Omar Claflin

Our intuition is often spoken as the hidden part of the iceberg part of our mind, giving us wordless opinions and flash judgments. The fact is our entire mind is an experiential system – experiences and observations (yours or hearing about someone else’s), expand this system and its bounds and even its scope. Any extractable patterns from what you’ve seen are remembered and color your future experience. 

This is the flaw of the pure contemplative idea that one can lock themselves in a dark room and conjure forth thoughts in a vacuum. Or the historical narratives that boil history down to singular actors playing pivotal roles armed with nothing but an idea they conjured forth from pure will. These ideas hide an aggrandizing idea of semi-godly powers. It subjectively comforts with the thought of a power that cannot be taken away. Our inner vault is, in fact, inaccessible in a sense but only to the extent our own self-ignorance. The fact of the matter is, if you’re born in an area of the world with severe limitations, or/and bound to the severe limitations of the era, even the current one now, you cannot rise above it armed with only a self-conjured idea. You can evade it as best as possible or make incremental contributions on a broad scope or significant contributions on an incremental scope.

This isn’t to remove your uniqueness. The particular features your brain take from information comes from your own unique set of genetic wiring and experiences. The point is the mind as an experiential creature, shaped by its inputs. Which is an argument for personal caution on what you input. I try not to input dumb ideas or bad writing. Or even mediocre. I also avoid horror films.

This influence of experience on your intuition implies two things. Number one, your intuition can be wrong. Even your intuition about your intuition may be wrong. Number two, your intuition can be corrected. It can be updated.

By far, in us, the totality of our intelligence is unconscious. Roughly, it’s available to us through our intuition. This intelligence, as mentioned before, is experiential. It extracts the patterns from your own experiences and compares your current inputs against it. Novel perceptions are remembered because they don’t fit in these patterns. Salient perceptions stick out against the background of patterns.

The brain is remarkably indifferent about the vessel it occupies. What I mean is that it operates in its closed-off skull, blind to the world, largely free of pain receptors or sensation, as a large mass of biological computing. Scientists have switched parts of the brain that processes hearing with parts that process vision, and those parts will just adapt to the new input. Cortical layers that once processed vision will now processing hearing. Its currency is information. Information about the environment.

Its priorities include trying to predict accurately. This has consequences of exploration and experimentation to glean more information about the systems and worlds around it in order to know them more. To predict better. It is primarily an expectation machine. For example, it looks for common features in visual information. It dedicates parts of itself to detect common shapes, colors and faces. It looks for common sequences of events. It notices whenever ABC happens, DEF follows.

Information about the world is stored in these patterns. Pattern-recognition and memory and expectation are all extensions of the same thing.

Frustration serves as a signal that reality is mismatched with your projections of expectations. The frustration of reaching for something that was there a second ago, opening a drawer to not find your keys, clicking a touchpad and not have the computer respond in the way you expected to are all caused by wrongly guessing how something will happen or how your actions would impact it. This is a signal emanating from your deeper, wordless assessment processes wired in your perception and motor systems. It can stand as a subconscious assessment that you should attempt to adjust your reality. It can also serve as a reminder that the expectations of your systems should be adjusted or released entirely. Such as expectations of timeliness when stuck in gridlock traffic.

Or maybe you should just forget all of this and just go ahead and lean on the horn.

Memories aren’t really stored in a hard drive anywhere in your mind. Features of your experience are extracted and are distributed ethereally, reflected in the connections and neural weighting that determine how you process your environment and how you act. Similarly, advanced algorithms, complex procedures and social systems do this as well. There is intelligence wired in the patterns of their code. There is also intelligence wired in our distributed memories.

When you remember something, these stored features are pulled up and resynthesized. Some stuff may be filled in, implied or invented by your brain to fill in the gaps. The act of remembering a memory slightly alters the weighting of these features. Re-remembering over and over continues to alter these weights, as newly imagined experiences.

These features serve as filters for your perception as you input the environment. But this isn’t raw or comprehensive in its capturing of the environment. The filtering begins at the first stages (for instance, you can’t see ultraviolet light because of the limitations of your retina) all the way through the levels of your nervous system. Further along, shapes and color patterns are extracted, these pattern-extracting abilities deemed useful by your nervous system having been shaped by the millions of things seen in your life. This continues until these collection of shapes are identified as a car or a human face or some higher-level pattern, these patterns also recognized from past experience.

Association works at the highest levels including the similarities or overlapping features of abstract thoughts in your mind. Abstraction occurs gradually. Everything, once it hits your nervous system, is a form of abstraction. An array of light detectors on your retina communicate through nerves which are being activated or not. Already at this level, a reduction of information occurs as only the differences are communicated back (i.e. only the edges of a black box on a white screen). Features such as color, lines, motion get extracted and sent further up. If these are similar to something that resembles a face or a scene, the face or scene abstraction is processed relative to previous scenes or faces the nervous system has encountered before. It isn’t a collection of colors and lines; it’s now a face. More than that, it gets sorted into a type of face. A famous face, a familial face, a kind face, an angry face. Or it gets extracted up further into a crowd of faces. A crowd of pedestrians, a discontent mob, an orderly dance troupe, etc.

