+- Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum (https://www.scivillage.com)
+-- Forum: Science (https://www.scivillage.com/forum-61.html)
+--- Forum: Alternative Theories (https://www.scivillage.com/forum-130.html)
+--- Thread: Consciousness vs intuition (/thread-21003.html)
Consciousness vs intuition - Magical Realist - Aug 1, 2026
There is no debating the fact that when we are immediately aware of something, be it a state of our body or something in our environment, that we are "knowing" about it. Consciousness seems to presuppose this very act of knowing. Which suggests that there is another kind of knowing that often happens below the threshhold of our consciousness. We call this intuition--the unconscious processing of information that goes on without us even having the think about it. Like how you just know someone is not being on the level with you. Or how you just know how to type without even being conscious of it. In firearms training in the military they called this "muscle memory"--when you are able to go thru the routine of handling and shooting a firearm automatically and efficiently without thinking about it. Strange that consciousness had to even evolve at all when we already had this innate ability to cognize going on inside our brains. Just what IS the function of being conscious? Wouldn't we have all been better off as zombies?
RE: Consciousness vs intuition - Syne - Aug 1, 2026
Subconscious instinct works on the level of animal stimulus/response. It's not cognition, as cognition involves the awareness of recognition.
RE: Consciousness vs intuition - Magical Realist - Aug 1, 2026
Google AI:
"No, cognition does not always involve recognition.To understand why, it helps to look at the definitions and the scope of these two terms:
Cognition is the broad, overarching umbrella for all mental processes involved in acquiring, processing, storing, and using information. It includes perception, attention, memory, reasoning, decision-making, problem-solving, planning, and language. Recognition is a specific cognitive function—a subset of memory and perception—where you match current sensory input to stored knowledge and identify it as something familiar or previously encountered ("knowing again"). Many cognitive processes occur without any element of matching or identifying a past stimulus:
Novel Problem-Solving / Fluid Reasoning: When you encounter a completely unprecedented, brand-new problem and use logical deduction or abstract reasoning to figure out a solution, your brain is deeply engaged in high-level cognition. Because the situation is entirely novel, you aren’t "recognizing" a past pattern or memory; you are generating a new mental construct.
First-Time Perception (Bottom-Up Processing): When raw sensory data (like a novel abstract sound or an unfamiliar object in a foreign environment) hits your sensory receptors, your brain begins the cognitive process of organizing those basic features (edges, light, pitch). Before categorization or recognition kicks in, the earliest baseline stages of perceptual processing are already active cognitive work.
Creative Generation: Daydreaming, imagining a fantastical creature you’ve never seen before, or composing a brand-new melody relies on generative imagination rather than the retrieval or recognition of stored templates.
In short, recognition is a vital tool and a frequent component within many cognitive tasks, but cognition itself is vast enough to encompass much more than just identifying what we already know."
RE: Consciousness vs intuition - C C - Aug 1, 2026
(5 hours ago)Magical Realist Wrote: There is no debating the fact that when we are immediately aware of something, be it a state of our body or something in our environment, that we are "knowing" about it. Consciousness seems to presuppose this very act of knowing. Which suggests that there is another kind of knowing that often happens below the threshhold of our consciousness. We call this intuition--the unconscious processing of information that goes on without us even having the think about it. Like how you just know someone is not being on the level with you. Or how you just know how to type without even being conscious of it. In firearms training in the military they called this "muscle memory"--when you are able to go thru the routine of handling and shooting a firearm automatically and efficiently without thinking about it. Strange that consciousness had to even evolve at all when we already had this innate ability to cognize going on inside our brains. Just what IS the function of being conscious? Wouldn't we have all been better off as zombies?
"Knowing" or indentification and understanding is usually mediated by language-based thoughts in humans (as communicated to others or privately experienced, anyway -- not as the hidden brain processes). That in turn is dependent on stored information. In animals it would be more feelings/emotions applied to the incoming sensory data for meaning, if not direct, resurrected memory events themselves. Rather than the learned, in-between symbolic representations of humans.
Intuitions are kind of akin to tacit knowledge, where the latter isn't expressed by language. But by action, skills, or making a claim that one can't explain in terms of reasoning or justify with language elaborations.
For Kant, intuitions were the forms of space and time that sensations or phenomenal affairs conformed to (they weren't subordinate to language). Whereas general concepts (categories) were the forms that thoughts conformed to (usually language expressed thoughts, but non-sensory visual thoughts can be regulated by abstract principles and patterns, too).
The motley number of ways that "consciousness" is used just points out the futility of employing that term for the "problem" in philosophy of mind. Of trying to exclusively use consciousness to refer to the manifestations. Whereas in actual practice, anyone can and does steer it away from that specific mystery to the dozens of characteristics and abilities associated with intelligence and proto-intelligence. The latter reliant on information retention and retrieval (just as the microprocessor chip of a computer can't do ___ if the memory of the computer's RAM sticks and disk or solid-state drives are removed).