Adventuring - The Bear Creek Commentaries

--- Notes on intuition ---

All our knowledge begins with sense, proceeds thence to understanding, and ends with reason beyond which nothing higher can be discovered in the human mind for elaborating the matter of intuition and subjecting it to the highest unity of thought.

Immanuel Kant

I'm all for intuition. It seems better to me than common sense because intuition, at least, has the basis of experience and common sense only has the basis of "that's what I heard" and common sense is notoriously unreliable.

Have you ever played Telegraph. In a group, one person tells another a "secret" in private. That person tells another, and so on. In the end, the secret is completely transformed. Imagine what happens to an item of common sense over many, many years. It was common sense to Aristotle that men had more teeth than women.

But intuition isn't perfect. I have had some ninjitsu training. One reason people in martial fields go over and over patterns of movement or strategy until they are internalized is that, in a fight, you don't have time to think out every move. Repetition turns patterns into intuitions.

But, when possible, intuitions should be tested by reason and that is where I agree with Kant.

As a vocational evaluator,I subjected many clients to "demeaning" work which greatly undervalued their actual skills and they, of course, took offense, until I explained that the purpose was diagnosis. I could observe them in "real work" situations. The more "advanced", sophisticated, in brief - complicated the activity was, the harder it was to separate the characteristics of the job from the characteristics of the client, which is what I was trying to discover.

And that is why I enjoy dishwashing (see The Zen of Washing Dishes). I can explore my own behaviors.

I currently have a sore thumb caused by the very dry conditions of a job I have taken. My skin is drying out faster than I can moisturize it and my thumb just split open like an over-ripe plum. So, while washing dishes today, I noticed that, without conscious thought, I slide pieces of silverware to the drain so I can get under them without using my thumb. I have worked enough with typical people to know that this is not normal behavior. They will usually continue to use their sore thumb as they always do, grumping and groaning all the way.

I attribute my adaptability to things like endurance hikes and dishwashing in which I can try out different ways to do things and attend to them. In other words, I have tested various problem solving behaviors and internalized the ones I found particularly useful.