Thank you for those of you who made it to this Philosophy Publics Unplugged live. Join me for the next live on Wednesdays at 12noon EST.

In this episode, we delve into the concept of intuition and its validity as a form of knowledge. We start by addressing the Shadow Journal question posted in our Discord server: “Can you describe a situation where intuition would be considered a valid form of knowledge? In this situation, how would you distinguish reliable intuition from mere guesswork or wishful thinking?” The discussion includes personal anecdotes, philosophical references such as Socrates' daimon, and different ways of defining knowledge. Additionally, we explore the differences between intuition and instinct and touch upon the implications of knowledge construction and loss, especially in the context of technological advancements like Large Language Models commonly referred to as AI. Join us for a thoughtful exploration of how our minds perceive and process the world around us.

00:00 Introduction to the Shadow Journal Question on Intuition as Knowledge

00:33 Defining Intuition: A Personal Story

03:41 Socrates’s Daimon

05:27 Exploring Knowledge Production and Destruction

09:21 Knowledge Access and Loss of

13:41 Q&A and Community Interaction

25:40 Closing Remarks

Get more from Mona Mona in the Substack appAvailable for iOS and AndroidGet the app

Transcript:

Today I thought we could talk a little bit about the question that has been put into the Discord our new discord from a couple of days ago. And this is the shadow journal question. I'll, I think I'll just read it out loud. Can you describe a situation where intuition would be considered a valid form of knowledge?

In this situation, how would you distinguish reliable intuition from mere guesswork or wishful thinking? Great. So, I'm thinking of intuition here in a fairly colloquial way. There is a technical term, intuition, that Kant uses. That's not what I'm really talking about here. I'm more talking about that situation where you have If something pops into your mind and you, you think about it for a moment, or the other type of intuition is you have some sort of issue, problem, something before you, and you, you think you might know a solution or you think you might know how something works and you then have to figure out whether your intuition is true or not, right?

Is that kernel of knowledge knowledge and in what circumstances are, is it reliable rather than mere guesswork is kind of the question that we put out for, for this week. The story that I associate with this is the intuition that I had. At one point I was at a pizza shop and I was going to walk home with a pizza and I had this momentary thought.

That I should walk Not the usual way, but a slightly longer more scenic way, but I didn't really know why Well it turned I went the regular way I ignored my intuition and I went the regular way And I was mugged that day now nothing bad happened because I always thought that if someone asked me for my bag, I'm not a materialistic person, I don't carry valuables, you know, I would just give it to them.

You know, who cares? But, as it turns out, you don't know how you're going to react in a situation like that. And I was so incensed that someone would try to mug me that I, I fought like heck. And there was nothing in the bag, but I was just, on principle, angry about it. And I yelled, and I screamed, and I, you know.

basically fell on the bag and they could not move me off of it. So, so they didn't get nothing.

But later I thought, Huh, that's interesting that I had this intuition that I should have walked a different way. And I wonder what that intuition was and where it comes from. Now, I'm more prone to think that we have these sorts of thoughts all the time. And we just don't remember them, right? If I had not been mugged that day.

I maybe would never have remembered that I had that thought that I should walk the other way. Because I'm always thinking, oh, should I walk home this way or that way? Should I do this or that? Right? And that, what becomes the intuition that I should walk a different way, that wouldn't have become anything significant, except for the fact that something bad happened to me on the way, that I intuited I should not have gone, or or I should go.

And and so that's the type of intuition that I had in mind.

Okay, Barbara. Nice. Well, thank you for stopping by. Hi, Fab.

Now, that type of intuition is related to a story that that Plato tells us about Socrates. Right? Socrates, in the symposium, is on the way to this party. It's at the, they are having a poetry festival, and it's in celebration of the poet Aristophanes, I believe. Oh, I may have that. Hmm. Who was? The poet that won the prize, they were gathering at the, this poet's house to have a drinking party, which was a common thing.

