A. But is the skeptic's claim consistent? If he casts doubt on everything, how does he rely on his senses? (getting on a plane, etc.)
What I am really trying to clarify is this: without intuition, is it possible to explain anything at all, as opposed to simply acting in a mechanical, automatic way?

B. Regarding animals, if they indeed have no thought and no consciousness, how can one say that there is intuition there? Isn't it correct that intuition is an intellectual capacity but not a material one (the mind's eye)? And then animals are basically just biological robots…

A. He does not rely on them. In the absence of any other criterion, he goes with his senses simply because he is used to it. Skepticism is not a behavioral thesis but a philosophical thesis.
B. I answered that. It is indeed an empty term when we are talking about a mechanical process.

If so, then why not reduce a human being to that same mechanical process that is going on in the background? Why do we need intuition as something cognitive?

I did not understand the question.

If animals have no spiritual dimension at all, but only carry out blind processes of brain computation, like computers for example,
and yet they can still accumulate information about the world—for example by making analogies and inductions—
then apparently intuition is not required in order to perform analogies; rather, these are only processes of computation pure and simple.

Intuition lies somewhere on the spectrum between emotion and intellect.
From the side of intellect, the more intellect a person has, the more it improves intuition. (“Who is wise? One who learns from every person.”)
And from the side of emotion, the more experience a person has, the more it improves intuition. (“There is none as wise as one with experience.”)

No need for demons. Look somewhere else.

Animals do not accumulate information about the world. They accumulate information the way a computer accumulates information. They make decisions the way a computer makes them. Only human beings have the ability to accumulate information, think, make an analogy or a deduction, or make decisions. All the others carry out mechanical operations, and those operations can acquire the meaning of analogy or deduction or decision-making only for us human beings, who observe the animal or the computer.

Sorry for jumping into the discussion, but this is not clear.
First, according to your approach, the a priori probability of assuming that they (animals and computers) will be right in the “future” choices they make solely on the basis of a mechanical or logical mechanism tends toward zero (after all, one can think of countless possible lines). But factually they do succeed.
And therefore, according to the empirical test you proposed in your books, it can be proven that their computational method works.

Second, I did not entirely understand the distinction between an animal/computer and a human being. (You mentioned this about a month ago too, but even then you did not explain exactly where the point lies.) Is the difference that a human being has *understanding* and a capacity for *decision*? Because in practice, in terms of actions and consequences, one can imagine that the animal and the human ultimately produce identical results, and a computer too can accumulate information and perform calculations (even if it does not understand their content).
If so, the distinction between understanding and decision on the one hand and blind computation on the other seems like just a distinction connected to the philosophical field of dualism, free choice, and emergence, but not really anything essential to the epistemological issue.

Not true. Evolution ensures that these calculations will be efficient (even if not necessarily correct).
A computer that imitates a human being is not a human being. If in your view it is the same thing, then we have a deep disagreement. See column 35.

I did not understand why that is not true.
After all, you could say the same thing about a human being, namely that “evolution ensured that these calculations would be efficient (even if not necessarily correct).”

In the end, if a priori animals were not supposed to succeed in learning and functioning in the world because a priori the probability of that is negligible, and yet they do succeed, that is a sign that they have *another mechanism* that allows this. And even if you say that for them there is no identity between efficiency and truth (= efficient but not correct), still, if in nearly 100% of the cases we have encountered they were correct—and let us say this ratio is close enough to ours (since even you do not connect knowledge with 100% certainty)—then there is no reason not to say that the same mechanism exists in us as well. Why not claim that?
It seems that at the very least this should completely undermine your proof from the possibility of inferring the laws of nature.
Because here the second hypothesis offers a material mechanism that reaches results close to the mechanism you are proposing.

As for the second part, I looked over the column. It seems that there you define intelligence (and elsewhere you added a few supplements) only as the ability to choose the optimal path to a solution, and not the mechanism of the solution. But if so, then this ability is not identical with an ideal world or anything of that sort. For example, one can think of the set of heuristics used in artificial intelligence, but they have no connection at all to ideal vision, and a human being only has judgment regarding which heuristic to choose from among a whole set… And if so, this is still a side philosophical question, but not anything essential to the issue.

Animals do not ask themselves why they succeed, and human beings do. Human beings formulate the theory of evolution for themselves, and animals do not (even though both are governed by it).

But if so, then the mind's eye is just an ad hoc excuse!!
Because in truth, you too agree that the evolutionary mechanism alone is enough to enable us to understand the world, but “the small problem” is only that it provides us with almost no justification for our beliefs (aside from the marginal fact that in practice it works completely).
And therefore we recruited the world of ideas to our service to provide us with justification.
But that sounds like a rather problematic excuse..

(Even if animals had judgment, and I think that in another responsum you were uncertain whether they have free choice, it is still not certain that tomorrow morning they would formulate a physical theory for us; additional factors are required for that.)

Rabbi, if so, why is this not included in the ad hoc category (even though the evolutionary description in practice reaches identical results)? Because there is no other explanation?

I do not know what the ad hoc category is. It is indeed an ad hoc explanation. That is the essence of a “theological” argument, as I defined it in the fourth notebook.