Intuition and instinct - Lent 2023: Day 15

Into the third week of Lent, and I'd like to move onto the theme of intuition. 

Defined as "immediate cognition without the use of conscious rational processes" or "a perceptive insight gained by the use of this faculty", [Wiktionary] we instinctively know of its presence but spend little time or effort trying to understand it, even less trying to develop it as something that can be of enormous help in our lives.

Is intuition the same as gut instinct? I'd argue that it isn't - intuition is something different, something metaphysical.

Gut instinct is a biological response unguided by thought. It is an evolutionary development of the fight-or-flight response. I am in a new environment - I am on guard. Is this a threatening situation? Or can I relax? I see a strange face - should I fear it? Can I trust it? 

Instinct is set of behaviours, innate and learned, that an organism carries out unconsciously in response to external conditions. Blinking, recoiling, shielding one's face, reaching out to grab.

Intuition comes spontaneously, unprompted by circumstances. 

Intuition is something metaphysical, a 'sixth sense', perception that lies beyond the scope of today's reductionist-materialist science. Intuition is that thought that often presents itself to you unbidden, maybe as you wake, or shower, or while on a walk. It can also present itself to you as an answer to an intractable problem you've been wrestling with - a simple 'let it go' or 'act now'. The voice is calm, it has your best long-term interests at heart. And that intuiting moment may come in prayer - as the back-channel, the response to your opening up towards the Infinite and Eternal.

Learning to heed intuition is a skill that we humans have not even begun to develop. It's not taught, it's often dismissed as a cognitive bias, as a symptom of wishful thinking. Developing intuition, through practice and self-awareness, is possible - to the extent that the US military has spent millions of dollars on a programme to help develop a sixth sense among infantrymen.

The reductionist materialist approach to intuition is limited to an interaction between neurons in the brain; matter causes the effect we experience as intuition.

In this short clip below, physicist Sabine Hossenfelder (one of today's great YouTube popularisers of science) gives an extremely clear explanation in under five minutes of how reductionist-materialism sees the metaphysical. 

This is certainly not my point of view; I believe that consciousness is non-local - that is, not confined to the brain within our skull. Possibly - and this is nothing more than intuition! - consciousness is present across the Cosmos; a background, a sea within which all particles - everything - exists.

My intellectual counterargument rests on that which physics today doesn't yet know. Basing one's worldview on the Standard Model, which remains unreconciled with General Relativity, which cannot explain dark matter or dark energy, squeezes spirituality out of the physical world and into Dualism. There can be a soul, there can be Heaven - but not in the Cosmos of particles and fields. This is not what I intuit - my own feeling is that Consciousness is the force (maybe related to quantum theory, or string theory - who knows?) that binds everything together in this unfolding Universe of ours.

More about intuition over the next few days.

Lent 2022: Day 15

Religious belief, practice, inquiry and experience

Lent 2021: Day 15
The Afterlife - Faith and Doubt

Lent 2020: Day 15
Rites and Rituals