And Socrates on the way there, stops in the middle of his path and just starts thinking. And the person who's with them who is tagging along with Socrates, so they themselves are not invited to this party they wonder if they should. Wait or continue and they decide to continue and go to the party and then they arrive at the party They say well Socrates invited me, but he stopped in the middle of the road and he's just appears to be sitting there thinking well Socrates is reported to have this little voice that a daimon which is the root for our word demon, but really it means a spirit or an advisor right a Say A non human inkling and this little voice would tell him when he should not do something.

So the intuition was described as only being in the negative. It would never tell it what, it would never tell Socrates what Socrates should do, but it would tell Socrates when Socrates was doing something that he shouldn't do. So in that sense, it's very much like that little voice had told me that I shouldn't walk home.

way that day. So what do you all think? Is that a form of knowledge, right? We seem to know a lot of things without them being formally knowledge. If we describe knowledge as an account that includes evidence argument Some sort of a story from tradition, right? There's lots of things that we know because they're handed down to us.

There are certain things that we know because of our own experience, in which case we would give a first hand account. There's things that we know because we had a thesis and we tested it and we came up with evidence and that can be replicated by somebody else, right? That's the scientific idea of what knowledge is.

So when we talk about knowledge, we do talk about something that is a little bit heartier and that we share, that other people share, right? We kind of agree that this is a known thing. Or, even if we disagree we agree that it's, knowledge is being tested. And that's not quite what intuition is, right?

Intuition seems to be before that, or maybe it runs alongside what we know. But I think we can all think of many cases where we intuit something, right? So, go ahead and put into the chat a 1 if you think that intuition is knowledge. Some form of knowledge. And maybe it's just a different type of knowledge.

There's lots of things that we, we know. I think I'm repeating myself here. But our brains We don't understand yet, right? Probably never will. But, they're, they're our brains are these pattern making machines is how I think of it sometimes because it's not a, that's not the only and best metaphor probably.

But, we're very good at pattern matching. So, we can't possibly take in with our perceptive abilities everything that, that is presented to us. So we select using patterns what makes sense to us and what we're looking for. What agrees with us, right? So, what we know through our own experience is already filtered through perceptive abilities.

And we don't consciously think of what those perceptive abilities are most of the time. This is part of what the phenomenological reduction is about. It's about stopping and thinking about what you're taking in and how, right? So, there's all this information that is out there that we're taking in at a Subliminal might be the right word.

We're taking it in some way, because we're able to filter it, right? So we know it at some level, but it's not conscious knowledge and it's certainly not tested knowledge. So, at what point do we call it knowledge, right? Is it when it's proven correct? Only in retrospect can we say that was a piece of knowledge and I should have paid attention to it.

Perhaps that's one possibility. Or do we say, you know, there's lots of different kinds of knowledge intuition is one of them, and we can accept that knowledge is pluralistic. That would be another way to go.

And, you know, philosophy begins, and science, begins on top of all these other there's kind of a layer of perception, a layer of experience. Out of that. We construct knowledge, and the construction of knowledge, I believe, is a social and a political process. We not only construct knowledge, but we also deconstruct it.

So we can work back through our assumptions to how we produce that knowledge. We can also forget knowledge. We can ignore things that are known by others. So there's lots of ways in which knowledge not only is built up, but also brought brought down as well. A good example of that is the, the internet.

Before the internet, or as the internet was coming up, I worked at my library at my college as an undergraduate. And those were the days when like JSTOR and those Databases were being constructed, and we used to get CDs once a month, once every four months, I remember it was different for different ones, that had the data.

We had to load the data up into the machines. People had just begun to search for articles using that. Before that, it was the card catalog. And I saw the transition that happened when it used to be that you would search something in the card catalog, and if The book wasn't in the library and you had to order it through library loan systems.

