What Is Intuitive?

There are two jokes about computer novices, illustrating what intuition is.

• An old person is told to "move the mouse to that button in that window". The old person picks up the mouse, takes it up to the screen, and places it over the screen area where the button is displayed. This interpretation must be completely intuitive to the old person's sense of "move to" - it has always meant that to the old person for 70 years.
• An office clerk receives a new computer at work. It has a new front panel he has never seen before: a button, which when pushed, causes a retractable tray to come out; the tray has a circular depression and a smaller circular hole. The clerk intuits it to be a cup holder - afterall, the clerk has never seen a CD player, but has always seen retractable trays with circular depressions and holes in cars and these have invariably been cup holders.

According to my observation, intuition is expectation on the ground of an analogy with past experience and education. When a direct analogy is not found, an indirect one, usually very weird, is drawn; the neural network is very creative and strange in drawing analogies, sound or flawed. Wherever intuition is possible, paradox is also possible.

Intuition is derived from educational background. Suppose a programming language is to be designed for expressing the act of performing tasks R, S, T in that sequence, possibly with dataflow between consecutive stages. A European or American may suggest

R | S | T

T . S . R

When a concept is asserted to be intuitive, it is equivalently confessed to be nothing new. This is a two-edged sword. If a concept or problem is transformable to old ones, it saves us effort of learning or solving. But if all new concepts are confined to the known old ones, how is advance possible? "New" is by definition hitherto unknown and unlike the old, and must be at odds with intuition. Seen in this light, intuitiveness is probably undesirable for original research, and is probably a sign of stagnation for industrial practice if overemphasized.

Many new, alternative concepts are rejected because they are "counter-intuitive". It may be an understandable, benign desire to save and reuse past knowledge. But thinking deeper, if education encourages you to reject those alternatives you have never been taught, has education become brainwashing? What is the difference, and where do you draw the line?

Is intuition your master, or are you the master of your intuition? Do you let intuition make all decisions for you, or do you keep modifying your intuition to accomodate new learning?

Also posted to Lambda the Ultimate.