Author: Spiros Kakos
Harmonia Philosophica Facebook page
Religion-Science Philosophy articles series
Science people tend to laugh at the importance other people show at intuition. But they shouldn’t laugh at all. If one has read at least some History of Science, then he will know that the greatest scientific discoveries came to be due to intuition and intuition only!
Just think about it. The idea of a “invisible field affecting other masses from distance instantly” would certainly look absurd at the time of Newton. The idea that “time is relative” would certainly look irrational at the time of Eistein. However these great ideas, which came to be not as a result of experiments but as a result of the fantasy of some great people, are the ideas which formed physics! In a way, a genious is more irrational than rational! And this is what makes him (or her) unique. Pincare emphasized the role of intuition in mathematical discoveries and Riemann actually found out the way prime numbers are distributed based only on intuition. And surely someone cannot say that the new String Theory or the Multiple Universes theories of todays physics have come to life based on “evidence” or “experiments”… And the catalogue goes on…
Since we are kinds we are taught how to think. But only if we think differently will we discover new things! Only if we forget how to think will we actually think freely! And in order to open new doors, we must forget of the axioms on which we were once based upon. Our “Geometry” was based on many axioms which we all thought as “correct” for thousands of years. Look what happened when we simply chose to change them: a whole new universe of new Geometries came into existence! The same applies for all other scientific fields. Science was supposed to always seek the truth. But since many years ago, it has seized to do so. Whenever a certain axiom worked sufficiently for some time, “scientists” just forgot that it was an axiom and started looking at it as if it were some kind of “innevitable truth”. And then everything can go wrong…
Intuition is what humans use to formulate axioms. And in that sense it is much more fundamendal and of “higher essense” than Logic or any other human construction which is based on such entities (i.e. axioms). Intuition is the keyhole through which we glance at Reality. Logic and other methodologies are just by-products of intuition. Intuition looks at the world directly, while all other methodologies we have available only look at the cosmos through the lens we have built for them.
What could happen when we stop thinking that everything is made of matter? What could happen when we stop thinking that something can be right and wrong at the same time (see Dialethism), as an electron can be in many different states (see quantum mechanics)? What could happen we we stop thinking that humans are nothing more than inorganic molecules bound together? What could happen if we stop thinking that a set of electic currents can produce that unique immaterial thing we call “consciouness”? What could happen if we trust our inner feelings about us having a purpose here on this cosmos? What could happen if we trust our intuition that there must be a reason for something to exist instead of nothing? What would happen if we stop thinking that free will is an illusion (as many materialists today claim) and start thinking that it may actually exist (as our feeling tells us so)?
Our intuition tells us that the answer to many of the abovementioned questions could be the key to finding out who we really are. Or as someone might say: to remember what we once knew about who we are, before out analysis-mania ruined everything. Are we scientific enough to trust our feelings?
In the words of Wittgenstein, “Man has to awaken to wonder – and so perhaps do peoples. Science is a way of sending him to sleep again…”
Related article: Scientific theories: The illusion of their “progress”
Leave a Reply to skakosCancel reply