It was a little bit harder, right, because you wanted what you needed right away. So there was a certain proximity to what was known. What was closest to you is what you would get to know. As these databases got better and better, if the database didn't list the item, then it didn't exist because it wasn't easy to access.

And then it became, if it's not accessible online, right? If it's not catalogued by Google, if it's not online, then all that knowledge that was produced that never made it online Hello, Sarah! All that knowledge that was produced that never made it into databases or online, it's sitting there. Someone who still knows how to get at that knowledge can access it.

Fewer and fewer of us know how to do that. And so that stuff is going to get buried and lost. So we're going to lose some of that knowledge. We'll have accounts of people who did access that knowledge at one point, but direct access to that will be a little bit harder. Now we're seeing one more transition because as AI becomes a way that people access knowledge, anything that AI cannot access, Or doesn't want to access, right?

Right? Which that it is taught to not make apparent will also be lost. So we lose knowledge all the time. So there's knowledge production and there's also the loss of of knowledge. Yeah, so, intuition, what is it? And then the other question is that has come up through our discussion is there's some words that are very closely related.

So there's intuition, there's instinct, and what's the difference between intuition and instinct? Any ideas? I'm going to stop here because I've been talking for a few minutes and just see if there's any any thoughts that you want to share that you want to discuss or any questions that you might have.

I'll take a little sip of coffee. Hello, Gansk. Welcome. Hi, Terry. Hello, Carlos. Hi, Tower. Any questions?

There were some really interesting views that were expressed in our discussion in the Discord. But I don't have the permission to share those ideas, if you want. We have a private Discord for the subscribers. It's free to subscribe. And and there we can kind of have a more you know, in the kind of safety in that space, we can have a discussion.

So there's a little bit of a discussion going on there. Some of it involves Kant and Kant's idea of intuition, as I mentioned earlier. So yeah, so join us also if you wanted to see what other people are thinking about intuition and what some of the other ideas are that have been expressed.

And this question is one every Sunday around noon, I publish a philosophical question to help us to think about our assumptions to help us to think about what our personal philosophies might be, and to help us to frame common human problems philosophically. So that's, that's where this kind of question comes from.

All right, let's do Let's do a Q& A for the next five minutes or so. So, Q& A time. Also, ask me anything time. Within reason. Any philosophy questions. Or you could also kind of opening the suggestion box as well. This is something that my subscribers are able to do as well. But if you have any suggestions for topics that you would like.

To put on the discussion block. That also would be fantastic.

So, let's, I'm just going to scroll through here. Oh, okay. Can I make this bigger? Intuition seems like the ability to access in this real time flow of information of the information field, just off the cuff impression. Yeah, I think that's one way to think about intuition is that. It's the, it's the way in which we're taking in, you know, the, the phenomenal world, the flux of the phenomenal world, and all the information that is coming that is part of the environment that we're in, right, that we frame in a specific way because we're in the world trying to do something specific.

So if I feel that the room is dark and I look. Towards the lamp. I'm going to see the lamp. I'm not going to see whatever's behind the lamp or anything like that, right? But all that stuff is still there. I still see it at some level. So there might be some sort of mismatch. I might notice that there is a wild animal behind the lamp that I'm looking for and not really see it, but Still register it.

I think that's a good way to put it. Actually. I'm registering things that I'm not actively seeing And that might give me you know, a message might be sent Somewhere in there to say whoa, take another look, right? Actually, this reminds me of I'm a photographer as well. I studied photography at the Academy of Art in San Francisco, and I did that for a couple years One of the things that you find out when you do photography is that you are taking pictures of something and you notice after when you you take the picture, you develop it and you print it and you're looking at the print and you're like, Oh, look at this.

I didn't notice that when I took the picture. And then you realize that not only are you doing that, but it's somehow conscious, it's, it's a pattern that you're repeating. So you develop another photograph and you're like, Huh. Look at that, I did, I, I captured that thing again, without wanting to. And that's how photographers sometimes develop series, right?

