A Case Against Intuition

A distinct feature of science, especially since the enlightenment period, is that it has shown us our intuitions are often wrong. Religion has done this to some degree (eg. evil is caused by demons, Hades controls how much minerals are in the ground), but it relies on revelatory mystical knowledge. With science, anyone can test and know the theories to question their validity. There is no priest class that's been given special divine privileges. It's open to everyone who has reason, but this doesn't mean the answers are always apparent.

The indirect attack on intuition that happens within science increases as a natural byproduct of its advancements. We can see clear examples of its disruption from history too. Galileo famously altered the geocentric view of the world to a heliocentric one. Though this seems to be common sense now, it's easy to forget how counterintuitive this fact is since it defies experience. We don't feel the motion of our orbit. From our perspective it's the stars and the sun that change every day and something that’s aligned to our clocks. For all practical purposes geocentrism feels right and intuitive. It's disrupted by some seemingly small facts that can be observed through relatively simple telescopes (especially compared to todays standards), which is how Galileo came to the logical, but non-obvious, conclusions he did. Modern science has advanced to exploring phenomenon in the atomic realm such as photons. These particles act in even more bizarre and counterintuitive ways than those proposed by heliocentrism. Increasingly our world, though rational and comprehensible, isn't what we see on the surface.

I could summarize all this by saying that nothing is as it seems. Of course this is true. Only children think in such simple ways. With the increase in complexity that comes with advancement most return to operating under intuition for the sake of simplicity, because of how difficult it is to keep up. We are laypeople in most if not everything. How to tackle this is a long and separate thought though. My main point is the following.

If reality exposes itself as non-intuitive, how, as social animals, can we proceed into the future with a mere observational understanding of the world? Intuition may allow us to survive just fine in the short term, but we will have to set it aside to some degree if we are to understand anything about the universe. Solving meaningful problems seems like it would depend on it. Creating a functioning society does as well.