But if so, we can imagine a bag in which green balls were intentionally planted in the upper part and orange ones in the lower part. And since we lack any further information about the bag, we will think that this is what should be expected in its continuation as well (as you said).
But in truth it is clear that our intuition about it is not at all correct and has nothing to rely on. Yet since in the end we did develop a distinct “feeling” about it, that only shows that the basis of our understanding is psychological and not essential.
No?

We can imagine lots of things. But in the absence of other information, it is more reasonable to think that what comes next will also be green.
Nobody claims that intuition is certain. My claim was that it is not a shot in the dark (that is, that intuition is a cognitive tool, not just a lottery or psychology).
If you were right that it is just psychology, then science today would be in the same state it was in with Adam. See my article on Occam’s razor:

עוד בעניין תערו של אוקהאם

Of course there is not always a connection between a hypothetical possibility and reality, but if we can explain in “psychological” terms how that sense of intuition was formed, and show that it is indeed aroused the same way even in ordinary cases where that feeling *should not have* arisen according to your view (as in the bag example), doesn’t that mean it is not really a cognitive process as you say?

Because it should be stressed that the bag example is not some exceptional example or anything… And if such a feeling would arise in us there, then it seems understandable why in all the other places these feelings arise in us too.

I don’t understand this discussion. If I can be misled, does that mean I should never accept my conclusions? What exactly are you trying to claim?

Okay, I’ll try to explain myself more clearly. Sorry for the length, but this just seems straightforward to me, and I even thought of an analogy that might show it simply.
I’m only asking about the part where you try to justify our trust in the synthetic system of arguments by means of the claim that our thinking system includes a connecting cognitive component.
As I understand it, you assume this on the basis of a “theological” argument (*not* a “philosophical” one): since what you think is indeed true, and after all we have no other real way to justify the findings, you conclude from that that in fact we are endowed with such a component.
But I want to argue that this conclusion is not at all reasonable. (And not by means of a claim that you could dismiss as mere skepticism.)

And my claim is simple: that feeling of intuition is a mental-psychological feeling, but not a cognitive one.
(First, the average person does not think he has a third eye, and that strengthens my point that this is at most a theological, not a philosophical, view.)
And second, it can almost be proven to you that this is so, because we can imagine a whole set of *ordinary* events (as in the bag example or any other event that appears cyclical before our eyes while we lack knowledge about it, but really is not) that would simply produce this intuition in us. If so, then we have no reason whatsoever to assume we possess supernatural abilities. By contrast, according to your view, in all those examples we should not have experienced this feeling at all!
And if that is so, then the natural / mental-psychological explanation faithfully explains the other phenomena that are generated in the same way as well: for example, since the laws of nature in our time have continued (why? I don’t know), we ‘assume’ that they continue too, if only on a psychological level (even though it is unclear whether there is any essential justification for assuming they will continue), and that also explains why we are right every time, because almost every moment we have encountered them, they really did continue… But the fact that they continued does not mean that we indeed have such a cognitive ability.

What is this comparable to? (Sorry if this analogy offends anyone, but this is a real thing.)
Suppose your friend Moshe assumes he has a supernatural radar for identifying gay people. You would surely laugh at him and try to explain that he has simply met people with certain appearance patterns whom he assumed were gay, and therefore the next person he sees with the same appearance pattern he will also assume is gay (and only Moshe thinks this because of the same ‘theological’ vision discussed above, but his conclusions are in fact mistaken).
And then that good friend tries to show Moshe that he really does not have such an ability by conducting a little experiment in front of him. He presents him with a series of people who all have the same gay-looking appearance pattern, but only some of them are actually gay!

If so, for Moshe to try to prove his claim that he has such a mystical sensor, it is certainly not enough for him to wave his hand and claim they are all gay. He would have to provide a sufficient number of correct hits (that is, also point to people who look gay and claim they are not, and also point to people who really are gay and say that they are).
But our Moshe pointed to all of them as gay. If so, it is reasonable to assume that his mystical ability is probably not exactly mystical but more a matter of analogical pattern recognition… or in any case, something else, whatever it may be.

So too in the case at hand: to claim about every case that looks cyclical that it really is cyclical is not such a great feat. The real feat is to know how to distinguish between the bag from which you draw many green balls and which really is all green, and that hypothetical bag where the hundredth ball and onward is already red.
Since we both agree that in the second case too you would assume that the whole bag is green, it is reasonable to claim that we do not possess that cognitive sensor, that third eye. Q.E.D.