Is they start to realize what it is that they're photographing, in spite of the fact that they're seeing something else. So, I did a whole series on, like, faces, seeing faces and things, which is a common thing that our brains do. Do we like to see faces? So in, in inanimate objects I would photograph and frame the photograph in such a way that you could see that face that I had been picking up without noticing that I had been picking it up until I started to look at my photographs.

So that act of printing and looking at what you're actually photographing, right? What you're seeing when you took the photograph is really interesting because it does teach you that there's all these things that you're picking up that you're not necessarily trying to capture. And I think that's part of intuition, right?

I think that's a concrete example of how intuition might be at work in producing knowledge at some level, or maybe you want to call it pre knowledge, or maybe just call it intuition. So it doesn't have to be something supernatural. I think there's also a sense in which intuition can feel magical, can feel supernatural, and maybe that's another explanation for intuition.

Right? Socrates daemon was a spirit a, it translates to demon, but really it's just a spirit. Right? So it's a supernatural entity that is stopping Socrates in his tracks and and making him or giving him a message about what he should not do. So that's another version of intuition. And it's interesting that we have just one word to capture all those different experiences.

All right, and yet we have a word that's intuition and instinct, right? I think instinct is a lot more animalistic in in its sense, right? Instinct would be more like breathing or you know with animals reproduction or I don't even know because I'm not a biologist, but I think the instinct sounds to me a little bit more like base body functions.

Intuition feels more intellectual. Let's see. More about deconstructing knowledge, please. Yeah, so I woke up one day and I went to a Reddit called Deconstruction Thinking. Where are all these Dairy Doll fans coming from? Woo! Only to find out that that's a word that's now being used by people who have been part of religious cults high demand organizations.

When they come out, they're saying that they deconstruct their experience, which means really discovering or uncovering Undoing, somehow, the programming that they underwent. So that is what some people mean when they say that they're deconstructing their Christianity or they're deconstructing their, insert cult name.

And in philosophy, deconstruction means something a little bit different. So the word deconstruction is a word that comes from Derrida. Jacques Derrida was a French philosopher of the 20th century who who was reading another philosopher called Heidegger, a German philosopher. Heidegger has a term called destruction in German, and what Heidegger meant by destruction or destroying the tradition was to Go back through the tradition to question the assumptions that were made about certain questions that interest him in order to kind of raise to flatten the ground, to, to, to raise the, the grounds of knowledge that was built on false assumptions to basically clear the ground and work his way back through tradition.

to do this. Now this is something Aristotle did, so Heidegger didn't necessarily invent this. Aristotle also began all of his accounts by doing a resume of what people who came before him had said about the topic. This is something that you're taught in school as well, right? When you start an essay, you may begin by saying, well, you know, so and so said this, and so and so said that, and so and so said that, and I think they're all wrong because blah blah blah.

Right? So, this is the basic idea. Now, Heidegger's, Heidegger's version of it is a little bit more elaborated. It's more specific than that, but that's the basic idea. So, Heidegger had this plan to, of destruction. Of destroying the tradition in order to get back to some questions that he found interesting.

When that term destruction came over to France and Derrida picked it up It became deconstruction. So it's a translation of a technical Heideggerian term. And what deconstruction means, which is another kind of topic deconstruction is about taking a look at binary logic. Say trying to think of a good example.

I mean, gender is the one that always comes to mind. Yeah, let's, let's do gender. So. Man and woman. A binary distinction. Binary thinking is all over our languages and our ways of thinking in the West. So in deconstruction you would look at that pair, man and woman. And you would come to realize that although we're presented with two options here, the way that that binary is constructed is that one is positive, one is the negation of that.

So, Man is subject transcendent, strong, let's use non philosophical terms, strong, um, let's just use strong. So man is strong, and women are weak in comparison to man. So what it means to be a woman is the negation of the things that it means to be a man. So, Woman is put into place really to prop up and to heighten, to accent, and to elevate what it means to be a man.

