Obviousness and Intuition

December 20th, 2006 Fred McVittie Posted in Consciousness, Feeling, Intuition, Unconscious |

Many of the actions we carry out are marked with a sense of ‘obviousness’. The placement of a chair in a room; the moment we step off a pavement to cross a road, avoiding oncoming cars. There is no need for much, if any, conscious deliberative thought when carrying out these actions, and often they do not appear in consciousness at all, being carried out on ‘autopilot’. The obviousness of the decisions involved in these actions is, in a sense, a strong form of the ‘intuition’ that we mobilise when making other, less commonplace, decisions. When we get a ‘bad feeling’ about a particular course of action we may be consciously aware of the feeling but reasoning is usually absent from consciousness. The actions steered or shaped by both intuition and obviousness are characterised by this lack of conscious, rational thought. In fact, to bring rational thought to bear on the kind of ‘problems’ usually solved by intuition and obviousness, crossing a road for example, actually makes the task much more difficult and hazardous. In both these forms of decision making, the decision is being made and the action shaped by non-conscious processes, and often the conscious mind is not given access to that process, or is incapable of understanding that process.