At the end of the white rope, I can no longer tell which way is up. Under the weight of 18 metres of water, my lungs are crushed to 36 percent of their usual volume. My natural buoyancy is neutralised, and I’m weightless. Suspended like a duck down feather in the air, on a day that’s holding its breath. Like I am.
No visual cues either. The water is the colour of envy - not yet deep enough for everything to turn blue. But even at this depth, the murk has diffused the light enough that the direction to the sun, and the surface, is a mystery. A billion microscopic sea organisms and particles of sediment bend and reflect the light so many times on its journey that it’s impossible to guess where the rays originated.
And there’s no sound.
I joined this introductory freediving course for exactly this experience: complete sensory alienation, submerged below the world we usually inhabit. I’d read beforehand about this otherworld, where our senses no longer supply us the information we’re accustomed to, and wanted to visit it for myself. It’s exactly the nothing I’d hoped for, but it’s so new to me, and so foreign, that I’m slightly overwhelmed.
The only directional clue is the white rope. The freediving line, weighted at the bottom, and hanging from a dive buoy, to which we can orient ourselves when gravity abandons us. It’s my pre-addressed envelope back to the surface, where I can breathe. I grab the rope the way I’ve been taught. I hold on and wait for everything to stop spinning. Then I pull, and kick.
This is my most visceral experience of the difference between intuitive and rational knowledge. What, then, is the difference? How does that difference infuse everything from our position on politics, to our place in the universe? And what use is it in knowing?
Intuitive and rational beings
Intuitive knowledge is subconscious, and it grows through direct experience. Moving through the world, we’re like a tiny soap bubble. Our senses our useful at different distances, each forming a sphere around us within which they can give us useful information. Touch educates us about things within arms reach. It forms a bubble with a radius about a metre. Taste functions even more close up. Sight and hearing work at greater distance, giving us varying levels of clarity within a radius of a few kilometres.
During our life, our senses collect records, called experience, like overzealous entomologists. Over time, and mostly while we’re sleeping, these records are assembled into a wet and wonderful statistical machine called our intuition. Once we’ve been around the block a few times and primed this machine, we can ask it questions. We give it sensory information and it gives us answers back as something called feelings.
The sky is grey. My skin is cold. I hear the birds singing as they fly home. I feel like it’s going to rain.
Inuition is fast. It’s consistent. It’s ever present, and it informs our actions directly. We never need to look up tables of numbers to find out how to respond appropriately. Great stuff. Why would we need anything else?
Well, at the end of the freediving line, when the signals from my senses were scrambled, I would have been in trouble without the human capability to augment intuition with rational thought.
With rational thought, we’re in the realm of stuff that we don’t feel, can’t see, taste or touch, but can still reason about. We can still draw meaningful conclusions about things that are invisible. Rational thought may be counter-intuitive - in conflict with intuition. Or, it may be non-intuitive - providing ropes to guide us on topics where intuition is absolutely silent.
Neither tool is better than the other. They each serve an important purpose. But how do we know when to grab which tool?
Boundaries
Let’s salvage a broken down cliche and put it to work for us: beyond the pale. Normally used as a moral characterisation, the origins of the phrase are enlightening and worth hijacking. The pale was a shrunken strip of Irish land under English rule in the middle ages. Its boundary was originally marked by pales - stakes driven into the ground - and later augmented into a deep ditch and fencing. The physical boundary became clearer over time.
Inside the pale, you were inside the authority and safety of English law. Outside, or beyond the pale, the rules and the reassurance those laws provided no longer applied. Of course, this imputation that the English laws were better is considered from the English side of the wall. Every famously named wall - Berlin, China, Hadrian, Maginot - has two sides. I’m only explaining the origin of the idiom.
I like this image, because it depicts a bounded area within which the rules of our intuition are applicable. Outside that, we’d better get accustomed to a different way of thinking about the world.
Once more for emphasis: neither system is better than the other. They just have different domains where they work. We overestimate the usefulness of rational thinking to our detriment, believing that we can win an argument with logic - when frequently emotional appeals will overrule the rational mind. Conversely, we may try to take our gut instinct with us into realms where it no longer functions. In space, there’s no gravity. At the north pole, there’s no compass direction. Throughout life, there are places where our frame of reference fails us.
What kinds of places?
This way up
Intuition fails us when input is out of range of our senses. When things happen outside our bubble of sensation. That may be because things are too distant. But things can be out of range in other ways. Maybe too big or too small. Maybe too fast or too slow. Maybe too high-pitched or low-pitched (a special case of being too fast or slow).
Huh? Too slow to perceive? Sure. Nobody has the patience to sit all day and experience the tide. Nobody has the patience to sit and experience the changes in season. Or the way a forest grows or recedes. These are all phenomena that are captured through our rational mind. We experience them through reason. Through the implied collection of data that is our memory, and rational comparison with what we see before us. Absolutely, things can happen too slowly for us to feel them or intuit them.
The world between
There’s a blurry liminal space the rational and the intuitive. We don’t sink directly below the surface and find ourselves in a new world. There’s a gradual transition, as we leave one world and arrive on the threshold of the next. In this in-between world, we drag things within range of our senses, using instruments. Instruments like microscopes and telescopes. But we have to be wary of illusions in this zone.
We can’t just scale things up or down and expect them to work the same way. The understanding of that truth is called allometry, and it’s the reason we don’t see giant versions of grasshoppers or tiny versions of elephants. James May, of Top Gear fame, gave a great illustration of allometry in trying to build a life-size Lego house - demonstrating that Lego as a building material fails to scale up. A large Lego structure is not as strong as a small one, because the pieces are all out of proportion. In a similar way, the building blocks of living things fail to scale proportionally. Relationships between size, volume, strength and mass shift as we traverse scales. It means that we should be cautious about intuition when we’re augmenting our senses with instruments. Just as Alice was disconcerted in wonderland, so too may we be.