Hello,
I truly don’t see anything new here. Everything was answered well enough in what I wrote. I’ll try once more, and if you still disagree, we’ll part as friends.
1. In fact, almost everyone is sure they have a third eye, except that they don’t know that this is the meaning of their view. They think their thinking grasps reality correctly, and are not aware of the philosophical difficulty involved. Implicitly, their confidence in the results of their thinking is itself the intuition that they have a third eye.
2. Our intuition does indeed hit upon reality quite well, as scientific predictions prove. I referred you to my article on Occam’s razor.
3. The bag example and similar ones prove nothing. They only show that sometimes we make mistakes. That requires no proof. It is obvious. But you infer from this that all our intuitions are mistaken, and that is like someone concluding from optical illusions that his vision is unreliable.
4. The experiment you suggested about gay people proves nothing. It is simply a methodological mistake, and it is the same mistake you make in the bag example. Obviously, if you deliberately choose people who look gay and are not, your experiment will produce problematic results. You are misleading him with your own hands. This is exactly the sort of deception I was talking about. The question is what happens if that person who claims he can identify gay people uses his abilities on a group of people who come before him randomly (without anyone choosing them). If he is right at a rate above random statistics (the percentage of gay people in the population), then indeed he has such an ability.
That’s it. As far as I’m concerned, we’ve exhausted this completely.

I don’t agree, as opposed to not understanding 🙂
1. I don’t agree, but it’s not relevant right now.
2. No argument there.
3,4. I don’t understand, because that is exactly the point: we are not talking here about optical illusions.
When you want to conduct the research about gaydar on the general population, you are actually presenting the friend’s claim! The reason it would work when choosing a random person from the general population does not come from supernatural abilities, but from probability calculations: among the group of people with a gay appearance, chances are that if we pick one at random, he really will be such.
But the moment Moshe claims he has a third eye, he is not claiming he knows this through statistical reasoning abilities, but through direct acquaintance with the qualities of the soul of the person standing opposite him, like acquaintance with the person’s “soul” and the like.
And here we really would expect that for the same degree of gay-looking appearance, he would also be able to identify who is gay and who is not in an *essential* way. And if he cannot do that, it is reasonable to say that he is operating by some other kind of inference, such as statistical reasoning, but certainly not in some extrasensory way.
The same here: once you claim that you have the power to identify which event with a cyclical pattern is one to which the rule “what has been is what will be” applies, as a kind of direct recognition, say, of the idea that produced the event—and thus you show us that you can distinguish that there are events that appear to us in a very material sense to be quite cyclical, yet nevertheless you do not apply “what has been is what will be” to them so that they continue in the future—then you are entirely right. And you show us that you are endowed with an ability of recognition beyond what is visible to our eyes.

But the moment you are unable to identify by negation, and instead for every cyclical pattern you just wave your hand and say “what has been is what will be,” then that shows you are merely making a probabilistic analysis, which is certainly connected to the claim in point 2 that you raised.
For example, since in the end most of the world really has operated until now according to synthetic patterns of thought (why? no idea), then for any event with that kind of profile it would be preferable to say that it is indeed like that too. Though in truth it is not preferable. Or perhaps in psychological-evolutionary terms a synthetic thought pattern has been embedded in us, and so on. But that certainly does not come from extrasensory vision.

Thank you. I’d be glad for a response, because I really didn’t understand your point here.

Could I get an explanation of this?
I thought that from your perspective this could only be answered if you retract your view that understanding an event is immediately connected with some sort of non-sensory perception, and instead say, for example, that an ancient a priori insight is ingrained in us regarding the rationality of the world, one that says processes we experience as cyclical can be trusted—and if so, then you are making a statistical comparison based on that a priori insight.
But if you think the ideational vision is *present* with respect to each and every event, then you should not be impressed by the external appearance of things (that the event presently looks cyclical), but by the ideas that compose it (it is in fact not cyclical).
(Just like with the gaydar example, where according to the metaphysical approach one is impressed by the person’s “soul,” so it should not matter whether he looks gay or not, but what he really is “inside”—not statistical reasoning.)

I’m done with this.

The Rabbi wrote that if all the balls that came out until now are green, then the reasonable assumption is that going forward they will also be green.
Isn’t that against the explanation in the discussion of the legal rule of majority, that majority is not a logical inference, because the fact that most of the fruit here is terumah (for example) does not give higher odds that this particular fruit is fruit of terumah—the doubt remains fifty-fifty?
Or did you write this only because all the balls are green and there is no other color? Still, it seems to me that this is no different from majority.

Can someone decipher this riddle for me?

I’ll try to explain.
I don’t remember exactly because I learned the Talmudic topic of majority a long time ago.
What I do remember is that some of the later authorities (I think Rabbi Shimon) claim that the rule of following the majority in mixtures and the like is a legal rule and not a logical inference. Because there are places where there is no logic in following the majority. For example, if there is an apple here between two boxes, one box of terumah and one box of ordinary produce, and there are more apples in the terumah box. There is a rule to follow the majority, and the apple has the status of terumah strictly.
And here there is no logic that because there are more apples in the terumah box, there is a higher chance this one fell from the terumah box, because for this apple by itself there is a fifty percent chance it fell from ordinary produce and a fifty percent chance it fell from terumah.
And more than that: even if statistically more terumah apples fell here, statistics is a fact; it is not a rational inference saying that because until now the majority was like this, therefore it is also so for this specific apple.
(I vaguely remember that Rabbi Shimon writes something similar about a lottery, that there are more slips with the same answer—perhaps you remember what I mean.)
So I wanted to compare that to here, where you said that if until now green balls came out, then the reasonable assumption is that the next one will also be green.
And according to the explanation above, there is no reason that if it was like this until now, then it is also like this now (except perhaps “do not remain in doubt” or a presumption of prior status?)
Sorry for the length—or perhaps you didn’t understand because in your view this is not similar to majority but to “do not remain in doubt,” or maybe I missed something and the Rabbi can enlighten me.

I’d be glad if the Rabbi could spell out for me mathematically the plausibility that all the balls are green in a way that would make it higher than the chance that not all the balls are green (even if most of them are). Besides that, I don’t understand how one can calculate statistics or probability if the data point of the number of balls is missing, or in our case the number of natural events.

First, you do not need to calculate probability but rather the difference between the probabilities of two possibilities (that what follows is green and that it is not). Therefore the number of balls is not relevant to the discussion.
Second, I am not talking about probability but about plausibility.
You are apparently referring to Rabbi Shimon Shkop’s comments about an available majority. See the columns I wrote on majority (79, 237, and others). But as I said, that is not relevant here.

See also columns 227–8.

Thank you very much for the reference.

Rabbi, practically speaking, could you repeat the explanation of why you classify these cases as optical illusions?

Because as I understand it, the idea of ideational vision is connected to understanding what generates the events. It certainly is not supposed to be derived only from the outer, physical appearance of the events. And yes, this is also connected to the simple fact because of which you posit the whole discussion about the need for ideational vision in the first place—that one cannot derive that a process will continue to be cyclical merely because we saw it as such over a single cycle… So how does the thought arise in us that the process is cyclical if what generated it is something non-cyclical? That thought should not have arisen in us at all.

With optical illusions things are obviously different, because there are plenty of reasons to explain why they arise… But that is exactly the point I don’t understand in your words here. How can such a thing arise, when it is essentially different from the idea of ideational vision?

So where is my mistake in understanding the idea?

You are mixing up two planes. When I speak about ideational vision, I do not mean that I know how the composition of the balls in the box came about. I mean a more general kind of vision: what it is correct to do in the absence of information. That too is a kind of insight (plausibility or probability). When I see a chair in front of me, I have no direct information as to whether someone is deceiving me, and it is certainly possible that they are (they filmed a movie or showed me a picture with a chair). I make decisions in a state of incomplete information, and I decide that my vision is not deceiving me. Therefore, if I see a chair, I conclude that there really is a chair in front of me. Although in situations where they present me with a confusing setup I will make a mistake, that way of conducting myself is still correct.
Thus exactly with the box of balls. I do not know how the composition of the box was constructed, but my reasoning says that in the absence of information it is sensible to conclude that what comes next will be green. If someone placed before me a misleading box (constructed as though it were entirely green balls, while in truth it is not), then I will make a mistake. But that does not mean that my general, principled logic regarding such boxes is not correct.

Okay, thank you very much, so I did not understand your principle of ideational vision correctly.
It seems that you present it in the style of synthetic a priori understandings, but ones that arise following empirical ‘observation.’ And you are not claiming that there is a direct interactive relation between reality and those truths—unlike the light rays that return from the ball to the retina and produce in us the image of the ball.
But on the other hand, I assume that when you meant that intuition tells us “what is correct to do in the absence of information,” you do assume that it also includes within it the assumption that the guiding principle for preferring one explanation is itself also more correct. Just like with Occam’s razor.
But if so, then apparently there is some kind of interaction between reality and that guiding idea…??

(Here personally I think you could already push back and claim that intuition reflects the majority view or something like that, and in the analogy to gay people it succeeds in defining how ‘gayness’—on the basis of the idea of ‘horsey femininity’—would look, and therefore not every concrete person who comes before us must necessarily be such. But by contrast, random choice from a society of random people would give a better plausibility than complete arbitrariness.

The problem, of course, is that if the guiding idea includes within it the totality of events that occur in the world—”what to do under lack of information”—then at some point the distance between the event-base on which it is built is too great to give us any good predictive ability with respect to a single event, just as if the ruling party in Israel is Likud, then one would assume that the rabbi, ‘without prior information,’ votes Likud)…

Really, thank you very much for the answers. I’d be glad if you could explain to me the plausibility or probability, according to your view, that the rest is green, in numbers, because I got a bit confused here in the discussion.

Plausibility cannot be explained in numbers. That is the main difference between it and probability. This is what we call a logical intuition.

So can it be explained in a logical sentence?

I don’t know what a logical explanation means. A logical argument is based on premises. How will you explain those? Do you have a logical explanation for the assumption of the principle of causality? Or for the assumption that the senses are reliable?

No, but the principle of causality has a fact that makes it more plausible than the opposite (see my question “The Results of Science”), and the senses (provided we do not view them as a single whole) corroborate one another: sight sees the source of the noise while hearing hears it. My question is not whether this is an assumption—I know that this is an assumption of pure reason—I am only asking what makes this assumption, that all the remaining balls are green, more plausible than the opposite.