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Sunday, January 31, 2016 - 1:15pmSanction this postReply
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The first thing that an Objectivist should do is parse out what is meant by "intuitive feelings."   Often there is a claim made that implies there is a form of ESP at work.  That is, a claim to the acquiring of knowledge of reality without any sensory input.  This is a claim for knowledge about reality but without a connection to reality.  That kind of claim should be rejected. 

 

It is like "magic" - magic to a rational person is something that appears to have happened even though it should be impossible... it looks impossible, But the rational person understands that there is an explanation, even if he doesn't know what it might be, and that that explanation will be something that does not fly in the face of the laws of nature.

 

It is always good to look behind what is being said to see if the person hungers for some kind of escape from our understanding of the laws of nature.  Is the attraction that it defies reason?  Ignores the laws of nature?  (Motivation counts!)

 

Saying that we might not yet understand everything that our senses pick up, or everything our subconscious does, or everything our subconscious could do in assembling perceptions from our sensory information is a good thing.   This is a case of where knowing we have some ignorance, is an opportunity to try to learn.  The very fact that we have a SUBconsciousness tells us that a mental processing is going on below our focused, conscious level of awareness.  Branden has referred to the subconscious as being as vast as a continent and far more powerful than our conscious mind.  And a some of that power is available to be tapped.

 

I think that exploring alledged "intuitions" can be valuable in offering leads to understanding the full range of sensory input and to understanding our processing of that input.  The more that we, as individuals, can increase our ability to sense our environment in helpful ways, the more conscious we are and the more choices we will have.

 

(Edited by Steve Wolfer on 1/31, 6:06pm)



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Wednesday, February 3, 2016 - 8:05pmSanction this postReply
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The woman had weird fantasies during her pregnancy. The anecdotal evidence is that lots of women do, so probabilities are that some of them will be true, just as some psychics' predictions come true.

 

She told the anesthesiologist about her symptoms. Turned out she really did have a problem, and the doctor caught it. That's pretty common, too.

 

She tells the story in retrospect, saying that she insisted to her earlier doctors, in detail, that something was wrong, and they ignored her. I wonder what she really said to her doctors and her husband. It might be contemporaneous doctors' notes, letters, diaries or well-corroborated eyewitness accounts (not an exhaustive list). In the meantime I suspect that she's making herself look better in retrospect.

 

As for what Objectivism has to say, Barbara Branden's efficient thinking lectures took the topic up, noting that the subconscious can give us information that we aren't aware of consciously. She illustrated the point with one of Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot stories. Maybe the present story is an example of this. It isn't a problem for Objectivism.



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Wednesday, February 3, 2016 - 9:08pmSanction this postReply
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The chemistry of the human body is incredibly complex and, for all that is known now, it may have a mechanism for chemically detecting a condition like an accreta, sending a signal of the detection to the brain where the signal is processed by DNA to produce certain proteins or other biochemicals, etc, etc, - which ultimately manifest themselves into what is commonly believed to be 'intuition'.



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Thursday, February 4, 2016 - 8:03amSanction this postReply
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Simple question here. Did she catalog ALL, or at least a signficant sample of her "premonitions," then count up the hits as well as the misses? Of course not. Is this story even even worth the time to read the title? 



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Friday, February 5, 2016 - 5:42amSanction this postReply
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If we want to clarify our thinking about epistemology, then the answer is "Yes," the story title and the story itself are worth reading and considering.



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Friday, February 5, 2016 - 9:04amSanction this postReply
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The answer is a very, very conditional "Yes" - the condition being that there are no 'intuitions' as people tend to describe them.  That kind of intutition has to be seen as akin to "ESP" or "Telekinesis" or "Magic."  There are a large number of stories like this but they all want to claim some power or mechanism that reason can't find and they all are based upon 'knowledge' of reality by magical or non-specific means.

 

We don't need the word "intuition" to explore, scientifically, what we don't know about the flow of data from those senses that we know about to the subconsious and from there to something being presented to the conscious mind.  Epistemologically, this form of the transformation of sensations to a 'percept' needs a way to validate the percept because the subconscious is just as likely to present us with fantasy - How would we know the difference between some valid internal sensory input 'telling' us we have a specific ailment, and a tendency to convert feelings of stress or worry into an imagined concrete illness (hypochondria)?

 

As a side note, it should be pointed out that when we focus on the senses we usually only discuss those that sense the external world (sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, temperature).  But we have internal sensations as well: hunger, lack of oxygen, build up of carbon dioxide, thirst, spatial orientation, balance, acceleration/deacceleration and gravity, spatial orientation of our limbs, internal pains and aches, and many more.  We have used reason to find the means of measuring and validating what we sense of the external world (e.g., working with color theory, properties of light, perspective, physiology, etc., to validate and understand sight)... we haven't done that much for our internal senses.  Other things seem like we 'sense' them, but are probably products of the subconscious, like the 'sense' of passing time.

 

There is this divide where on one side there are mystics who are into things like out-of-body experiences, ESP, visions, etc., and on the other side there are psychologists and neurologists and these two sides have such widely differing epistemological bases and such different motivations, that they usually don't work together to explore new territory - such as how much control can one consciously gain over what are normally only subconsciously controled elements in our physiology (e.g., can you consciously 'will' yourself to have 'goose bumps' or to blush?).   I've seen and done things with hypnosis that make it clear that there is a lot we still don't understand and that there is much more that the conscious mind is capable knowing and doing.  I don't, however, believe that this is 'the' explanation for claims of valid intutions - I'm betting that 99.99% of those claims are a kind of wishful thinking, neuroisis, a kind of religious experience, an example of 'faith' - mysticism - take your pick.



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Monday, February 8, 2016 - 7:28amSanction this postReply
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This woman's caregivers did not ignore her.  At 22 weeks she went to the hospital reporting her concerns.  She was no doubt admitted, and her and her baby fully examined.  At 30 weeks, she reported her concerns again.  An MRI was ordered.  During her consultation with her anesthesiologist, she reported her concerns and that caregiver responded by planning for the very thing that was ultimately needed. 

 

The article could just as easily have been titled "My Intuition Saved My Life."  That would require the author to NOT have a victim mentality, however.  I suspect she's a glass-half-empty kind of gal.



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