Is intuition like a weak force of magic or more often the logical result of its time

[entropie]

I was wondering: lately they had a documentary about apes on television. There were those capuchin apes who hang out on trees all day and chill. But then when the falling tide comes and the little pond under them runs dry thy go down and grap clams. They cant open the clams so they spend hours hitting and rubbing them on trees until they open.

The reporter said: this is atypical for apes, since they are like all ADS-aggrieved and cant concentrate on shit for more than 2 seconds. But those apes have the ability to abstract and to imagine that there will be tasty calm meat inside and that becomes their driving force or motivation to continue with their work.

I found this to be a good description of intuition. However I told the story to an isfp friend of mine and he said that this mustnt be because the apes are so good at abstracting, it could be too that they just learnt over the years the clams have tasty meat inside and then copied this behaviour over generations. He had a point with that.

So I was wondering how intuition can be defined. You maybe all know the concept of induction and deduction and since I am not religious, I think induction only works in physics. And even there it's not real induction, the "appearing-out-of-nowhere" of an electromagnetical field while inducing an electrical current is probably a mere result of a quantum process we yet dont understand. Or any other process, let's call it "OJ-Simpson-process".

So I was wondering: have humans the ability to abstract ? I think so, I dont even think abstraction is very magical or complicated it's just the clear imagination of the end product while still being in the design process. So all fundamental changes dervived in physic for example are they a reasonable result according to their time ? So a thing that could be learnt because the basic conditions were right and someone just had to add 1 and 1 to come up with the result.

Or is there like a pool of ideas, like a weak force or an ability to induce in our brains we havent really developed yet and that enables us to have ideas flow from the subconciousness into the conciousness randomly according to unknown stimuli and let us perceive new things. Like the theory that states we as humans are part of the universe and we dont know how dependant that makes us from it. Like all the universe's knowledge could be coded into our DNA or our way of thinking is automatically aligned with the way the universe works. We would have the ability to think differently from what the universe would want from us, yet we would never stick to long with such train of thoughts because it is not in our nature to not think not exactly in the way the universe works.

Does someone understanhd this, I dont ?! Nevertheless, would like to hear your thoughts

 

[CrystalViolet]

^Was that a Ne vomit?
The words instant gratification vs. delayed gratification come to mind.
A certain amount of abstraction was involve in the process with the monkeys and the clams. Some where in the past, an individual monkey had the curiousity to see what was inside a clam, taste it and make the connection these all funny little things have tasty meat. Even if little abstraction is involved in the process now, at some point, there was.
As to intuition being weakly magical, I often thought Ni descriptions sound magical.

 

[Sunny Ghost]

I'm often confused by the definition of intuition in mbti terms. I know people in real life who will quickly say, "I'm an N... and I'm super intuitive (in the sense of clairvoyant), that it freaks people out." But isn't it merely looking beyond the immediate physical layer, and comprehending a deeper point of view? For example, observing telephone wires... and N might not simply see them as wires that criss cross to bring everyone electricity and cable and phone service, but as human cob webs that are enveloping the earth. Or with Ne, forming connections... I relate Ne with synchronicity-type view.

 

[Poki]

Intuition or N people make connections. I find that Ne doesnt always know, or understand the connections they make, but they do make connections based on what they see. Sometmes they may dig deeper. Ni brings things in and tries to understand things and makes internal connections.

Some ape back in the day probably stepped on a weak clam and broke it and found meat. After that they attempted to grab another and figure out how to open it. They didnt abstract anything. They just wanted into it so they could get the meat as clams look alike. Now if they found something that only semi resembled a clam and decided they wanted to see if it also had meat or maybe had a different kind of meat then that would be abstraction. I dont see Ne as very good at abstracting, but good at working with abstractions.

 

[Savage Idealist]

I think that intuition is rooted deep within the subconscious level of the brain, hidden from our conscious awareness at times. It's capable of collecting mass amounts of data in short amounts of time and draws an intuitive big picture of things inside our heads; for animlas it brings about a realization that something bad might occur, similar with humans and how we get random ideas.

Well that's my idea anyway.