Intuition can fail you if experiences you’ve inputted so far are not related. If you are aware of this, your confidence in any sense you have will be very low. In this case, at least you know that you don’t know.

However, if the experiences you have had and the information you’ve inputted seems related, dramatic intuition failures can occur. But they are related. Yeah, so says your intuition.

Memory isn’t the only feature of this experience system. Confidence is also wired into this system. This is a consequence of how our networks of neurons connect with each other. Not only do we associate extracted patterns but we associate a confidence with that pattern. In other words, you are really sure the morning bus will arrive between 6:59 and 7:03 because it always has for that last several months. But in your first week, you were only fairly sure because the number of the examples you had to go off of was less.

You, your brain, doesn’t recalculate these odds every time you see something happen. It takes whatever its previous position on the matter was, say medium confidence, and updates them with what it just saw, experienced, read or even hallucinated. So that now the pattern, the time window the bus will come by in, is still the same, but now the confidence has been bumped up slightly.

This can explain why you catch yourself confirming things that you already knew, testing situations in which you already knew the outcome. Your mind is a relativistic information machine gathering whatever it can about the world around it and acting accordingly to gain that information. And confidence in that information. Its balancing this priority with a bunch of other priorities which may be partially conscious to you or not.

Consider how the elderly physician in your neighborhood, seen thousands upon thousands of clinic visits during his life. So many of those cases, runny noses and upset stomachs, which he was able to figure more or less how it was going to proceed. Now consider the rare disease occurring in the population at a rate of 1/10,000. Short of being a specialist in a large city, largely relying on specialized referrals, he may never see a single case during his three decade career. This disease isn’t trivial as 30,000 people in the US would have this condition holding this statistic. Which is why there are case reports. Or just overt memorization of pathology and board exam questions.

This is the hubris of having seen many thousands of patients in one’s lifetime and relying on them for experience. This is true for a reporter who’s embedded or travelled for years when there are sophisticated polling mechanisms capable of sampling tens of thousands of individuals.  This is the point of education systems. This is the point of all human information-sharing systems including the Internet and human language itself. This is also the self-valuing narratives of aged individuals or experienced individuals. If someone encounters something unique, they can generate a case report, a photograph or a book. That contribution will join the probably tens or someday, hundreds of others. But there is a severe limitation to the scope of what we can be individually exposed to. Thus, the case for inputting a lot, whether it be the Internet, books or Youtube. The case for plugging into these shared experience networks.

Intuition about intuition can be wrong. The same thing applies to a twice-successful venture capitalist evaluating technology. Or a pundit who was present and/or involved in the four previous elections. This is why we gather and concentrate information.

Experiential patterns is a form of intelligence for sure. Arguably, that’s all we are. An intuition machine with limitations.

I’m not deriding experience, or extracted experience that is essentially education or human information-sharing. I’m just bringing it into awareness. We operate on experiential information, occurring in many forms. We extract probabilities of things and the confidence of those probabilities from these experiences.

Much of what is newly discovered by our scientific and civilization progress isn’t intuitive. But they can be. They will be.

The workings of anything that isn’t available to our immediate senses of sight and sound of everyday experience is incredibly counter-intuitive actually. But the discovery process doesn’t care about intuitive explanations or narratives. And we know these discovered patterns to be consistently true and useful. And through education, our intuition gets updated. More will be added over time.

The formulas that characterize gravity, or the relationship between mass and force, that allows us to know how a rocket will act if launched from Earth were accomplished by this rational process. It was not at all intuitive pre-Newton, that if you threw a coin up and it falls back down, but if you threw it hard enough, it would fall forever in a circular path around Earth. An orbit. Once discovered, this can be integrated into your intuition to the point where 9th graders get these concepts intuitively but you can’t just rely on your strong gut feelings or your love of the universe to accomplish this.

The mechanics of quantum action, complex social interactions, economic systems, geopolitical maneuverings, even twenty dimensional space, can be made intuitive with enough exposure and experience. This is a natural feature of the network of neurons in your head.

Similarly, nothing is immediately intuitive about the form information can take on in your brain, a system with over a hundred trillion connections. Well, not yet. But with untold hours of human investigation and critical thinking, we will continue to make this more intuitive. For now, as best as my intuition can do, I have a sense that quantum physics or a ghost-soul explanation isn’t a very useful encapsulation of this system. I have an intuition that the old learning and education systems that don’t engage you in varied experiences aren’t the most efficient ways for people to learn. My sense is that our encapsulations of psychiatric pathologies and the medical-legal rehabilitation of criminals could be improved.

