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A question about the rabbi's reliance on intuition as the basic tool for examining truths

שו"תA question about the rabbi's reliance on intuition as the basic tool for examining truths
שאל לפני 5 שנים

Have a good week, Rabbi,
I wanted to ask about those who claim that human (or Jewish) intuition has a special status.
As I think from reading many of your letters, this is also your position, and if I am not accurate, I would be happy to clarify.
According to this concept, it is a kind of sixth sense, a spiritual power/talent, one that allows the observer to observe spiritual truths that exist on a spiritual level that interacts with physical reality.
However, many experiments have already shown from various directions that human intuition is extremely limited, and even leads to many embarrassing mistakes.
In fact, it is entirely a product of our brain structure and its interaction with environmental stimuli. Experiments inspired by Kahneman, for example, have shown that the brain responds to questions even before conscious thought, and that there are fast-thinking systems (=intuition?), slow-thinking systems, and some interaction between the systems.
In addition, the programs that run artificial intelligence (AI) codes help to understand how computers can learn by recognizing patterns and updating the induction they have built in response to encountering more and more data. It should be noted that researchers claim fundamental differences between computer systems and biological systems. But it is clear to both sides that this is a mechanism that can be explained with scientific tools.
Therefore, it turns out that intuition can be reasonably understood without the need for a spiritual framework (or narrative).
It is also possible to conduct various experiments (both social and those that measure brain stimulation, etc.) and deepen the understanding of how humans learn and how to draw conclusions.
And even if we put aside the question of the need for a spiritual explanation (and the problem of Occam's razor),
From all of this, it follows that intuition cannot be a criterion for examining truth. Intuition is just another thinking mechanism with which an initial examination can be conducted, but certainly not an exhaustive one.
Regarding decisions that are also moral, here too it does not seem that intuition should have a special status.
For example, various experiments have shown that it is possible to formulate identical questions with different wording and obtain divided opinions, and there are also built-in mechanisms of cognitive fallacy that lead people (even very smart ones) to incorrect (and inconsistent) conclusions regarding questions of moral judgment.
I would appreciate your response,


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0 Answers
מיכי צוות ענה לפני 5 שנים
These questions have been raised here more than once. In my opinion, there is no point in going into all these examples, since there are also examples of the failures of our sense of sight. Is that why you give up trust in it? If you give up trust in your intuition, then these examples also do not hold water, since 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 be wrong. So it's definitely worth checking yourself and cross-referencing information and criticizing intuition. But giving up on it completely is not an option even if you want to.

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