ago
ktRolster 10y ago
Emotions are stored logic loops (sometimes they need to be debugged).
jomamaxx 10y ago
"Reason is conscious; intuition is subconscious." Conscious or not, it can still be reason. 'Hunger' , 'fear', 'lust', 'anger' are all part of the reasonable human calculation. If you set your mind to just 'conscious' decisions, we'd have been dead a long time ago. Consider autonomous functions: are you 'reasoning' your heart rate and breathing right now? And yet, somewhere, somehow, you're 'deciding' to keep your heart at a certain rate while it's warm, and another when you are in need of more oxygen, and another when it's cold. So autonomous functions are perfectly reasonable.
eikenberry 10y ago
Reason is mostly subconscious like all our mental facilities. That is not a good distinction. That it has good reasoning behind it is the only good distinction.

whybroke 10y ago

How would you go about showing that emotions, feelings and intuition produce good results without proving that very idea rationally? While intuition may be useful to get good results (perhaps it is the subconscious quickly applying some pattern that has worked in the past) there's no way to know a particular use of intuition worked unless you go back later and rationally analyze the results. And more importantly, there's no reason to believe intuition works at all unless we either 1) understand it on something like a neurological psychological level (I would not hold my breath waiting for this) or 2) do some statistical modeling of it's reliably.

meric 10y ago
Forget reason, rely only on intuition, and there will be no 'working' or 'not working'. Stop thinking and end your problems. (Tao Te Ching, chapter 20) Isn't that what we are all after, having no problems? Is there any point in time where in reality you are more than sensory signals entering your consciousness? Is everything not a mere an illusion of your mind? Letting intuition figuring everything out is effortless, why dwell on illusions? Thus there is no use for reason.
- whybroke 10y ago
  Reason will give you the math to build the pyramids. Irrationality will make you think it is a good idea.
  - meric 10y ago
    Ahh yes, but it is intuition that gave you these words. :)
ordu 10y ago
> And more importantly, there's no reason to believe intuition works... Yes, there is. Humans are alive, they survived the evolution and they used intuition much more frequently then rationality. Logic was invented by greeks less then 3k years ago and before there was no way for rationality to exist. Intuiton does works in most cases. It is the apparent fact.

eevilspock 10y ago

Intuition and the ability to reason are components of intelligence. But they are distinct. Intuition is certainly not reason (though it could be reasonable) and reason is not intuition (though to some people it comes intuitively).

jdietrich 10y ago

Intuition can be tuned by the tools of rationality. Professional poker players infrequently calculate odds consciously, but they have a very strong intuitive sense of probability and game theory. Study and practice allows them to instinctively recognise the expected value of a scenario. Physicists and engineers develop an intuitive understanding of some very complex and counter-intuitive phenomena.

eikenberry 10y ago

I agree that thinking of these things in isolation is not that useful. That understanding how they interrelate is as important if not more important than understanding them in isolation. I also agree that rationality and intuition are not the opposites they are describing them as, the opposite of rational has always been emotional. Intuition plays a part both in rational and emotional decisions, it is orthogonal to that dualism.