Obscure maybe you want ti give a look at this

Intuition might turn out to be the most undervalued source of knowledge. The conventional idea of intuition is natural intuition. Natural intuition is inborn and more often than not, faulty. How many times have you taken a glance at a person and classified him/her according to stereotypes depending on how they look? It is our natural intuition that drives us towards thinking this way, just as our intuition steers us towards a certain number in lottery or gambling. Educated intuition is another side of intuition and is ‘trained’. It is achieved through long periods of contemplation in the subject and is less faulty than natural intuition. Areas of knowledge relate to intuition in different ways: In mathematics one would think that intuition plays a minute role in helping mathematics uncover ‘truth’. Mathematics is built upon foundations and laws, previous layers of knowledge. There is only one right answer, which leaves very little room for intuition, or so it seems. However when solving a problem that can be solved with many methods, educated intuition is extremely important. Solving the simple problem of what is the 100th term in the sequence of 1, 4, 7, 9,… one can always add 3 to get to the 100th number, but with educated intuition a person can solve the problem quicker by using 3n – 2. In another scenario where one is presented with a problem never seen before, intuition is used to decide on the first steps used to try achieve the answer. Therefore, although it might not look it, intuition plays a role in mathematics. Natural Science uses the empirical method, which is heavily reliant on perception, to derive facts. However, how much of perception is actually ‘real’? perception is extremely prone to tricks and illusions suggested by the theories that the world only sprung into existence a short period of time ago and we are all born with our memories intact, fooling us to believe that we have lived our whole life on earth1, or that we are all part of an entity’s dream2. Yet, to move closer to ‘truth’ our intuition tells us that we exist here and now. Taking this stance, it can be argued that all of our perception centres on one intuition, ‘we exist’. The greatest scientific discoveries of all times are discovered by intuition. Stepping away from the overused Archimedes’ ‘Eureka’ and Newton’s apple, a personal favourite of mine is August Friedrich von Kekule that dreamt of the ouroboros3 to come up with the Kekule structure for benzene, enabling scientists to develop benzene for useful purposes. Intuition is arguably the same as inductive logic. The sun rises every day, therefore, it will rise again tomorrow. We are using our previous experiences to predict what will happen in the future. The acceleration of a known mass follows the equation f = ma previously, therefore it will do so again in the future. They both build upon previous past experiences. Social Science relies heavily on both natural and educated intuition to make laws and trends for human behaviour. Social Sciences involve a lot of uncertainties due to the inability to isolate the subject from external factors. Humans are different from each other, and although psychologists generalize, it is hard to prove whether the reason for a person dreaming that he is a peacock is complying with Freud’s theories about inner wishes4, or whether his subconscious had been affected by his study of peacocks the night beforehand. A person does not need to be crying for you to know that s/he is unhappy…humans use their intuition to predict what others are feeling. But as intuition is a collection of our previous experiences, what applies to one person might be different to another, and might be a hindrance in understanding people. In History, intuition is valued differently. Historians use educated intuition in the way they do their work systematically however personal intuition is used in judging. A historian who is presented with a deluge of resources and witnesses, all with different accounts, must use intuition to select only the ones that are deemed to be the most reliable. However, this intuition is also conditioned by bias and cultural upbringing. The Annales School5 argues that everything is in context, one cannot replicate the same situation exactly and understand a piece of evidence completely, therefore needing intuition. From this point of view we can argue that all history is based on intuition, and we have experienced how misleading and, as historians use different amount of intuition in their work, vague intuition can be. Sub-consciously our intuition is carried in the language that history is written in…along with the bias. In the arts, intuition works in an abstract manner. Our intuition makes us draw the distinction to what is a piece of art and what is not. My intuition tells me that a piece of art lies in what the artist wants it to be. If someone takes a map of the world, tears it apart and places the pieces into a glass jar and exhibits it as art, mirroring the conflicts of the earth. I would say it is art, just as a blank canvas titled ‘emptiness’ would be. However a blank canvas with no purpose would not be art. “If there is no intuition, there will be no risk taking”6. People will follow their intuition to deviate from the complimentary colour theory if they have enough intuition. Art revolves around breaking laws. Therefore intuition is needed to interpret a piece of artwork. Is it not intuition that makes us associate certain images to certain feelings, influenced by our own experiences? There are rules in art, such as the composition will look better if it coincides with the golden ratio, and one can always measure it mathematically to position the focus of a painting, however, it is our natural intuition that tells us at times that placing it in a different position makes the piece more effective to the desired effect. Similarly the theory of the 4Rs7 to evaluate a piece of artwork is non-intuitive. However when presented with a piece of artwork, people don’t go through these steps mechanically. They use intuition to tell whether the art means something to them or not. In Ethics we make generalizations of what is right and wrong. In reality the factors that the moral judgments depend on are overwhelming and there are certain situations which cannot be ‘judged’ just by following generalisations, needing our intuition. Abortion might be seen as wrong at the most basic level. Travelling deeper one level, one might say that abortion is right if executed to save a life. However if a girl chooses to have intercourse, conceiving a child, knowing that it will lead to an abortion because her body cannot handle the bearing of the child, will that be right or wrong? It is the same case as euthanasia. A person watching a child drown, choosing not to save the child, is not technically wrong. However not doing anything to a person in hospital to put them out of misery can be seen as immoral. Humans rely on intuition to judge whether a decision is moral or not, even if by law it is il/legal. How do we know that natural intuition is not influenced by upbringing? When reading ‘A Streetcar named Desire’8, the speech where Blanche hints that her husband was homosexual, is not explicit to readers today. However, after reading that speech I knew he was gay and I couldn’t explain why as I haven’t properly analysed the passage. I’m not sure if it was a lucky guess, a spontaneous analysation of the speech or my intuition. I didn’t have enough knowledge of Tennessee Williams to be able to draw that connection. What did occur to me was that years before I had read a book in which the protagonist married a man who she finds to be homosexual later on in the book in a similar way to Blanche. Did I subconsciously make that connection in my brain? If so isn’t natural intuition just a sub-conscious collection of all our previous experiences that allows us to project what we know upon unknown situations, therefore the same as educated intuition? One might choose to believe that there is no such thing as intuition. Intuition is just inductive logic, a potpourri of all our unique experiences which the mind summons both on a subconscious and conscious level, thus leading us to believe that there are two types of intuition. We call it ‘intuition’ because we are not aware of the links our brain is making spontaneously because we cannot feel it. Because of this, intuition might turn out to be a way to gain valuable insights. In Physics, quantum theory defies our intuition, making it a difficult concept to grasp. However there is always a slither of doubt that quantum theory is not the ‘truth’. According to Kuhn’s theory of how Scientific Revolutions are achieved, maybe there will come a time when, just like the Ptolemian model of the Universe, it will be proven wrong in one paradigm shift and our intuition proven correct. Just because there is no scientific explanation and our ‘reason’ opposes intuition does not mean that it is not a realistic way to gain valuable knowledge. Therefore intuition plays a major role in all areas of knowledge. But we should not romanticize and overvalue both types of intuition. Without the proper background knowledge, they are misleading. The diagram should look like this, as intuition cannot be quantified. Sub-conscious collection of previous experiences [intuition] Art Nat.Sciences Social Sciences Maths History Ethics