Q&A: A difficulty with the Rabbi’s reliance on intuition as the basic tool for examining truths
A difficulty with the Rabbi’s reliance on intuition as the basic tool for examining truths
Question
Have a good week, Rabbi,
I wanted to ask about those who claim that human intuition (or Jewish intuition) has a special status.
It seems to me, from reading many of your writings, that this is also your position, and if I’m not being precise I’d be glad for clarification.
According to this view, we are talking about a kind of sixth sense, a spiritual power/talent, one that enables a person using it to perceive spiritual truths that exist on a spiritual plane interacting with physical reality.
But many experiments have already shown, from different directions, that human intuition is extremely limited, and even leads to many embarrassing mistakes.
In fact, it is entirely a product of the structure of our brain and its interaction with environmental stimuli. Experiments inspired by Kahneman, for example, showed that the brain responds to questions even before conscious thought, and that there are systems of fast thinking (= intuition?), systems of slow thinking, and some sort of interaction between the systems.
In addition, software running artificial intelligence (AI) code helps us understand how computers can learn through pattern recognition and by updating the induction they have built in accordance with exposure to more and more data. It should be noted that researchers claim there are essential differences between computerized systems and biological systems. But it is clear to both sides that we are dealing with a mechanism that can be explained using scientific tools.
Accordingly, it turns out that intuition can be understood reasonably well without any need for a spiritual framing story (or narrative).
Likewise, one can conduct various experiments (both social ones and ones that measure brain stimuli and the like) and deepen our understanding of the way human learning works and the ways conclusions are drawn.
And even if we set aside the question of the need for a spiritual explanation (and Occam’s razor),
all this implies that intuition cannot serve as a criterion for examining truths. Intuition is only one more cognitive mechanism that can be used for an initial examination, but certainly not an exhaustive one.
As for decisions that are also moral, here too it does not seem that intuition should have any special status.
For example, various experiments have shown that one can phrase identical questions with different wording and get divided opinions, along with many other built-in mechanisms of cognitive failure that lead people (even very smart people) to mistaken (and inconsistent) conclusions regarding questions of moral judgment.
I would be glad for your answer,
Answer
These questions have come up here more than once. In my view there is no point getting into all these examples, since there are examples of failures in our sense of sight as well. Do you give up trusting it because of that? If you give up trusting your intuition, then these examples too don’t hold water, because there is no aspect of our thinking (including empirical science) that does not rely on intuition.
All these examples teach us is that intuition is not absolute and can make mistakes. Therefore it is certainly worthwhile to check yourself, cross-check information, and criticize intuition. But completely giving it up is not an option, even if you wanted to.
Discussion on Answer
I don’t know whether you read what I wrote. It seems not. I’ll say again that there is nothing in the world that is not based on intuition. So if you don’t accept it, you become a complete skeptic in every field.
Indeed, everything is based on intuition. But one should distinguish here between two kinds of intuitive statements: a. when intuition tells us to believe another tool that has simply proven itself; b. when intuition itself tells us something.
When intuition tells me to trust my sense of sight, I accept that, because trust in sight proves itself—I also manage to touch the object I see, and hear the sound coming from it, etc. So it’s true that this calculation too (why to trust sight) is a product of intuition, but in the end this coherence gives me a good reason to trust intuition here. If a mirage were a common phenomenon, that would undermine all trust in sight. But it is something rare.
But when intuition reports to me the existence of something just because it seems that way to me, and I know that many times such reports from intuition (the second type) turn out not to be correct, then why should I believe it?
And what about that book? Have you read it?
I haven’t read the book, but I am very familiar with errors of intuition from various directions (especially Kahneman and Tversky). Of course, in science too consistency means nothing, since all the cross-checking you do is based on your intuition, and even the very insight that cross-checking improves reliability. Moreover, someone who studies and knows can also improve his intuitive ability, but that is not relevant to the discussion.
You are looking at this incorrectly. We have a faculty called intuition, and it operates in various contexts that you cannot separate from one another. If this faculty is reliable, then it is reliable, and if not, then not. If intuition works well in places where it can be tested (like in science), then that is a sign that it is a good and reliable faculty, and therefore one can rely on it in other places as well. Exactly like the sense of sight: if it works in certain contexts, you adopt it in other contexts too.
The fact that there are contexts that cannot be subjected to a falsification test does not mean it makes sense to abandon trust in intuition. That is the nature of those contexts, and that is what there is. Not everything can be handled scientifically.
What do you mean by “like the sense of sight, that if it works in certain contexts you adopt it in other contexts”? What different contexts are there in the sense of sight?
If you have seen plants, you also trust seeing stars or facial features. If you have seen massive bodies, you also trust seeing light waves and colors.
Because the sense is the same sense, and the eye distinguishes plants in exactly the same way it distinguishes stars.
But with intuition, the way it works is vague and murky, not something measurable. So you can’t say that this is “one particular mode of operation” that has proven itself.
Okay, I’ve exhausted this.
You are used to comparing the phenomenon of a mirage, which does not cause us to abandon trust in our sense of sight, to flaws in intuition.
But a mirage is something rare, whereas with sight there are countless times when the knowledge conveyed to us by sight is confirmed by many means (what we see we also hear when it has a sound, and also touch, etc.). By contrast, with intuition it is hard to find conclusive proof that it is correct, and the concepts it conveys are often undefined (has there ever been a study proving that knowledge coming from intuition is correct?). So what is the comparison at all?
And by the way, have you read the book The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us?