Subject: Intuition & Consciousness From: "William J. Rapaport" Date: Mon, 5 Apr 2010 20:10:51 -0400 (EDT) A student writes: "You talked today about intuition and unconscience thought vs conscience thought. Our bodies have multiple ways of making these unconscience thoughts, one of which being "muscle memory". Would you consider that intuition is only learned through repetition? And if applied to a machine it will all just be calculated and not miss. For example a basketball player, although he may be good, will miss sometimes and doesn't go through some sort of calculation to know how far to throw. A machine would never miss. (would be a bad game to watch if it were all robots) so these machines can't really show intuition, just a calculated action. ROBOTIC BASKETBALL SHOOTER http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQ0yGrYu0yM " Reply: First, there's a difference between "conscious" and "conscience" (at least, in English; in most Romance languages, like French, Italian, and Spanish, there isn't). Your "conscience" is your inner voice that tells you right from wrong (like Jiminy Cricket, in Disney's Pinocchio :-). You are "conscious" if you are aware of what's going on (very roughly). I assume you're talking about the latter, not the former. "Muscle memory" usually refers to the ability of the body to do things without your having to consciously think about how to make your muscles do it, so it is related to the conscious/unconscious distinction, but I'm not sure how much it has to do with thinking and decision making in the sense we were talking about today. (Although I guess you do have to make decisions about how to move your body, so maybe it's more related than I first thought.) Intuition/unconscious knowledge is not learned merely through repetition, but through a repetitive learning process. For instance, I can recognize pretty much any piece of music by, say, Bach after hearing just the first few notes. I've never studied Bach's music in any formal way, but I've listened to a lot of it. But it's not just repetition: If I had only listened to one piece by Bach over and over, I don't think I would have developed the intuition I have about his music.