Intuition

[Trivia: What are the 3 novels from William Gibson’s “Sprawl” trilogy?]

Early in college, one of my history professors introduced me to the concept of “intuition.” That word, etymologically, comes from Latin for “in” and “to see,” so it could almost be taken apart as equivalent to “insight.” The concept, he explained, was a faculty that could be contrasted with discursive reasoning. While our minds reason by following pieces of evidence and given circumstances to build to conclusions, intuition involves our mind processing and then presenting conclusions to us almost spontaneously.

The example he provided was that he was in the habit of bringing his satchel into the classroom when he had a pop quiz to distribute and not otherwise—and, reportedly, one student in the past had developed a surefire confidence in being able to predict whether a pop quiz was coming or not. She couldn’t say why she ever felt one premonition or the other about it, but she was right 100% of the time. Her brain had noticed the satchel, even if she didn’t know that her brain had noticed it.

It felt like a weird concept, but certainly being able to produce an example where someone consistently made right predictions because of this piqued my interest. This concept made more sense to me when I started noticing my own brain doing it—picking up on things that I was sure of, for reasons I didn’t properly know. For example, I was talking with a friend of mine about how it felt really weird that Germany produced so much scholarship on the classical world—Ancient Greece and Rome. My friend challenged me on that, basically arguing that there’s no reason to expect classical scholarship to be uniformly produced by different countries, and there was nothing special about the one randomly active country being Germany rather than any other. But that still didn’t fit right with me, so I sifted it out until I realized what my brain had been subconsciously picking up on: many Western European languages—French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese—are direct descendants of Latin. They share a striking amount of vocabulary; shifting from one Romance language to the next does feel rather like using a decoder ring, at least as far as spelling and words go (if not whole sentence structures). People who natively speak any of those languages already have a big leg up when it came to learning the ancient languages (Latin at least) and reading all that ancient history, philosophy, and poetry in the original—so why in the world would Germany, where their scholars are starting from Square One, be so active and accomplished in research?

(I don’t have an answer to that question; I just felt validated that it was, in fact, a weird phenomenon.)

Same thing with “Safe Space.” That insidious language never sat right with me, even though it was years until I heard someone (I forget who, but it may have been Jonathan Chaidt) spell out what was so fundamentally wrong about that terminology, that I hadn’t been able to bring into focus: calling one space “safe” implied that other spaces, where people (e.g.) disagreed morally with sexual lifestyle choices, afforded harm or the threat of harm. That’s nonsense, and pretty insulting nonsense at that. Formally categorizing viewpoints you don’t like as “harm” in order to get them thrown out of debate altogether in exactly that way is an existential threat to the freedom of speech. And it was being adopted by pretty much everyone.

It’s also a counterproductive way of thinking to surreptitiously mainline to the impressionable. Telling a rising generation that people disagreeing with them about sexual mores, human nature, or the like threatens them with harm is a great way to make them more vulnerable, fearful, and weak. Not that that’s stopped, e.g., the “Healthline” website from arguing “Why ‘Safe Spaces’ Are Important for Mental Health — Especially on College Campuses.”

Zooming back out, though: for me personally—someone who prizes having specific reasons within arm’s reach for my beliefs and positions—the concept of “intuition” was a valuable one to learn and accept. I want to dismiss from consideration any opinions that people offer based on nothing definite or specific that they can share with me. But even if that’s not the worst principle to have, it has an enormous blind spot. I’ve gatekept useful information out of my life because the grounding wasn’t specific enough.

Sometimes it’s worth heeding “I have a bad feeling about this.”

~

Answer: Neuromancer (1984), Count Zero (1986), and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988).