INTUITION

Intuition came up in several recent school readings and class discussions. I don’t understand this conversation or know where to go with it. At all. Part of the problem, I think, is about definitions. (Though this is probably just Maslow's hammer: my cognitive bias that over-relies upon semantics. To the semantic-hammer, everything seems a word-nail.) What I'm certain of is that our readings never help with a definition. (It seems you're just supposed to intuit a meaning. ZING!) And when I go looking elsewhere I find an expansive spectrum of meanings, with some directly contradicting others.

To give you a taste, those meanings begin with "instinct." (What are we talking about, exactly? Information neither learned through experience nor coded in DNA? Housed on what mainframe, then? Where? Are we talking about physics or metaphysics?) From there we go to what some may read as a slightly modified version but that I interpret as closer to the opposite of the above: "a gut feeling based on experience." (So you've made enough espressos or built enough boats or knitted enough scarves to sense when something is off without having to wait to see the final result, or even necessarily knowing what's wrong or how you've made that assessment. Makes sense.) Next is a highly specific and spiritually-entwined "innate knowing." This is explained as a form of illumination beyond the mental, almost certainly something super-natural. Then we have an impossibly vague and general sense that humans have a capacity for understanding themselves and the world. So this intuition stuff seems rather complicated or, at least to me, terribly messy. With all of that in the offering, I think you really have to pick one and be clear about it. Though that never seems to happen. We just speak as if we know what we're talking about and are all on the same page.

But what's the big deal? Does any of this matter? Well, I think it has to. For example, to me, it is a perfectly intuitive, experiential, sense-based proposition or observation, to suggest that I'm sitting on something (the Earth) that's far more like a leaf than a marble. This intuition goes deeper and tells me this crusty, undulating, leaf-like thing is nearly motionless (aside from the occasional quivering we call earthquakes.) The world being leaf-like is just intuitively obvious. Flat Earthers, as a result, make all kinds of sense on any intuitive level. Or, rather, if coming from a stance that there's real wisdom in experience-based intuition, I don't know where anyone could find room for serious criticism. Has anyone ever had the experience or innate knowing or spiritual illumination of their being on the surface of a sphere-like object that is, if shrunk to fit in the palm of your hand, smoother than glass? Any intuition that our collective Earthliness is spinning like a mad top (at 1,000km/h), all while trapped and swirling in a bottomless whirlpool (the solar system), that is itself trapped in another bottomless whirlpool (the galaxy), which are together all spinning and zooming through an unimaginably vast expanse of emptiness at an additional 100,000km/h? No. Every shaman and mystic and spiritual warrior there ever was failed to grok just how weird (counterintuitive) this whole reality thing is. Everyone's sense of the matter (and any common sense and still more common intuition – or even insights gleaned from a seriously exotic psychopharmacological catapult straight off the waterfall) inevitably arrives them at expressions, as beautiful and meaningful as they may be, that are backasswards to reality. This is just how confused I am (we are) by my (our) nature, my (our) senses, and my (our) experience.

So then this power of intuition may be an insight into my mind, and perhaps how it came about, but not at all into the subject or matter my intuition is directing itself toward. Thinking about it, I clearly have an intuitive geography and cosmology, an intuitive biology and sense of health, and more; but these, also very clearly, tell me how I feel about the world or how I'd like it to be and not, at all, how the world is. As such, my own "intuition" feels synonymous with "deliberate self-immiseration." And I don't know how else to think, feel, or intuit about the matter. For me, my intuition is that which constrains and diminishes myself and the world while clearly and reliably leading me astray. (Is yours so different? How so?)

And in my intuition I'm confused, schizophrenically so (with a full complement of hallucinations, delusions, and disordered thinking), on just about every front. My math intuition, for example, tells me that if I add up all the natural numbers to infinity (1+2+3+4+5...) I'd have an infinitely large number – or at least, if there even is an answer (how could there be?) it must be something truly tremendous in scale. Right? Well, amazingly, the answer can be worked out without an infinite number of infinitely powerful computers running for an infinity. And the result is nothing even vaguely approximating my "innate or experience-based knowing." All natural numbers to infinity sum to -1/12. (You read that right: negative one twelfth!) And, though you should very much doubt this, because it makes no common sense and perfectly defies any intuition you could possibly have (evolved, God-given, or both), this result forms the basis of real work in the worlds of math and physics, such as complex analysis, string theory, quantum field theory, and more.

Speaking of physics, my intuitive physics tells me that if I can see something, or even imagine it, I can divide or reduce that thing to half or to just some smaller portion of said whole. Seems impossible to refute that and yet Max Plank did so, demonstrating that our human-scale intuition is unlikely to be operative at any fundamental level. Or what about the other end of the scale? What if you were asked which number is bigger: the number of planets in the universe or the number of seconds since the dawn of time, 13.8 billion years ago? What does your intuition tell you? Or even take a quick reasoned guess? Well, I happen to know, just randomly, that a million seconds is roughly 11.5 days and a billion seconds is almost 32 years. So without even starting to think about this, and at the very smallest of scales, I'm already in the billions; so I would guess, however big and old the universe, for matter to coalescing into chunky bits, and for those chunky bits to conglomerate into substantial chonky chunks, big enough that we might call them planets, is a rare enough event and one that takes a significant amount of time that there almost has to be, surely, more seconds than planets. In fact, I would have bet that was the case and by a substantial margin. But now take a reasonable stab at an estimate by actually rubbing some numbers together. The simple bit: How many seconds have elapsed since the birth of space-time? If that event took place 13.8 billion years ago, and each year contains 31,536,000 seconds, then there have been more than four hundred thirty-five quadrillion (435,196,800,000,000,000) seconds, or so. The messier bit: Best estimates suggest there to be roughly two trillion galaxies in the observable universe. The number of stars in the Milky Way (seemingly a pretty average galaxy) are roughly on the order of 100 to 400 billion. If we say there is only one planet per star (some have none, others many, so one seems pretty low) and we use only the lowest estimate of 100 billion stars then with this smallest of estimates there are likely more than two hundred sextillion (200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) planets in the universe. So it's not even close – and in the opposite direction my intuition offered – with planets being, at the least, 450,000 times more abundant than seconds.

This intuition business seems pretty bunk, if only to me. Perhaps, as J.B.S Haldane put it, "the world is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose."