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On the concept of intuition

שו”תCategory: faithOn the concept of intuition
asked 7 years ago

I really enjoyed reading (most) of the rabbi’s books, cold water for a tired soul!
In general, I understand the rabbi’s opinion on the subject of intuition something like this: intuition is a kind of sixth sense of the soul. It is our basis for belief in truth, and it is also our foundation for “principles of faith” such as perceiving ourselves as dualistic beings with a soul beyond the body, free choice, prophetic ability, and perhaps also a kind of additional vision of the reality of Hashem.
But how does this come into play with studies of intuition itself? The advanced understanding and experiments on the functioning of unconscious mechanisms show that the brain is a machine that produces hundreds of thousands of analogies and inductions and examines with rapid thinking (I think it’s a phrase from Kahneman) and in this way examines everything in reality. We are not directly exposed to this activity, but only to the rational part of thinking that is revealed to us in the form of an “inner voice speaking.” Intuition seems to us to be something miraculous, an illumination from heaven, a quasi-prophetic voice, but it is actually a mechanistic and materialistic mechanism, which makes many calculations, and many times also makes mistakes and misleads.
Such an understanding of the concept of intuition overturns many of our intuitions (is there a circular fallacy here?) regarding a dualistic view and with it the tenets of faith based on it. We are amazing robots, who invented the story of the soul because we were unable to understand materialistic factors. Like all the ancient mythological stories that explained natural phenomena that we did not understand through “spiritual” practices, the lack of understanding of intuition is the cause of the meta-mythological story about the invention of the term soul.
 


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מיכי Staff answered 7 years ago
I don’t understand what all of this has to do with the conclusion you presented. It’s clear that the brain examines many possibilities and decides between them. The question of whether the process is deterministic is a completely open question. Beyond that, these experiments themselves are also based on principles that are rooted in intuition.

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