So that means that if you're a woman, you're read or understood or recognized only insofar as A comparison to man is appropriate. So deconstruction is about deconstructing the binary oppositions to show how they work. That they work through opposition. That it's not a true difference. It's really the one and the negation of the one.

And you do that by just, by looking at the underlying assumptions that create that binary distinction. So, not only do we have a binary distinction, but it's hierarchical. One is elevated against the other. And what grounds the assumption of gender is a biological idea of sex. Gender is thought to be the manifestation of that biological truth or reality.

So that's just one example of deconstruction. It's probably not the clearest one, and I do have a little write up on deconstruction, I probably should just publish that, because that was much more clear. But the idea is that it's not just about,

it's not just about thinking about binary difference, but it's about the mechanism that, that creates and makes those binary differences work and maintained.

So that's it. Yeah, a little bit about deconstruction. Do you know if archivists are trained in AI now or other methods? I do not know. I don't know. I've also been outside of academia for probably almost 10 years now. So, I don't know how AI is impacting higher education. Yeah, I don't know. I would be surprised.

I mean Maybe not. I don't know, actually. I don't know. That's a really good question. Someone should be keeping track of what AI is doing to our knowledge systems. And it's not just about, yeah, like I said with the library example, it isn't just about

the control of knowledge, although that is part of it. It's also about a generation who will now come in with AI as their primary way of finding information. Online, perhaps who will, will lose the knowledge of how to access information in books and written knowledge oral traditions. We'll lose all of that in the bin of history.

Now some things it's good to lose, but we seem to always lose the wrong things, in my opinion. Yeah. Okay. So welcome Coach. Welcome Soft. Welcome The Rebel. Hi Lucy. And hi Kathleen R. Hi Phyllis. Oh, lots of people, that's fantastic. Thank you so much for coming. Yeah, thanks for the hearts. So, what else to say?

Yeah, ask me anything. We have two more minutes, so I think I can take one more question. Last chance. Going once. Going twice. Yeah. So, I can take one more question, if anyone has a question.

Today was pretty open ended. I thought I would just jump on, say hello with my cup of coffee. In the future, I'd like to do something, you know, I'd like to try and run the philosophy salons that I used to run. And those are a little bit more structured, but I'm trying to figure out whether this format would work.

I think it might have to be more like a Zoom, my version of Zoom, which is an open source. It's called Jitsi. It's an open source alternative to Zoom and it's privacy focused. So I try to use privacy focused tools when I can.

I'm not sure if this, because this is more one way and the philosophy salons definitely need to be a two way conversation, and you could type questions, but that's not a conversation. So I'm not sure what exactly to do with this space, but I'm watching what other people are doing. It seems to be more yeah, it may be more of a place to, to lecture, to, to talk and take questions like, like I'm doing here, I think is, is the way to go.

All right. Well, thank you so much for coming. It was a pleasure. I hope to do these fairly regularly. I'm going to set up some sort of schedule and post that to the events calendar in the discord. So I encourage you if you're interested in philosophy, you're interested in feminist theory if you're interested in critical gender, critical race theory critical theory in general, if you're interested in existentialism, phenomenology philosophy of tech.

I work as a developer, you know, until very recently. And so I do have lots of things to say about tech and AI, and I do, you know, know a little bit about that stuff as well. So that'll at some point come out, I'm sure. I've written a few couple pieces on tech, but tech, you know, I kind of try, I, yeah. I haven't mixed up the philosophy and the tech too, too much yet.

But that's probably on the agenda. So if all those things or any of those things interest you subscribe to to Philosophy Publics. It's free and with a free subscription, you'll be able to see the chat and the link to the discord. So it's, you know, it's free to join the discord as well. So yeah join, join us as we build this It's a group of people who are interested in doing things and we're gonna get up to some fun stuff.

So yeah, I hope to see you there and in the next live. Take care everyone. Bye!