Updated: 03/04/2025

Intuition misconceptions

Intuition is not innate knowledge. Intuition and knowledge exist in two different dimensions. Intuition exists in the dimension of perception - awareness of space-time. Knowledge exists in the dimension of judgement - interpretation of reality - and it is the awareness of the overall structure of a set of logical conditions. You can interpret the past, present and future which can lead to the formation of knowledge but the perception of the past, present and future is not knowledge itself.

Intuition is not a gut reaction. That's called an instinct. It operates without you having direct control over it. You might be able to develop it indirectly in order to change some of its tendencies, but when instinct snaps in your brain, you do not operate through it. Instead, the instinctive part of your brain operates you.

Intuition is not a feature of the unconscious. While intuition is abstract, in opposition with sensing which is concrete, intuition can be very much conscious for many people. What is unconscious, for the intuitive type, is their sensing.

An example: a person claims that he has an intuitive feeling that team A is going to win the match, but doesn't know why. His intuition is very much conscious to him but the sensing input that he accumulated that was the basis for the pattern identification is unconscious to him.

And more importantly, intuition is not magical. When we don't understand what intuition is, we mystify it.

Then, what is intuition

Fundamentally, intuition is the mental construction of what you can not sense, of what is possible and not yet real.

It's also true that intuition is the mental construction of the future since the future is not yet "real". Intuition is used all the time. When praying, when predicting the future, when developing a strategy, when anticipating, when listing life or career goals, when identifying someone's intentions. Intuition is what allows us to deal with the unset.

There are two ways to predict the future:

By using the past - using data to detect patterns and create a mental construction of the different future possibilities

• Divergence approach
• You can use statistics to help with pattern detection. The more data you have, the easier it is to create a model that best represents a causality map of an event
• Hypothesis: if you had the processing power to compute all the data in the world related to past events, you would be able to have the perfect statistical model to predict the future - presumes determinism

By using the present - creating a specific future

• Convergence approach
• That's why some people say - The most probable future is the one you create