Exorcising Intuition
The Intuition Wars take a spooky turn...
After my last post, Charles Egan left a comment that got me thinking.
He wrote:
“I don’t take myself to have undirected thinking. Under your model, I file my intuition-experiences as undirected feeling.”
That line led me to a rabbit hole. Because if he’s right, for some of us intuition is about thinking without direction, and for others it’s feeling without direction.
Most of what we call “thought” already points somewhere: a plan, an explanation, a worry. But if you sit long enough - sometimes hundreds of hours of meditation long -you start to catch the mind in neutral. Thoughts before topics, awareness before commentary. That’s what I meant by undirected thinking: cognition before it’s about anything at all.
Charles is talking about something different: undirected feeling. A bodily resonance, presumably a literal gut sense in some cases - the world pressing on him before words arrive. The difference matters, and it helps explain why people keep circling around this strange word intuition without ever quite landing on it.
Here’s how I try to map what’s going on. Consciousness only really moves four ways, between World and Model:
World → World – raw perception, the feeling of sense data arriving in the body.
World → Model – sense data being placed into a model, the feeling of things taking on a value.
Model → Model – reflection and flow states, the mind updating its own model, thinking before language.
Model → World – expression, speech, action, thinking in language.
Seen this way, Charles’s intuition lives in World → Model - the world talking to the model.
Mine lives in Model → Model - the model re-arranging itself.
Both are pre-verbal and both involve updating models, but they’re quite distinct.
And that, I think, is why people talk past each other about intuition.
Some describe the moment the body knows before the mind does.
Others describe the moment the mind realises before the mouth speaks.
Each calls it “intuitive.” Each is right from their side of the fence.
The analytic tradition - Kant, Husserl, cognitive science - leans Model → Model: intuition as insight, pattern recognition, the intellect’s sudden grasp.
Popular psychology and everyday life lean World → Model: intuition as gut feeling, resonance, and the sense that something’s true before you can explain why.
Both are real but neither captures the full turn of the wheel.
This doesn’t explain the scepticism, though - the people who say intuition doesn’t exist at all. I think that comes from what happens when we try to talk about it.
Intuition happens in Model → Model, but naming it moves us into Model → World.
The second you describe the intuition, it collapses. The private shift becomes a public statement. A collapse follows by the very definition of what it is to be a model of a model.
That’s why I think intuition feels ungraspable when you go looking for it.
You can’t point to the process of pointing. You can only catch the moment after it’s happened, so in that sense it IS only words, and yet… it’s hinting at something deeper and, yes, real.
Meditation slows this down just enough to glimpse the handoff - the tiny gap where knowing becomes knowable, where sensing turns to saying.
Spooky, huh?
