I would like to begin by both proposing, and introducing, an adaption to our informal convention here on ED of posting eclectic topics under "The Super thread of literature, art, music, life, and the universe in general". I find that it's hard to discover what new and divergent topic is under discussion until I actually go to the old thread and open the postings labeled "new".

I propose that we start a divergent topic with "OT - " followed by a meaningful description of the topic. So not only are the divergent topics more focused and easily identified from the forum listing, you can also search for "OT -" and get a list of solely divergent contributions.

Of course this assumes that people here in the ED club *want* to do divergent topics. I, for one, do: you can beat good ole CAS to death after a few months, let alone the 17 years I've contributed--and yet I find the people here at ED to be decent, intelligent, aesthetically sensitive people who have well founded opinions on topics other than CAS and his peers, and they self-moderate at just about the right level for me. This can be a significant issue: I have been officially banned from some Discus forums, informally asked not to contribute in certain discussion threads on others, and spot censored in Readers' Comments sections of newspapers for comporting myself just about as I do here, and the implications of this sort of intellectual ostracism, as it effects free thought, are very, very depressing--and frankly pretty scary--to me.

So today I'd like to explore what is commonly called "intuition"--and by this I mean the urgent impressions and perceptions that people get in given life situations that may not be accompanied by concrete evidence, and yet very often prove to be accurate.

When I was young I had these impressions but pooh-poohed them as silly--"fit only for womenfolk". So I ignored them and stuck to rational approaches--which work pretty well. And yet there was a gap in my strategies in situations in which I had substantially incomplete information. Often this gap would cause me to refrain from action, and this was usually OK.

But I missed opportunities due to this restraint.

Later, I began to play around with listening to these "unfounded inspirations" a bit, trying some of them out. I found that the important criterion was that they were derived from near instantaneous impressions and that these, and not reactions to unfounded impressions that I had formed after some consideration--but still without concrete information--were the ones to listen to. The latter--the unfounded ones formed later--were more in the nature of personal prejudices, while the former--the immediate ones--were more like instantaneous revelations or inspirations.

"Oh. That guy just told me a gigantic lie..."

And over time I used them more and more and in doing so they seemed to get more and more sound.

So what *are* these intuitive realizations? They could be described as extrasensory or even spiritual, but I think that maybe they are the evolved recognition of small visual (or aural) cues that formerly kept my preliterate, knuckle-dragging forebears alive.

Anyway, that's what I'm going on now. I'd sure like to hear other opinions on this.

I would caution readers that there also seems to be a school of thought that elevates these intuitive perceptions to semi-divine heights--they advise going *solely* with intuition, or to select the intuitive impression over the rational one, when the two are in conflict. This is a case of "choosing philosophical sides"--perhaps for misplaced sense of ideological purity--where no such choice is required: indeed, I suspect that this is pretty much what those addicted to gambling do.

But it is entirely possible orchestrate when to use intuition and when to use rational logic, and to even blend them. And therein lies the expertise, in my opinion. Effectively used, it ends up looking a whole like like a black art... ;^)

--Sawfish

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"The food at the new restaurant is awful, but at least the portions are large."
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Edited 5 time(s). Last edit at 17 May 21 | 08:58AM by Sawfish.

Your "OT" label idea is good. I hope it will catch on. The "Super Thread" has served to show that there's interest in topics related perhaps only tangentially to CAS and weird fiction, and that, at this time and with these participants at least, they can be discussed without becoming sources of severe annoyance.

As for intuition -- I have little doubt that it exists. But I don't seem to have experienced it at all often myself.

Here's something that came to mind almost immediately. It is a memory of a memory of something I was told rather than what I myself remember, so its value as evidence for anyone but myself may approach nil. I was about 7 years old and my sister about 3 years old. Our father was driving from California to Utah, where he was going ahead; he had landed a new job. We two children and our mom were having a meal when Mom suddenly felt the need to pray for Dad. So we did, and, I suppose, then went on about our meal. I don't remember the incident itself, but rather Mom telling me about it. She later learned (perhaps a phone call that evening) that my dad had been driving on a narrow, winding mountain road (a 2-lane, I take it) in dense fog, and trucks were coming from the other direction from time to time. He was in danger. He arrived safely at his destination. Well, for people of my beliefs, it is easy to take it that God told Mom to pray for her husband. But I believe I have read similar accounts by people who would not, themselves, account for their sudden impressions by referring to God.

From the point of view of scientific method, these incidents must be elusive. They can't be induced under laboratory conditions and evidence is anecdotal, although statistics could be compiled; in theory, you could ask 10,000 people to keep records of what they felt to be moments of intuitive knowledge and to record when they turned out to be true and when they didn't. But what really counts? How would we know that participants were reliable about their self-reporting? And so on. What if "looking for" such moments affected their occurrence?

Eventually y'all might want to discuss dreams that seemed to have a bearing in some extraordinary way on life, but I think it would be good to avoid that topic for now.

And perhaps what I've just written is already a departure from Sawfish's intuition topic into something related, but distinct -- if so it's fine to postpone or omit discussion of what I just wrote.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 17 May 21 | 10:49AM by Dale Nelson.

Thanks for the thoughts, Dale. When I kicked off the topic I hoped to be able to tie it to other non-material phenomena, like aesthetic appreciation, and a topic you've raised, beauty.

