Based on current knowledge and hypotheses, could intuition plausibly have a “quantum mechanical” basis?

2 minutes ago, Jooolz said:

Based on current knowledge and hypotheses, could intuition plausibly have a “quantum mechanical” basis?

Well, all biochemistry has a quantum mechanical basis. So that goes for mental processes, i.e. brain function too.

But what do we mean by intuition? As I understand it, we mean a process of understanding something without a conscious train of reasoning. I think we actually carry out a lot of mental processes without that, though most of them are fairly simple. I further suspect quite a bit of what we are taught about reasoning is to stop us jumping to conclusions, intuitively, because a lot of the time we would be wrong if we did that. So we learn to break issues down into steps and evaluate them sequentially, to have more confidence our understanding and conclusions are sound.

So maybe intuition is what we call it when we fail to apply a reasoning process and, by luck, turn out nevertheless to be right!😀. On that basis I think I would say that quick "intuitive" mental processes without a conscious train of reasoning are the default method of thinking and just, well, normal, not special at all.

No.

Learn a little of the science and you'll realize why.
IOW, ask about QM, a well-defined science; not a human defined abstraction like 'intuition'.

Edited August 19Aug 19 by MigL

1 hour ago, MigL said:

No.

Learn a little of the science and you'll realize why.
IOW, ask about QM, a well-defined science; not a human defined abstraction like 'intuition'.

Agreed and this isn't the forum for that discussion.

1 hour ago, Jooolz said:

Based on current knowledge and hypotheses, could intuition plausibly have a “quantum mechanical” basis?

This is a woefully under-specified question. You would need to understand the cognitive/neurological details of intuition before trying to tie it back to QM. Ultimately you would find QM at the basic level, but there’s so many layers above that to be considered.

Thanks all! Appreciate your answers and your time 👍

2 hours ago, Jooolz said:

Based on current knowledge and hypotheses, could intuition plausibly have a “quantum mechanical” basis?

No I don't see anything in QM that might lead to 'intuition'.

QM is deterministic in that QM process follow regular equations (although we don't yet know them all).

However you might like to consider this proposal from the opening chapter of the 2024 science prize book because 'intuition' may be Bayesian.

I admit that the book is somewhat biased towards Bayesian statistics and prediction.