Intuition is incredibly useful. It allows you to make incredibly complex assessments in a moment. It allows you to inhale a hundred different features and make a judgment. Whether something is valuable or not. The identity of someone’s face. An illogical concept. All these processes are our intelligence. These are results of our layers of categories developed from experience.

Intuition doesn’t learn in a clean educational vacuum either. It’s able to learn and figure out how things work using the noisy, inconsistent examples from the world. But it’s limited by what it can see or extract.

Distinctions, categories, groupings by your brain works at all levels, on many levels unaware to you. By evaluating your behavior or language or unspoken reactions, you can infer what the underlying distinctions you’re making are. That person is trustworthy. That strategy won’t work. That piece of music is underappreciated. These intuitive judgments or groupings occur whether you are conscious of them or not.

Intuition isn’t uniquely unconscious. Its output is explicitly conscious as thoughts arising in your head or observable action. Unawareness of the processes at work is true of our entire brain. We can turn our memory and narrative systems on itself and try to explain why we have that sense or reaction but that’s only inferring the inner calculus at work. Our neurons not directly accessible.

Consciousness, serving as the perceptual memory chalkboard in your mind, bringing up the collection of behaviors that in this case, you, yourself, have produced, is self-consciousness. All the tools, deep and intuitive, explanatory and narrative, can be brought to bear with the right clarifying language to understand yourself better. The ability to simulate others and the world, can be turned around on yourself, potentially in a recursive manner giving you seemingly limitless ability to self-clarify.

Self-awareness or consciousness turned on yourself is perceiving, remembering and assessing your own actions from yourself.

There are discussions about whether consciousness is possible in machines. Sure. That consciousness of a sort exists in large human organizations, companies, and culture. Yeah. We already use language that implies this. Active information systems with enough complexity are bound to exhibit complex behavior and have preferences. Doing visceral and more explicit calculus. Reflecting on its own makeup, its own output, its own actions. Trying to use purpose to orient its many working pieces and to sustain some more-than-immediate strategy.

This concept gets hijacked and over-infused with meaning to aggrandize ourselves. The phenomena of consciousness isn’t beyond replication in the external world around us. This also shouldn’t be conflated with the broadness of our intelligence.

Understanding what consciousness is comes into play for instance if you have a pain blocking medication that simply works by making you forget. During those moments, you are experiencing pain but since you lose the memory of it, it becomes basically irrelevant that you were experiencing horrifying pain. Because consciousness is perception and memory.

Except that your neural system records implicit memories of it some way of course. Even though you lack the ability to replay the event explicitly in your mind, there was some influence on your pattern-recognizing nervous system by those moments. Similar to the Pavlovian animal that flinches at the implicit expectation of a shock. Or how a perfect eidetic memory would record the traumatizing experiences and saliency of infanthood. That is just a more explicit psychological trauma.

Not that all psychological trauma is to be avoided. There is an argument to be made that development comes out of trauma. Assuming trauma is navigated successfully. Which isn’t to say that every step of it was successful.

As an aside, suffering at first, before success, isn’t a karmic justice endowment system. This explanation implies that you must necessarily suffer to it before you are deserving of its reward. This is a terrible shortcut explanation. There is no deserving or not deserving. There may be a self-development period, an experiential adaptation period to learn how to handle some new situation that results in trial-and-failure. A training environment is structured to make an adaptation to a soon-to-be real situation in a consequence-free way. Promotion builds in incrementalism into the handling and learning adaptation to minimize the scope of failure. A bootstrap effort may actually require incubation time to accrue and/or build resources. None of this implies a karmic market although it is understandable why this shortcut description seems to work.

Our intuitive system isn’t a monolith either. In other words, it’s capable of evaluating multiple features of something in parallel or at once. A mob on the street can be a group of people that are cohesive, disorderly and content all at once. Similarly, conflicting evaluations can arise as conscious thoughts. This doesn’t imply some grand conscious versus subconscious duel.

The parallel nature of billions of information sensors feeding in different signals of varying intensity results in parallel pattern extraction of these individual streams of information as well as combinations of them. Your eye contains more than a hundred million light-detecting receptors. You have receptors that can tell how inflated your lungs are. Receptors to detect how much oxygen and carbon dioxide is in your blood. Our experience is a conflation of these information streams of (apparently) a mind-boggling number.

Dedicated information processing for some of these receptors or combinations of receptors produce even more information streams. Colors, lines, space, words, taste, sounds, temperature, arm position, balance, pain, all being extracted for patterns. Applications of these pattern-extracting systems on the downstream output give us a sense of awareness of some parts of our brain. Understanding the intuitive nature of our minds de-emphasizes our conscious narratives as us. It realizes the conscious narratives as outputs of our intuitive intelligence and emphasizes the impact of experience and concentrated experience in the form of stories, movies, videos, books, imagined scenarios, conversations and any form of human information sharing. The mismatch between your expectations and the world, or inability for your current intuition to grasp something, can be resolved. Updating with better or newer information, in the form of lower perceptual forms or higher abstractions is all that your intuition requires to improve.

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