 

[EcK]

That doesn't even mean anything. The title I mean.
It's not that our linguistic sense of esthetics recognizes a sentence as roughly 'shaped' like something profound that it actually is

'intuition' in its wide sense (non conscious processing) is the normal way in which most of the brain works, most of the features of 'consciousness' are very recent evolutionarily speaking. It's a bit like object permanence in kids. Young kids don't know where the ball goes when it disappears from their sight, they don't percieve its continued existence. In a vaguely similar way we don't always are conscious of the computational 'chain' of your thoughts enough to call it 'linear' and hence see it as "intuition".
It's like a colorblind person trying to solve and being baffled by a perfectly logical color based code, he sees enough colors to 'see a pattern' but doesn't have enough information to solve it. Or an invisible sea, because your conscious mind only sees the boat. And when the sea gets rough it seems like the boat starts moving up and down and defy gravity. Yet there's always activity, we just notice it more in some occasions.
All our drives for example are unconscious, it's hard to motivate someone into loving someone for example. Intuition is part of these unconscious processes relating to 'higher brain function' and its flexible problem solving abilities.

 

[rav3n]

Some where in the past, an individual monkey had the curiousity to see what was inside a clam, taste it and make the connection these all funny little things have tasty meat. Even if little abstraction is involved in the process now, at some point, there was.

As a guess, there was probably a clam with a cracked shell that smelled good to the first ape who was hungry, who then sniffed it and picked out the meat to eat. From there, Si took over from generation to generation.

IMO, if your brain's underlying databases are full of facts, physics equations and logical knowledge, the abstracts and concepts it constructs will probably align with the laws of nature. If your brain is full of frou-frou and rainbows, unicorn vomit will come out!

 

[entropie]

That doesn't even mean anything. The title I mean.
It's not that our linguistic sense of esthetics recognizes a sentence as roughly 'shaped' like something profound that it actually is

'intuition' in its wide sense (non conscious processing) is the normal way in which most of the brain works, most of the features of 'consciousness' are very recent evolutionarily speaking. It's a bit like object permanence in kids. Young kids don't know where the ball goes when it disappears from their sight, they don't percieve its continued existence. In a vaguely similar way we don't always are conscious of the computational 'chain' of your thoughts enough to call it 'linear' and hence see it as "intuition".
It's like a colorblind person trying to solve and being baffled by a perfectly logical color based code, he sees enough colors to 'see a pattern' but doesn't have enough information to solve it. Or an invisible sea, because your conscious mind only sees the boat. And when the sea gets rough it seems like the boat starts moving up and down and defy gravity. Yet there's always activity, we just notice it more in some occasions.
All our drives for example are unconscious, it's hard to motivate someone into loving someone for example. Intuition is part of these unconscious processes relating to 'higher brain function' and its flexible problem solving abilities.

As a guess, there was probably a clam with a cracked shell that smelled good to the first ape who was hungry, who then sniffed it and picked out the meat to eat. From there, Si took over from generation to generation.

IMO, if your brain's underlying databases are full of facts, physics equations and logical knowledge, the abstracts and concepts it constructs will probably align with the laws of nature. If your brain is full of frou-frou and rainbows, unicorn vomit will come out!

Haha, I can at least give you ten examples for woman motivating themselves to love that prick so that cant be true .

Jokes aside you're both right of course, still I would like to believe there is more to it and I do. I think you are humanizing the apes too much in that moment, I cant believe an ape could remember that his grandpa told him the clams are awesome plus I think they'ld need some sort of genetic memory if they could remember a thing one ape did before. If you imagine one ape showing to the others that its cool to crack the clam and he hits it for 3 hours on a tree; do you believe the other 20 apes would have the patience to sit around and watch for 3 hours with nothing happening. I think they can only do that when they have some sort of ability to abstract and to imagine that there could come something tasty out of it.

Regarding the nature of intuition, I am more on the side of Savage Idealist's opinion. I do think too that intuition's primary function is connecting the dots and that is where you see it working the most. But if you take emotions and feelings into account, intuition takes on a more instinctual variant, which is quite different from the intellectual one. Even with a strong intellectual variant, the instinctual is still influencing you somehow, giving you hunches about foreign people, telling you whom to trust and whom not to trust, manipulating your whole being on a completly illogical level. I long thought that this is a pool where connections between emotions and experiences flow from the unconciouncious into the real world, but it's worse; it's even facial shapes and the looks of people that influence you.

I dont know, but since we are only using 1/3rd of this brain, I'ld like to think there is more to intuition than just connecting the dots, maybe that's what it is at the moment, but tho this sounds crazy: I wouldnt rule out the possibility that humanity is even one day able to do some mild form of empathy or would have a much more evolved sense of abstraction to be able to see to the bottom of the clam in any given situation, I dont know. I am not satisfied with clumsy logical explanations, I need more X-factor

 

[ThatGirl]

Innovation, experience, and imagination are interdependent.

 

[KDude]

Something about placing the tree below him makes it look like he's taking a dump.