Consciousness vs intuition

[Magical Realist]

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?

[Syne]

Subconscious instinct works on the level of animal stimulus/response. It's not cognition, as cognition involves the awareness of recognition.

[Magical Realist]

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."

[C C]

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 identification 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).

[confused2]

The answer given by an AI suggests language is a social thing .. we NEED to communicate. Other enquiries suggest that 'thinking' (consciousness?) is done in the language we communicate in. Like MR suggests (?) .. this whole 'consciousness' thing may be no more than fitting the bullets into the magazine (correct gun term?) .. ready to fire. Crazy/stupid folks fire crazy/stupid .. smart folks can take take the wing off a communist at 500 yards. Step into my parlour babe, you'll be safe once you're inside.

There are documented examples of children growing up without outside language guidance. However, the linguistic outcome depends entirely on whether the child is completely isolated alone or placed in a group with other children.

Historically known as "The Forbidden Experiment", these rare and tragic real-world cases fall into two distinct categories:

1. Isolated Individuals (Feral and Abused Children)
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When a single child is raised completely alone without language input, they fail to develop a language on their own. Because they lack social interaction, their innate language capabilities are never triggered. If they remain isolated past puberty, they permanently lose the ability to master complex grammar due to the Critical Period Hypothesis.

Genie Wiley: Discovered in 1970, Genie was locked in a room by her father from infancy until age 13. She was beaten for making sounds. While scientists later taught her hundreds of words, she could never master syntax or form proper sentences.

2. Groups of Children (Spontaneous Language Creation)
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When multiple children who lack language guidance are placed together, the outcome shifts dramatically. Driven by a human need for connection, groups of children will spontaneously invent their own structured language.

Nicaraguan Sign Language (Idioma de Señas Nicaragüense): In the late 1970s and 1980s, Nicaragua opened its first schools for deaf youth. The children arrived with no knowledge of standard sign language; they had only used simple gesture systems ("home signs") with their families. Left to themselves on playgrounds and buses, the children combined their home signs and naturally engineered an entirely new, grammatically complex sign language completely independent of adult influence.

Idioglossia in Twins: Twins raised in environments with severe adult neglect often develop highly complex, private languages known as idioglossia. A famous case is Poto and Cabengo (Grace and Virginia Kennedy), who were left alone with a grandmother who rarely spoke to them. They created a rapid-fire, structured language that sounded like gibberish to outsiders but had its own consistent rules and vocabulary.

[Syne]

There are no problems without any recognizable elements whatsoever for a human to solve. If a situation had absolutely zero recognizable elements, your brain would perceive it as pure sensory chaos or "white noise," making it impossible to even identify as a problem.
- gemini

This is the difference between event-level and feature-level recognition.

1. Specific Recognition (The Event Level)
This is what cognitive psychology usually means by "recognition." It is the ability to say, "I have seen this specific object, situation, or problem before." [1]

The Claim: Cognition can happen without this type of recognition.
Example: A doctor encounters a brand-new, mutated virus. They do not recognize the virus itself. However, they can still think, analyze, and treat it because they recognize the concept of cells, proteins, and DNA.

2. General Recognition (The Feature Level)
This is what your intuition is rightly pointing out. You cannot think about things if you cannot recognize the basic features making them up.

The Reality: Your brain must recognize fundamental building blocks—like shapes, colors, physical cause-and-effect, or basic logic—to process anything.

Example: If you were suddenly dropped into a 10-dimensional universe where light, gravity, matter, and time did not exist, you would have zero recognizable elements. You could not "think" your way out of a problem there because you would have no cognitive hooks to grab onto.
- gemini

[confused2]

I'm not sure whether or not I have words (thought words) in dreams .. anyone with an instant answer to that?

[Magical Realist]

Your brain must recognize fundamental building blocks—like shapes, colors, physical cause-and-effect, or basic logic—to process anything.

OTC cognition is the act of knowing something in its own being, not its mere reminding us of something else it is like. The thing we are conscious of is always THIS thing and not a mere abstract name or category. That's why we can know about things we've never experienced before. And of course there was always the first time you knew about something such that you could RE-cognize. The very word entails having cognized something previously. Our whole childhood was devoted to cognizing things we have never seen before. If we went around only seeing things we recognize we'd never see anything.

[Syne]

We can't "know something in its own being." This is a fundamental limit in human perception and understanding. Everything directly perceived is an approximation. We cannot cogitate on anything we are not aware, but the moment we become aware, we can instantly recognize it. If that weren't so, we would lack any object permanence. The second we look away, we'd think it ceased to exist.

[Magical Realist]

We can't "know something in its own being." This is a fundamental limit in human perception and understanding. Everything directly perceived is an approximation.

Knowing something only comes thru perceiving it. That is how we know things in their being. Past data as in seeing something like it in the past only serves us in identifying and naming it. But that isn't gaining knowledge about it. No information is acquired from recognizing something. If I recognize a toy I had as a child no new information is gained about it. It is no more than an empty cipher of a past experience. Only be cognizing it directly thru my immediate consciousness of it, by holding and examining it in its pure physicality, do I know it as what it is.