So I'm perfectly happy broadening out the discussion.

What you seemed to refer to are instances of phenomena that, if they exist and I'm not kidding myself (a big "if") I've both heard of anecdotally, and experienced myself. I'd differentiate them from what I described (detecting falsehood, emergent immediate danger, etc.) in that it's fairly easy to see that ones I desc ribe as "intuition" may well be detected by sensing subtle signals, and that they are associated with present and immediate events.

E.g., my wife and I regularly look at real estate with intent to invest. The most dramatic instance was about 35 years ago and we were looking at a fairly grand old house built on a slope in the Lair Hill area of PDX. It was somewhat run down, and a young man in his late 20s/ear;y 30s had inherited it from a relative. He was in some sense involved in the building/contruction trades.

He was offering the house for sale and we walked around in it and at one point I asked him about any emerging structural issues that he had noticed. I asked because I, myself, had seen a bit of worrisome land slippage, but it was not near the house. He quickly responded that he was aware of none.

At the very instant I had a clear impression that he was lying. He was looking at me, but there was something about the angle of his eyes, just before he said it, that caused an almost perceptible current or thrill.

Later I asked my wife about what she thought of the guy, and she said he was likeable, but probably not truthful, and she noticed this when he spoke of the structural issues.

So nothing proved, 3 years later the house, which had been sold, was demolished, and it was possibly structural. It was not to do a rebuild, because at that time it made no real sense to do those, as it does now, in certain cases.

But it's not certain.

Now I've also experienced seemingly perceptible "emanations" or moods from certain rooms in certain houses--again, we look at *a lot* of real estate. One of them hit both of us cold (I checked with her later). It was in an otherwise extremely cheerful old plantation house just outside of Hilo, Hawaii. Everything was all fine until we went into a particular room, and it was extremely unpleasant and almost threatening. Yet there was nothing one could identify--not the decor, not darker, or any other such prominent attribute.

Out of all other such places we saw, only one other house had a similar feeling, which was narrowly associated with a specific area of the house.

There are family anecdotes from my father's side of the family concerning something like foresight or precognition. I am unsure what to make of them; they were conveyed to me almost ashamedly, as an after thought. The old folks who conveyed this to me certainly didn't think they were anything positive.

--Sawfish

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"The food at the new restaurant is awful, but at least the portions are large."
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Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 17 May 21 | 08:00PM by Sawfish.

Perhaps I should say, given my early posting, that I'd be willing to consider that there are naturalistic or "materialistic" possible explanations for these things, or at least many of them. Things that are well established now as regards physics might have seemed uncanny to people in, say, 1850. But naturalistic explanations wouldn't, on the other hand, eliminate for me a Providential factor. The Providential element would be the "activation" of an "explicable" function at the right moment. Thus, in the incident with my mother's "intuition" of my father being in danger, it might be that nothing "supernatural" or "miraculous" had to happen for her to have that feeling, yet under Providence it happened at the right moment to be an occasion for prayer, understood as a kind of communication with, even cooperation of, the human being with her creator. On my presuppositions, it's that that is the more important thing here, not the "paranormal prompt." Mom never made a big deal about the incident and perhaps mentioned it only three times or so in her long life.

Your examples, Sawfish, of intuition are most interesting. Incidentally my friend Lars Walker wrote a near-future novel called Wolf Time, published by Baen around 20 years ago, with a protagonist who possesses a sometimes inconvenient capacity to tell when someone's lying.

It is a good proposal. As to intuition, I can only say that I strongly believe in it, but have been very bad at following it, not fully trusting this subtle holistic sense, and instead letting it be overrun by surface reasoning; which has led me into a number of awkward situations, "accidentally" bumping into the wrong people over and over, and also missed chances.

I think animals often are better at listening to this intuition, or sixth sense. For example they (elephants) can sense a catastrophe, like a tsunami coming, at a very early stage, immediately heading for the hills. Birds are also very sensitive.
Dogs are often better than humans at distinguishing bad from good people.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 22 May 21 | 04:22AM by Knygatin.

K, do you feel that this subliminal aspect of intuition is in some sense related to instantaneous recognition of aesthetic attraction? Both being non-rational, insistent, and immediate.

I think they may be related in some sense. They are not instinctive, but perhaps close...

--Sawfish

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"The food at the new restaurant is awful, but at least the portions are large."
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Sawfish Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> K, do you feel that this subliminal aspect of
> intuition is in some sense related to
> instantaneous recognition of aesthetic attraction?
> Both being non-rational, insistent, and
> immediate.
>
> I think they may be related in some sense. They
> are not instinctive, but perhaps close...


I don't know, Sawfish. Perhaps they are related, in not being rational, and going deeper. But I never doubt my instantaneous aesthetic attraction, like I do with intuition.

Intuition is often about following one or another path, and I am quite lousy at listening to the inner voice that will lead me right. However, if I am in a very stressed situation, like an emergency, I am usually very calm and make the right decisions. But for everyday errands, with so many meaningless choices modern society offers, I just get confused and can't make up my mind.

I'd like to be better at following intuition. I think one can find a good middle path, between rational and intuition; by being more focused, listening carefully, and calming down enough to be sensitively aware of a situation in its whole.