--- 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.

--- Notes on knowledge ---

Thus the faculties of consciousness, of memory, of external sense, and of reason are all equally the gifts of nature. No good reason can be assigned for receiving the testimony of one of them, which is not of equal force with regard to the others.

Thomas Reid

There is a huge difference between Descartes' epistemology and our epistemology. A lot of our epistemology has drifted from philosophy to science - cognitive science. And science has worked out techniques for research that reduce uncertainty and bridges the gap between what we perceive and what is actually "out there".

Some still are suspicious of "faculties of consciousness" like intuition, emotion, and aesthetic judgment but these abilities developed with our race to take care of situations important to our survival and they are as important today as they ever were. We are often called to make "snap judgments" in situations where there is no time for long deliberation and many of our cognitive abilities are there for those situations.

But it is, nevertheless, important that our "faculties of consciousness" and, also our more respected faculties be trained to work well and to work together. Intuition, for instance, with attention and collaboration with reason can be fine tuned to be an effective and reliable tool for assessing situations that are "fuzzy", open to multiple interpretations, or that require a quick, cool summation.

I still run into people who think that memory is like a video recording in which everything that we've done or perceived is stored in our brains (if only we could get to the recordings). That idea has been disproved over and over by cognitive scientists who know that memories are reconstructions from very summary clues stored in our brains. We reconstruct situations every time we remember them and there is much room for error. But the same cognitive scientists have discovered and developed techniques that help us to reduce that error greatly. Rehearsing memories, associating new memories with salient information, and the use of memory systems greatly empower us to remember accurately and reliably.

At the same time replication, triangulation, and good research design allow scientists to certify that the results of their research actually resembles reality enough to understand and predict the workings of nature.

Nevertheless, we should be careful about "what we know". A little humility is called for because we are still once removed from the world. What we perceive will always be processed through our senses and our brain before we consciously apprehend our world. We will always be stuck with mental models of the way things work but, as long as we keep firmly in mind that they are models, that will be good enough.

No, I don't think we can know with absolute certainty what's really "out there", but we can have a consistent and reliable view of how our world works. If it's not "absolute reality", it's our world. We can't go beyond that - or can we.

The major problem is that we are incapable of directly perceiving the universe. Our sensory organs are limited and our brains are material organs that are limited in their programming to certain patterns. They are linear and time bound. Most of the universe, we can't even grasp, but we know that there are things beyond what we can grasp. What we know - our models - require other things. A physicist told me that the universe isn't made of matter - it's made of fields. We can't perceive fields, but they have to be there or else nothing we know would work.

I've had experiences that my brain can't grasp. That's part of shamanism, and there's another way we can go beyond. We're approaching a time when we can construct artificial intelligences that work qualitatively different from our material brains. They can think things that we can't. Can they open up new areas of the universe for us? I guess the question is, "Do we want them to?"

--- Your emotional world ---

Twas brillig in ye slythy toves
Did gyre and gimble in ye wabe:
All mimsy were ye borogoves;
And ye mome raths outgrabe.

If you have never seen this poem before, I would guess that you at least have feelings about the words, which is strange since most of the words are meaningless, or they were when they were penned. They are from the poem, Jabberwocky, from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass.

In it, Carroll carefully crafted new words to convey specific feelings instead of meanings. What does "brillig" mean. It has a little of "bright" in it but somewhat "heavier". "Slythy toves" sounds somewhat sinister, a bit unwholesome. Humpty Dumpty actually explained some of the eanings in the book, but I won't give away his secret here.

The passage actually makes me feel like:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;

from The Second Coming, by W. B. Yeats.

The meaning is not the point that I want to make. The point is the feeling - the emotion.

There is a psychological test composed of colored card that one picks to bring an understanding about self. It's a personality test developed by Dr. Max Lüscher and, therefore, called the Lüscher Color Test. The colors included in the short form are blue, green, red, yellow, violet, brown, black, gray. Each color has a psychological meaning. You select your prefered colors and they mean things. You do it twice and the differences mean things. Ambivalences in your life, stresses and strengths, goals and perceived barriers are all reflected in the cards. For instance, a preference for blue can indicate a preference for calm, or a need for calm, according to how you select the other cards.

My results are actually accurate in many ways - disturbingly so. But, to my great satisfaction, I've already pegged most of the danger points and have titrated them down (you chemists will know what I mean there).

Now, I'm not going to tell you my results, but take the test for yourself. I don't expect you to disclose on the Internet. There are several Lüscher Tests on the Internet. Some are free and some (which give more detailed reports) have a small monetary price (and perhaps a larger emotional price because the test can be brutally honest). Again, I will let you find your own. It should be easy and, as soon as I give you a link, that site will close.

These are all examples of how emotionally charged seemingly meaningless perceptions - nonsense words, isolated colors - can be. And that goes for all the other senses. I can't hear Jethro Tull's War Child without smelling oil paint and vice versa. I spent one summer in college and for much of that summer, in my spare time, I sweated, listened to Jethro Tull, and painted oil paintings.

The nose is separated from the brain and a major olfactory center by only a very thin, perforated plate of bone in the vault of the nose, and the olfactory bulbs send out many connections into the rest of the brain. Odors are the strongest triggers of emotions and memories that we have.

My point is that there are no neutral perceptions. All perceptions are emotionally loaded. Nothing is meaningless. You can use that in your adventuring.

Emotions color code your world. If you pay attention to the emotions attached to the elements of your surroundings, you have another layer of information. In effect, your intuition comes into relief in your perceptions.