A simple view of the mind, instinct and intuition Yoji K Gondor Engineer (retired) Philosopher, Author Email: gondork@yahoo.com January 1, 2015 Abstract. The understanding our own mind seems to be an interesting topic in philosophy. I recall reading Kant, he ran away hiding in the metaphysical space when complex problems arrived. He used the "intuition" as a tool to justify things, much before the awareness of scientific genetics and such things made it feasible for such a use. Not much else he could do, the 18th century access to scientific knowledge was just very limited. My view of instinct and intuition are quite simple, perhaps a foolish view of such a complex and interesting phenomena. The Mind1 The material world is real; the difficulty stands in our approach and capacity to determine it. I posit the opinion that the spiritual component emerged later, and that the material world first existed. The self-evident fact is that we, the human beings, are in essence mere collections of biologically clustered fundamental particles.2 The physical matter was required to have been present before the mind; the matter has been the foundation for the creation which the biological structures of the life form. Later, the life form acquired what we call mind, and therefore, the mind is a consequence of the matter's quality and a proof of its existence.3 I wonder about the singular moment when inert matter became life. The journey from the initial form of life to the spiritual human manifestation is a remarkable pathway. The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts. -Bertrand Russell 1 A chapter from The Delude by Yoji K Gondor 2 Stephen W. Hawking: "The fact that we human beings-who are ourselves mere collections of fundamental particles of nature...." 3 A materialistic view is that physical matter is required as the basis of our life form. Through time, life traveled from a senseless state to the development of sensory perception, memory storage, and the development of complex consciousness and cognitive states. After a life ends, the physical matter that fulfilled the life object returns to its inert physical state. Seen this way, death itself becomes only a transformation. Beside existing physical structures, the mind accumulates memory objects. The memory object is a physical impression applied to our brain structures; it can be acquired through sensory perception, emotions, innate thinking, or as the result of association of multiple memory objects; we call this knowledge. Various forms of knowledge are also gathered and stored in the memory of computer systems, and that is commonly called data. The data itself is a basis of what we regard as raw knowledge. For example, we can see, in time, planes flying in the sky, which leads us to a new generalized object that is not generated by a particular plane but by our cognitive processing and generalization of the common properties of the multiple sensed planes. It is common knowledge that we can acquire by observation, and it would facilitate the availability of the object for cognitive processing when needed. It is reasonable to assume that knowledge is stored in memory clusters: for example, the memory cluster cars would include such varieties as Ford, Cadillac, etc. One unanswered question regarding memorization is whether, by repetition, we generate a gradually stronger memory impression when sensing the same object or we generate multiple memory impressions of the object to improve our chance to identify it when needed. Beside the common episodic memory, procedural memory objects are stored in the unconscious part of memory and are triggered by events similar to those that generated them. For example, we created a memory object when learning to swim. The next time we swim, we are automatically able to duplicate from memory the previous successful swim-motion pattern. The procedural memory is not an instinct; however, it acts similar and is so close that it does not make much difference. While awake, our memory continuously processes the visual-sensation objects. When coming home, for example, we are neutral when scanning our living surroundings. At times, we become aware of any visual or non-visual change which happened while we were absent. This scanning of our surroundings is done continuously at the subconscious level; this is a form of background cognitive processing associated with forms of mental processing such as intuition or instinct. That provides us with an involuntarily awareness of change in our surrounding by the means of the change detection of patterns. Further, it provides awareness events as a consequence of cognitive comparison of similar stored and new-memory objects. In our room, a large vase being removed when we were not there would be detected and turned into an awareness act, for example. Additionally, this undeniable event proves that the memory seems to order the memory objects with respect to what we call time. The cognitive processing can differentiate the presence or absence of an object compared to an earlier memory image. The memory objects are managed by the cognitive function, and decisions are made to dispose (forget) some selected objects. Some memory objects are determined to be unimportant. It is unusual that one person remembers what he had for breakfast last week. While this data is new, however, cognitive processing decided that it was unworthy of longtime storage and therefore discarded it quickly. We can cautiously articulate that we can sense the visual color of an object only by detecting the light rays reflected by the object; obviously we are not capable to sense the object itself. Diverse objects and events provide opportunity for sensual perception; however, they are not the sensation itself, as it is obviously widely understood.4 It is commonly agreed that the human being has nothing to go on other than a collection of 4 Objects sensing can also be named the objective component of our realism. nerve stimuli that gather fancies generated by the world around. It is evident that in our sense experience, we only have access to representations generated by our nervous structures and not to the actual physical objects themselves.5 For example, if we sense a cup, the cup is not directly experienced by our intellect, but our optical nerves generate a self-alteration related to sensing the cup-a modification that is detected by our brain and that becomes temporarily part of our consciousness. But there is more than the sense experience in the human world. It is fact that the abstract ideas are not consequent from sense perceptions, but from specific cognitive processes, and therefore, from the innate power of the mind. Regardless of how detailed we perceive an object, is it sufficiently adequate? For example, we glance at a rock, we see its shape and color and later we can determine