Attempt At Explaining Insight

[The Renaissance Man]

This is my attempt at explaining what insight is, after watching and thoroughly analyzing Leo's video from 4 months ago "What is insight?".

 

As Leo said, insight is sudden understanding. Not to the logical level, but true understanding. I think this is called internalization.

A smoker knows smoking is bad for his health, but he keeps smoking. That's logical understanding. Then a friend of his gets lung cancer, and he now quits immediately. He has internalized the knowledge.

It's unconscious understanding. That's why we don't have control over the generation of insight, and that's why it's so deep right away. It goes straight to the unconscious level. Internalization.

 

What is insight?

Insight is a form of understanding. A deep one maybe, but still a form of understanding.

I think understanding is ultimately the brain's ability to make sense of multiple pieces of information. The pieces are connected, and some sort of meaning comes out of it.

Insight is one of those connections. But it feels so real, so different.

 

My hypothesis

I think these connections happen all the time. ALL THE TIME. From input coming from the outside, to thoughts we have in the back of our minds, to habits, and so on.

We are not aware of those. Of almost all of them at least. Some are obvious, some are probably just tested by the brain and discarded because not useful.

But sometimes, we DESIRE a solution. It's not about a massive craving. It's just about an unconscious, but clear desire for the solution. We want it in some way.

Then we connect two dots that satisfy that desire. INSIGHT!

So, I think what we call insight, especially the very pleasurable ones, are connections + emotion, derived from this desire.

Again, read what I've written in the "what is insight" section of this post. I see understanding as the connection of dots, which creates meaning. So I think insight isn't something per se, but instead an emotion. The combination of a phenomenon that occurs all the time, with the desire of it occurring.

 

Examples from Leo's video

These are examples taken from Leo's video "what is insight?". They are examples of insights he gave in the first 30 minutes of the video to explain what insight is.

I haven't added any of my examples. These are what Leo provided.

If you observe carefully, you'll see how there's ALWAYS a component of desire, and when the right connection occurs... INSIGHT!

Every single example, even the one with chimps, shows this.

 

- Archimede’s Eureka moment. He was sitting in a bathtub, playing with an object, and as he submerged it the insight came that he could use the submerging of objects to measure the volume of irregular shapes.

- Newton’s apple. The story says an apple fell on his head, he then looked at the moon, and thought: if the apple is falling towards the Earth, why isn’t the Moon falling towards the Earth? He understood it was falling, but it was moving so fast it was in an orbit.

- Charles Darwin. When travelling around in South America, being around all these diverse animals, at some point it must have hit him that animal features were so specialized because everything is evolving.

- Einstein’s relativity. With his thought experiments of thinking what would happened if he was travelling at the speed of light towards a clock with a flashbeam, etc, etc. He understood there’s no fixed time and space. It’s relative to your velocity and frame of reference.

- Mathematical proofs in general. Something clicks when you’re doing a mathematical proof. Or logical proofs.

- The 9 dot problem. But most puzzles in general really. Puzzles require insight to solve. They test your lateral thinking ability.

- The comprehension of jokes. While comedy is something everybody likes and can appreciate, it’s taken for granted the amount of intelligence required to understand it.

- Plot twists in movies usually come with insights.

- Scientists observed that animals like chimps can have insights. If you place bananas where the chimp can’t reach them, and there’s boxes in a corner, at a certain point the chimp will have the insight of stacking the boxes to get the banana.

- In psychotherapy. Insight doesn’t have to be academic. It can also be personal. About yourself, about why you do the things you do. Leo says this is the best thing a psychotherapist can do. Giving his patients an aha moment. And you can do it by yourself through introspection.

- When you go to work the wrong day of the week and when you see nobody you understand… “ooooh… it’s Saturday!”. When you forget about an appointment but then it hits you suddenly “oh! I had an appointment!”

[The Renaissance Man]

Insight & Truth

Leo @Leo Gura in the video also asked about insight and truth. Are all insights true?

I think what I said above can explain this too in a way:

When insight feels true, it's because it unlocks and improves our logical understanding. Insights feel true because they're better than what we had before the insight. But this doesn't make them objectively true.

They're more true based on our current beliefs and understanding. In 3 years from now an insights I had today may be proven wrong.

 

Conclusion

So, in my opinion, insights aren't a window into Truth, but they feel so righteous because we can perceive the stark improvement compared to what we had before

[Leo Gura]

What if you had an insight into the nature of insight?

[Reciprocality]

On 17/06/2023 at 9:04 AM, Leo Gura said:

What if you had an insight into the nature of insight?

@Leo Gura That would be logic.

Let us say you imagined how it is like to be a bird, and then suddenly you realised out of a sudden without any experience of flying nor by means of any deduction that birds have mad balancing skills, then only to afterwards realise that birds must have mad balancing skills because to fly is to have no ground support. Now you would have an insight into the way of birds.

Would it not be an insight into the nature of insight when we find the conclusion to follow from the premises even though we skipped the premises, would it not be an insight into the nature of insight to find that insights are conclusions without premises, and to discover this through logic? And if this were NOT an insight into the nature of insight then what is the nature of insight, if not the ability to draw conclusions without needing to bother with their conditions? 

If you did accept that it were an insight into the nature of insight then you also accepted that you used logic to acquire an insight, in which case it would be false to define an insight as a conclusion that were not deduced from premises. You are left then where you must accept that insights, if they do have the nature above, can not be acquired through an additional insight, so of what nature then are insights in addition to that nature?

On the other hand, how is it possible to know anything without insight, as you must accept as possible if a nature of insight could be acquired without insight, if you also wished to maintain the definition of insight not being built premise upwards.

 

@The Renaissance Man Is insight always true? If truth is a condition for one to consider something an insight then does it first become an insight when you reason logically about it to confirm its truth? Or is it insight that is a condition for truth? If so then is it an old insight or an immediate insight that is the condition for truth? And if it is an immediate insight that is the condition for truth then how do you distinguish between a false fantasy and an insight? And if insight is a self-evident immediate truth, that needs no logical justification, how composite can such an insight be? Could that immediate self-evident truth of an insight contain ideas like grass, planets, birds or the behaviour of people?

How many such self evident insights would you be able to hold without needing to reaffirm them through logic before your thought patterns became unintelligible for others or yourself? Do these insights function as axioms due to their self-evidency by means of which you can gain new insight, if so then how does the mind glue together these self-evident truths, is it through language? 

[Reciprocality]

And also, if that of which we are insightful is not beyond us but really inside us, since there is only us, then how can it both be a new thing while non the less being a part of what we already are? This becomes especially suspicious when if we correctly understand logic as acquisition of what were already the case only seen in a new way, as being the most congruent with a monism, while a perpetuating incoming of insight is more aligned with a theory of dualism.