Tuesday, July 21, 2015

Intuition

I just posted a comment to Quora in a discussion about psychics. The question asked "What would be the greatest question to ask a psychic to prove that they're a real psychic?", and someone replied that psychics are unable to guess his favorite 22 digit number.

I offered this comment:
The problem is that the number isn't stored in your mind, it's stored in memory. Mind isn't a ticker tape of one's memories and other mental contents. That stuff isn't in RAM.

The non-verbal issues and emotions currently occupying someone's RAM can be gleaned via intuition. And intuition isn't magic; any of us can determine, to more/less extent, what someone's thinking via context, body english, facial expression, previous experience with the person, etc.. And some people are way better at this.

For any given human faculty, there are edge cases whose special abilities appear near-magical. Intuition is no exception. But pulling data from the neural structures of someone's memory isn't a human faculty, so you won't find anyone particularly good at it.

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