[tortoise]

I'm pondering on this and cannot visualize any form of intuition that would not have a basis in past experience, sense, thought symbol/language or preference.

That's my general take, but I've gotten into heated discussions about this very issue. Even among mathematicians there seems to be a desire to elevate intuition to the status of "sacred" or "mystical" despite what (to me) seems to be a complete lack of justification. People have a strong emotional attachment to their "intuition", probably because they'd have to explain themselves more often if they couldn't use that as an excuse. :-)

I generally avoid that argument as fruitless; it is usually a religious argument even for people that aren't religious. I don't go about tipping sacred cows without a good reason.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thank you so much for your post!

I'm not seeing a religious issue here. Where there is a spiritual revelation, it is sensed spiritually or mentally.

The same would be true for precognition, retrocognition, clairvoyance, telepathy, near death experiences. And from the other end - prayer, worship, spiritual discernment - come from the inner man as language, symbol or emotion.

I imagine we'd have to get "inside" the fetal mind to formulate a test to determine the point just before these emotions and thoughts arise, i.e. the clean slate, is there any intuition there? That may be beyond our technical capabilities.

[unspun]

tortoise, if you have devised a model of the operations of the subconscious, how would you be able to know how accurate it is?

A car with a Wankel engine can pretty much do what one with a piston engine does, but it's not a piston engine. Since the pistons in our intuition are subconscious.... (And what does intuition do? Think "qualia" as A-G has mentioned.)

BTW all, there may be a great deal of error in people's intuition, but there is also much error in applying raw, random calculations as a means to discover what is actual, eh?! ;-)

If I want to know how to get to Albequerque, I'll trust intuitions (based upon what knowledge I have and find, which is not the same thing as the raw 1's and 0's upon which computational data is based) more than I'll trust random calculations with no intuition to direct them. It's a marriage of both that is inevitably there. But then again, if I don't want to be there, I'll just come back.... The reason that intuition is an emotional issue, tortoise, is that it lives where our emotions emote from.

Now, I'm tempted to do that summary of Willard's article... some time before long, whether it's read or not.