Rishon Rishon

Knowledge of Intuition

Amritas responds to the post where I talk about my fondness for complex systems, such as evolution and economics, which are created by the application of simple, easy-to-understand rules. He talks about one of my other great intellectual loves, intuitive knowledge:

One does not need to spell properly or to get an 800 on the English portion of the SAT to get through life as an Anglophone in America. One does, however, have to decide to use a(n), the, or nothing before a noun on a regular basis. Such decisions are at the 'heart' of the language - the core known to all native users regardless of level of education. No native English speakers hesitate to choose between a(n), the, or nothing in the middle of a spoken sentence. Even a child can do it correctly. It seems self-evident - though it's also so hard to explain. If someone asked, "When do you use the?", could you give an instant (and short!) answer?

When I use the term intuitive knowledge, I'm referring to things that people know (which are true) but which people can't explain rationally. I find this kind of knowledge fascinating because people usually equate their thoughts with their self, e.g. "I think, therefore I am" - when the reality is that there is a great deal of thinking that we do which we are not even aware of.

Almost everything that we do, we do intuitively: walk, eat, see. To those who think that these things are innate, and therefore not thinking, I say: have a baby, you will see that these things are learned. But that doesn't tell the whole story: we are physiologically built to learn them. Children who don't learn these things at a young age will probably never be able to learn them, or will learn them poorly, and with great trouble. Language falls into this category. How many of us know the grammatical rules of our own language? Even professional linguists don't know all the rules of their own language. Learning language by learning grammar and vocabulary can only take you so far, the rest must be done intuitively, through usage. There are innumerable little rules in every language, that you must learn in order to be proficient in it. The amazing thing is that every everybody successfully masters those rules at least for one language. Even profoundly retarded people usually do a very good job of it, just as they learn to walk, eat, and see. (Anyone who has tried to write optical recognition software knows how hard it is, rationally, to distinguish objects from visual input. Yet people do effortlessly.)

I am very much a second-language speaker of Hebrew. If I concentrate, I am capable of producing Hebrew that Israelis will mistake for native, but this level of concentration is usually incompatible with thought. I have settled on an accent which Israelis have told me is "not bad" - which means that it is clearly foreign. And though I know the rules of Hebrew grammar, when I'm tired, or concentrating on a difficult thought, my production ability declines dramatically. Nevertheless, most of what you read about Hebrew on this blog are not things that I learned in school, rationally, but the results of thought-experiments performed on myself. Though I gained fluency in the language only as an adult, I was capable of absorbing through osmosis innumerable rules that rationally I don't know about.

There are those who claim that knowledge of God should be on the list of those things we know intuitively. I'm not so sure. What I am sure about is that worldview is on the list, and God may or may not be part of it. Our worldview enables us to interpret the events of our lives, in much the same way that sight enables us to interpret visual images, or language ability enables us to interpret speech. Hardly any of us even know that we have a worldview, or what it is if we do. Certainly it's not something we've learned rationally, in school (though the school environment is important in forming it: why I am so adamantly in favor of school choice). It's something we pick up through osmosis, like language, first from our parents, then from society at large. In my opinion it's the most important thing in our lives, and most of us pay no attention to it, neither in ourselves, nor our children.