Intuition and heuristic: What is the difference?

[r0ckyreed]

What is the difference between intuition and heuristic and logic? How can you tell the difference? What is the best method for deriving knowledge and making decisions?

 

Heuristic definition from Wikipedia: A heuristic, or heuristic technique, is any approach to problem solving or self-discovery that employs a practical method that is not guaranteed to be optimal, perfect, or rational, but is nevertheless sufficient for reaching an immediate, short-term goal or approximation.

Intuition definition from Wikipedia: Intuition is the ability to acquire knowledge without recourse to conscious reasoning.

Logic definition from Wikipedia: Logic is the study of correct reasoning or good arguments. It is often defined in a more narrow sense as the science of deductively valid inferencesor of logical truths.

One of the perks of logic and rationality is that you can follow your chain of reasoning from the conclusions asserted. Whereas, with intuition and heuristics, conclusions are made with no apparent chain of reasoning. If you cannot track your train of thought, then how can you know if you are using intuition, genuine knowing without conscious reasoning, or heuristic, which is a mental short cut based on our biases. Intuition I think is a form of mental shortcut, so how does it really differ from heuristics?

With heuristics, you can be quite convinced and can confuse them with intuition. For example, if you meet someone and have a strange feeling about them, is that intuition or heuristic being played there? Is your feeling grounded in what is true or is it biases you have picked up from the social matrix?

Logic, on the other hand, can track chains of thoughts to help us pinpoint inconsistencies in our chain of thinking. Logic is a second-order phenomenon to senses/experience/consciousness. 

You might say that logic cannot be reliable because you can logic anything and can arrive at different conclusions. For instance, you may say that Christians are using logic to justify their beliefs and so are atheists. But is that really so? Or are you conflating logic and heuristics together? When someone justifies their beliefs, that is a fallacy (error in logic) and heuristic. 

Remember, logic is a way of thinking objectively about a situation, arriving at a conclusion through a chain of reasoning. If something in the chain of reasoning is incorrect, then your conclusion is likely to be incorrect because of a flawed foundation. 

An issue with logic is that your conclusion can be correct, but your reasoning to get there can be wrong in the same way that you can get the right answer to a math problem but not employ the right methods. This matters because of consistency. If you get the right answers by cheating off someone else (like believing in pastor without reading the Bible and thinking for yourself), then you never develop cognitive autonomy and strength for every day life decision-making. When it comes to the test (we all get different forms), you won’t be able to do crap because of the method used in this example.

Logic is a method for following your train of thought that enables one to be able to detect errors in thinking (fallacies) and be able to make decisions without being influenced by emotions.

With heuristics (and possibly intuition?), they seem to be heavily influenced by our biases and emotions, so we cannot fully trust them. Emotions are like weather and are inconsistent, which is why we can’t rely on them to make decisions. Logic helps us keep ourselves honest and to avoid our emotions from clouding our judgment, as we can see if heuristics.

I have a sense that intuition transcends logic, but I am unsure how, if at all, intuition can transcend heuristics and biases?

Edit: Another issue with logic is that multiple conclusions and contradictory conclusions can be arrived at with valid reasoning. In that case, the method of logic does not always arrive us all to the same conclusions, so this is also an inevitable issue with the system of logic and the human mind, but logic is still valuable because it helps us track our train of thought instead of taking mental shortcuts through emotional decision-making. You could argue that every decision-making is an emotional decision-making. But what I am saying is going that extra step to think things through and question your decisions to see behind their influence, which is an exceptional skill to have in society today.

What do you think about all this? What is the difference between intuition and heuristics, and logic? Which method is a better way of making decisions in everyday life? Intuition I think is a form of mental shortcut, so how does it really differ from heuristics?

Edited May 29, 2022 by r0ckyreed

[Danioover9000]

   It depends. Some situations logic ie more suitable, and in other situations intuition is more suitable. The trap is staying stuck in a viewpoint, like a pragmatic and efficiency lens for example, and claim that logic is unilaterally superior to intuition. That of course isn't always the case, but a person stuck in that view won't be able to grok it's limitation, while a new age/hippie/psychic/medium view can intuit logic's limitations, because their understanding is more right brain in regards to what they're dealing with.

   Allowing yourself to balance between the two, depending on the situation, is far more important.

[r0ckyreed]

29 minutes ago, Danioover9000 said:

Some situations logic ie more suitable, and in other situations intuition is more suitable

How do you tell whether it is intuition or heuristic/bias? 

[Nilsi]

Logic is a map that shows you how to get from point A to B.

Intuition is getting from point A to point B by virtue of your expertise or experience.

A heuristic is stumbling from A to B, sometimes ending up at C instead.

 

But of course as we all know "the map is not the territory."