But if we keep going, we cross the threshold into yet another world.
Leaving the pale
This is the world in which we begin to apply intellectual tools to reason about things that we can’t sense at all.
Pay careful attention to where the border is drawn. In 2007, 170 Swiss soldiers inadvertently invaded Liechtenstein when they crossed the border without realising. We’re similarly in danger of not noticing when we’ve crossed the border into the world where rational thought reigns, and where we need to leave the tools of intuition behind.
Here we begin to use tools like data collection, statistics and manipulations of pure logic (sometimes called mathematics) to feel our way through an invisible but richly detailed world. Staring at invisible things sounds dull, but the wonder of it is that we can often bring useful artefacts back with us into the sensate world. Through the magic of science, we can tickle our senses, arouse emotions and improve overall the quality (and quantity) of our worldly experiences.
What unseen mysteries can we grasp with these tools?
We can wrestle with things that unfold over longer than a lifetime. Sweeping arcs of history. The rise and fall of civilisations, or even species, or even planets. We can draw all manner of valid conclusions about objects dramatically larger or smaller than ourselves, from the mysteries of RNA and viruses, to harnessing understanding of the solar system to fly satellites of our own making. We can harness forces that we can never touch directly, like migrations of electrons, or waves of radiation. And we can make sense of phenomena that emerge only when we have groups of millions of people organising - far too many relationships for any individual to analyse.
There’s an astonishing world beyond the bubble of our senses, and rich rewards for being willing to tour it on its own terms.
By way of one example, let’s recall one of the most shocking triumphs of rational thought to date.
Copernicus Brahe Kepler
What seismic event ever shook us more than the shift of the sun to the centre of our solar system, displacing the earth? It was intuitive that the earth was fixed, and the sun in motion around it. Everyone could see that, and re-live that intuitive truth every day. Nicolaus Copernicus, in a sense, marked out the boundary of that pale of thinking, with the assertion, backed by mathematical models, that our world is heliocentric - sun-centred. Copernicus dropped this bomb in 1543, when he published his thinking. But while Copernicus was on the right track, he did not have the full picture.
Copernicus had his sun in the right place, but was still hooked on the Platonic concept of the perfect circle. Perhaps nobody told him that perfection is the enemy of good, because in his craving for perfect circles, he was reduced to a cook up of epicycles ugly enough to give you stomach cramps.
It was only 76 years later that Johannes Kepler was finished providing a properly predictive, and satisfyingly elegant model for the motion of the planets. Kepler adopted ellipses instead of perfect circles, and suddenly the crystalline truth emerged.
Though it wasn’t sudden at all. It was brought about slowly and painfully by the unheroic figure of Tycho Brahe. Brahe hired Kepler to work in his observatory, and was the world’s ur-datascientist. That’s why I call him unheroic: I can’t help but wonder if in today’s world, his renowned passion for accurate observation might instead appear on his CV as a passion for filing accurate tax returns, or a passion for being punctual at the terminal when travelling by air. Perhaps not the kind of soaring intellectual acrobatics that would typically make a sapiosexual moist.
Yet it was from Brahe’s tables of data of observed planetary motion that Kepler’s ideas could emerge. These apparently arid tables of rationality were in reality the fuel that let Kepler reach orbit beyond the pale.
Not all knowledge
Important disclaimer.
There are more kinds of knowledge than just rational or intuitive.
Social knowledge - knowing how to behave in order to gain access to the substantial benefits of group membership - is critically important knowledge. Similarly, we’re born with a kind of proto-intuition in the form of insticts or reflexes - experience acquired by our ancestors and recorded in our DNA. And of course there’s more.
It’s not that other types of knowledge are not important. They are. They matter a lot. I’m just not discussing them for reasons of focus.
In politics
An interesting point has been made by George Lakoff and others, that one way we align ourselves politically is according to a preference for intuition, or for reason. There are many grand, sweeping schools of political thought that make distinctions in those abstract terms.
But each of us as individuals experience this question more as I’ve described here. Are we drawn to concerns that are local to us - that we can experience for ourselves in our own vicinity? Or are we drawn to think about issues that affect people in large groups? It turns out that many distinctions between the conservative and progressive approaches cleave quite neatly along these lines.
I stress once again that neither way of thinking about the world is better or more correct than the other. They are simply different tools for understanding. But being aware of the way political views are affected by an innate preference for one mode of thinking over the other can help us to understand where one another are coming from. Some people value the details up close. Some value the bigger picture. To be healthy as a cooperative, both are necessary.
Back on the surface
Let’s come up for air for a second, and survey where we’re up to.
We began with the bold insinuation that rational thought was the only thing that could bring me back to the surface alive during my freediving course. But the truth is more subtle. 18 metres underwater, in the cool of the moment, it seemed that the only type of thinking applicable was rational thinking. But with quietetude, and awareness, it turns out that there’s plenty of sensual detail on which to build intuition over time.
You can see the depth marks on the rope, once you have the mental space to pay attention. You can see the rope flex, indicating current. You can interpret the signs of building CO2 and nitrogen in your blood, with clarity. Rational thought may be the gateway into this foreign world, but it’s a world in which intuition can built, given enough time in residence.
So I propose that we have two complemtary modes of understanding the world empirically. The key is to be able to distinguish when to apply each mode. Not a simple journey, but worth it.
We can help ourselves by selecting the most fruitful mode for the problem at hand. And by understanding the way others may be thinking in a given moment, we’re able to be kinder to them, and gentler to ourselves in trying to fit in with them, by simply understanding what’s going on. I think working to develope that understanding is a worthwhile investment for all of us.