its weight and tell about its chemical composition. However, we can not directly determine its atomic structures; what our senses detect is valid; nevertheless, not complete. We can supplement our understanding of the rock by inductively adding general properties that we believe are similar materials the particular rock contains. The external perception of an object is complemented by our mental processes with additional memory-stored data of related objects and also complemented by the inductive power of the mind applied to the particular object. Simply, I say that our belief system is formed as a consequence of the cognitive validation of acquired knowledge, and later we accept the result as our personal reality. Proven knowledge is methodical, and true beliefs mutually support each other. If a false belief is held, the induced contradiction requires abandoning valid beliefs, and in this way, the new structure of beliefs becomes unstable. In many particular contexts, the epistemic requirements are uncommonly high, and it is difficult, if not impossible, for all our beliefs to count as valid knowledge. The cognitive validation that establishes a belief is usually a form of interpretation of multiple sense-data along with the contribution due to our cognitive processing. Data is validated in a hierarchical way; it can be regarded as: true, un-doubtfully true, desirable, maybe true, unlikely true, false, disgusting, and so on. The sensed data is later stored in the physical memory as a memory object and includes the impression of the object itself along with a component that encapsulates its properties. For example, we look at the moon and store its physical impression, its name, shape, color and size along with the emotional component present. We associate this with the earlier-acquired properties of the moon stored due to processes such as learning or earlier observation. If we observe a nice flower, the sense object is a flower object with its particular properties. Also, let's say that the flower is red. The color red is also associated with an object, color, in our mind, and one of the color properties is red. However, even the color red is an object due to many variations of the color red. Therefore, it is not only that we store sense-data as complex memory objects, but also, these objects seem linked to other objects-creating a web of connections. It appears efficient that this pattern of storage also implies that our memory-object processing is in fact manifold and distributed. The life evolution processes have been responsible for developing such an effective system-not atypical if we take into account the overall biological complexity of human beings. At times, the empirical evidence of an object is hidden by some transformation. As an example, sugar exists in solid form as crystals, but it is present in a cup of coffee and can be detected indirectly by us as sweetness only; this is a mode of circumstances the delude is not cognitively equipped to comprehend. The deluded fool believes that some extraordinary 5 Sense-only way to reality: a concept eloquently presented by John Stuart Mill: "In our sense experience we only have access to our mental representations, not to objects themselves." people can, in fact, walk on water, but he ignores the fact that water can also be found in solid form, as frozen ice, and that we all, in that case, can walk on it. We also can not sense other people's pain; however, we can indirectly detect it from a person's acts of exteriorization of it and understand it as compared to our similar past pain events. The sensed empirical data is associated by the mental processes with other mental objects and then classified into areas of understanding-either factual, rational, moot knowledge or invalid/unsound knowledge. The foundationalists claim that the structure of our belief system inherits its validation from a number of undisputable guarantees (comparable to basic truths) that form its basis. In this context, our belief system, then, is seen as having the architecture of a house-with its foundation firmly supporting its structures. Also, the human anatomy will fit the foundationalists' paradigm-with the point that the entire system is constructed around a rigid structure. Coherentists take our belief system to be like a basket or a nest-with our beliefs mutually supporting each other as the inter-tangled branches form a basket wall to hold the object together rather than relying on their justification from a foundation block. Both these paradigms seem legitimate and fitting to particular situations; also, a grouping of them seems appropriate. The delude's belief system includes malfunctioning cognitive structures that has an unstable basis with random and unproven characteristics. A delude does not posses any means to rationally validate newly acquired data, and he or she manages to assign meanings to it in a synthetic, objectionable way. It is the defective foundation of the delude's cognitive system that makes it next to impossible to untangle the mystery of his mental structures or to anticipate his rehabilitation. The deludes' minds goes much further, and their cognitive structures connect unconnected ideas; the result is that they arrive at unsound and annoying conclusions. Ignorance itself believably belongs to the cognitive power; inference or connection of multiple perceived, but unrelated, events is what gives the fool the possibility to dive deep into the dark area of the human condition. The perception, validated by the delude's defective mind, allows the fool to infer conclusions shameful for a rational being. The deluded fool enjoys sensuous consciousness; however, he or she processes it in such a strange way that surprises even the mighty devil. In cases where the perception of an object is a pure hallucination generated by the delude's mind, the perceived object might not exist in what we call reality.6 Now the real relation between perception and object is destroyed; only the empty perception lingers, triggering a mysterious chaotic mental state. This purely immanent mental process is separated from nature but inherent in the life of a delude. An object has properties that can be detected by our perception (human perception) but also properties that are detectable by our a priori, analytic mental processes and, furthermore, properties unknowable to us due to the absence of a base needed for our mental processes to be initiated.7 At times, a delude becomes a very original and independent thinker; his or her way to achieve this status is by denying the common agreed-upon reality. We all memorize perceptions and associate them with other memory objects previously stored in memory; this is an automated process-not too much to do with the empirical reality. The delude assumes that he or she knows all the truth, and he or she is so delusional that he or she can not ever be wrong; hence his or her competing opinion cannot possibly count as valid-this requires it to be quickly discarded. Accepting especially external opinions would mean that the delude must discard some of his old and strongly held false opinions and acquired bias, and that would possibly undermine the entire foundation of his or her thinking. Once on the delude's way, it is very difficult, if not 6 Reality: we refer here to the agreed-upon reality. 