The main point of the author of "Thinking, Fast and Slow" has been introduced to you earlier, that is, there are two parts of our brain, intuition (system 1) and rationality (system 2), intuition can not solve the problem, reason will come forward to solve, but intuition is the master of reason. Today, we're going to take a serious look at our system 1, intuition.
Normal thinking patterns are usually composed of many associations and outcomes, which are triggered by concepts such as situations, events, behaviors, etc., and the results always appear with some kind of law, which may appear at the same time, or there may be only a little time difference. —Excerpt from Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow.
Children are often pleasantly surprised by newfound things, and when they grow up, they become oblivious, which is one of the important characteristics of our brain's system1, intuition. We may be surprised, surprised, or curious when something happens for the first time, but if it happens a second time, the level of our emotions tends to decrease, and if it happens again and again, we become accustomed to it. For example, when we organize a meeting, you may expect all the personnel to arrive, and when all the personnel arrive on time, you may be very happy. But you wouldn't be surprised if someone takes time off for a special reason, because similar situations often happen. These are the feelings that our intuition brings us.
This is a famous question: "When Moses went up the boat, how much did each animal carry?" So few people found the problem problematic that some people called it the "Moses Illusion." As a Chinese, we may not be sensitive to this issue because we don't know much about Moses or Noah, but many of us know Noah's Ark and that Moses came from the Bible, and it was Noah, not Moses, who led the animals above the boat. When the associated words Moses, Noah, and animal entered the minds of Westerners, because of the relaxation of their minds, they unconsciously associated "Moses" and "Ark" and quickly accepted the question, without considering the right or wrong of the problem itself.
Our intuition can help us quickly detect anomalies, and the speed of their reactions is amazing. Psychologists have done an interesting experiment, when the subject heard the phrase "the earth revolves around trouble", less than 0.2 seconds after the sudden word "trouble" appeared, the detection of brain activity will find a special map. Each of us has a roughly equal level of knowledge of the world and the use of words, so we tend to have a roughly identical understanding of many things, such as tables that generally have four legs, the earth revolving around the sun, and so on. When we hear someone say, "The big rat crawled over the nose of the baby elephant," although the word "big" was added in front of the mouse and the word "small" was added in front of the elephant, it was difficult for most people to generate a scene in their minds of a rat that exceeded 5 tons crawling on the elephant's nose. The above judgments are all derived from our intuition, and we do not have to think deeply to draw conclusions, so we may make mistakes.
Here's an example from the book: After a day of wandering the crowded streets of New York and admiring the perfect view, Jane realizes that her wallet has been lost. Through the investigation, the researchers found that most people think of "pickpocket" instead of "beautiful view" after reading it, although the word "beautiful view" is written in the sentence properly. People intuitively associate the words "crowded", "wallet", and "lost" to imagine the conclusion of "pickpocket", but in fact there are many possibilities of losing their wallets, and being stolen is only one of them, and we once again rely on intuition alone to judge. Many famous psychologists have conducted in-depth research on human associations about causal relationships, and we have always believed that human beings will produce causal relationships after a large number of observations. Some psychologists in recent times believe that humans can directly "see" causal phenomena as if they were colors.
Psychologists Fritz Hyde and Mary-Ann Simmel present their views on causality through an animation. These experiments seem to prove that humans are inherently good at "intentional attribution," that is, they are born with causal associations, even if the associated relationships are wrong. In 2005, psychologist Paul Bloom published his opinion in the Atlantic Monthly that we are born with the ability to distinguish between natural and intentional causality, that is, the way humans know the laws of nature and their own spiritual laws is different, and our cognition of the natural world is mainly through rational logic, and for the spiritual world, it is mainly through intuition.
The content of this chapter is very obscure, it is very laborious to read, many of which also have philosophical knowledge, and it is difficult to find the relevant content on the Internet, so my understanding will inevitably be wrong, and I hope to get answers from friends.