On Intuition

More and more often we hear how important it is to develop our intuition, to make decisions through the unconscious, and so on.

In Alexey Sitnikov’s “Karmalogic” project there’s a chapter arguing that the unconscious always picks the best of all available options for us. Probably true.

But how does this unconscious actually work — along with intuition, which we could loosely call the product of its labor?

In my view, intuition is the sum (the neural net) of our lived experience: the skills we’ve built, the knowledge we’ve gathered, the mistakes we’ve made, the decisions we’ve taken, the actions, the things we’ve pushed through, the emotions and situations we’ve lived. And so on.

If we have no experience in some area, intuition will only fire at the level of the basic instincts: fear, self-preservation, reproduction, finding food and shelter. So those are the only options it has to assemble a decision from. No point being surprised, later, at the quality of the result.

It matters to know the edges of your own competence. For example, if I understand nothing about medicine or how my own body works, then in any confusing situation my intuition, driven by fear, will tell me to run to the pharmacy and start swallowing antibiotics “just in case.”

So intuition isn’t a universal tool for every occasion? Sadly, there’s no magic pill here either — I’m sorry.

To put our hidden mental resources to good use, we need to widen the space of potential choices as much as we can. And that’s only possible through learning: theory at the very least, and better still — practice. Only then can we start to apply intuition that already rests on a solid foundation of knowledge and experience.

But here’s the payoff: by constantly expanding the variety of scenarios, like stratagems, we gain a truly powerful ally in making decisions both simple and hard — our own unconscious.

Here’s to expanding the space of options, and to better intuitive decisions! 😎