7 Simply implied here is the presence of previous experience with similar objects with properties that are inductively associated to the currently sensed. impossible, to return to a rational condition.8 A delude's cognitive plumbing is defective, and the consequence is a continuous flood of unexplainable opinions or unconnected feelings. Only validated knowledge can let the holder be tranquil, and it provides shelter from the indecisive conflict of emotions. An instinct is not simply a reflex but a robotic inherent disposition to a particular action triggered by some external stimuli. Necessarily, we must reject dogmatic views regarding instinct's nature and follow the strict path of scientific method in evaluating it. Instincts are present at birth, not learned, and are resident in the subject's unconscious memory. Instincts seem to be hard-wired9 in the brain and commonly appear in every healthy member of the particular species. One such instinct belonging to the human species seems to be small babies crying when hungry or smiling when satisfied. Intuition typically is connected to the meaning by the ability to sense or know automatically without the help of deductive reasoning. It implies the ability to acquire understanding of events without any inference and is consequently detached from logical characteristic of thinking. Intuition is a knowing-a sensing-that is beyond the conscious understanding and provides us with beliefs which we cannot logically validate. The intuition is not a form of genuine assessment; it can apply error in our mental processes with regard to particular facts and therefore tamper with the validity of the overall perceptions. The danger of empty intuition is that it provides an automated context for our senses, thinking, and actions. The genetic transfer that is accountable for such properties as intuition is potentially responsible for the emergence of such mental conditions that the deluded fool is a victim of. The genotype10 of an individual is constructed from the merger of genomes11 inherited from his or her parents. The parents' genomes inherit the genotype of their ancestors; therefore the individual's genome is an ancestral inheritance of genetic characteristics. The genotype of an individual also contains much of the physical characteristics of his or her ancestors-sometimes far back from the chain of temporal existence. The transfer of physical characteristics does not exclude structures of the brain such as logical structures and deep memory impressions that seems to be stored in the receivers' subconscious mind and that account for such properties as logical capabilities, instinct, and intuition. The inherited logical capabilities can be seen as a result of evolutionary elements that allow the individual to draw assistance from his or her ancestors' experience. Instinct assists the person or species to automatically adjust and deal with essential events, while intuition is generating acts of awareness based on inherited experience of the ancestors. The intuition can be based on ancestral memory12 of impression objects stored in the subconscious and activated in consciousness by select events. The intuition can be seen at times as irrational, can apply error in our mental processes concerning particular objects, and can therefore tamper with the validity of our finding. In such context, the intuition is an automated and primitive tool that generates immediate awareness regarding an event and becomes an effortless but arbitrary decision-making act. In the delude's world, the activation of instinctual events is triggered in a flashy way, which is not customary for its species. This is a mental malfunction, and observers interpret it as an abnormal behavioral condition. Also, when the delude becomes aware of an intuition event, then he or she again fails to process this information as typical and amplifies it again, and distorts the meaning 8 Once the deeply entrenched biased opinion is imprinted in one's character, it is difficult, if not impossible, to remove it. 9 Hard-wired: in this context, it means a physical component. 10 Genotype: an organism's genetic constitution. 11 Genome: the entire DNA content of an organism. 12 Ancestral memory: the memory that includes the memory objects of one's ancestors. of the event in a way particular to his or her defective mental structures. Does this inheritance of ancestral genotype imply that once the delude's condition was constructed it is passed on genetically to the new generations of individuals, and that once a delude, your descendants will also inherit a predisposition for foolishness? Commonly, when a delude speaks, his message is expressed in a disorganized way, and nearly impossible to comprehend; this is a clear indication of his mental confusion. His words and sentences lose their meaning, and in his mental battle with communicating it reminds an educated man of the concept of chaos. Deludes are experts at developing erroneous acts of thinking in a loaded emotional layer. We know that rational judgments require uninterrupted logical connection from the initial premise to the final outcome of the conclusion at which they arrive. Deludes learn to live with the absence of a rational train of reasoning, and they can easily replace valid premises with some stemmed from their own synthetic/irrational mental processes. Most of the deludes are seen as misologists-people who do not enjoy logical argumentation. But the truth seems to be hidden elsewhere since habit is acquired; instinct is not. The foolishness is a random and unavoidable human condition. The large amount of random events determines our fate and it is responsible for the emergence of such a condition. It is undeniable that randomness generates patterns describable in mathematical terms; therefore, the existence of the deluded condition is not only probable but likely-if not guaranteed. We ought not to underestimate the element of chance in the event stream of our lives; most are independent of our being and hopeless to foresee. Furthermore, our responses to the critical events are based on decisions that spring from random experiences that have modeled our understanding; this adds a new dimension to the complexity of our life experience. Bad luck and good fortune are both frequent and natural in our lives; both are random sequences of predictable events.