Wrong guess (in my case). Reasoning can create good shapes where necessary.

As a non-native speaker, I am having difficulty parsing this sentence. Please explain.

The problem is: I learn too little for too much effort this way.

IMO, there are two kinds of players:

1. Intuitive players.
2. Weak players.

As a native speaker, I'm having trouble parsing that sentence too. I think maybe he left out a few key words while typing too fast?

Left foot, right foot, left foot, right foot...

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David

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One definition that philosophers like to use for intuition is knowledge without justification. If you are an intuitive player, you already know things without having learned them! It is only natural that they are stronger than the rest of us given that they had a head start. No wonder I am so weak...

You said intuition doesn't exist. You suggest two candidates for the name "intuition":

1. Guesses
2. The feeling of being right

Which is the one that doesn't exist?

[TLDR; Intuition exists, don't question it, exploit it ruthlessly instead! ]

While we might have trouble agreeing on a definition of intuition, most of us should be able to agree that our brain does things that we're not actively conscious of, at least to some extent.

For example, your heart beats, you can walk, form sentences, catch balls, drive cars etc. When you throw a ball a long way for a dog, how does the dog know where to run to to catch it? Why do they tend to take the shortest path? Can dogs do calculus? Not really.

The implication that relying on intuition is somehow lazy or didn't require learning doesn't ring true to me. Intuition is the precious result of experience and learning.

How does one develop intuition in Go? Some of the ways I know of include, playing lots of games, solving lots of Go problems, replaying lots of pro games and looking at lots of examples in books. Perhaps we love Go, but to many people that would sound like hard work. When you do the 'work' though, something a little bit magical starts to happen, you start to see good moves and have good ideas more often - reflexively. I'm not claiming to understand how that works, but my personal experience and the anecdotal experience of others suggests that there's something there.

Looking at Herman's categorization, pretty much all us here fall into the category of weak players (feel free to exclude yourself from this grouping if you feel offended ), because most of us didn't learn Go until were already adults (or at least teenagers). The adult brain is (has learned to be?) more analytical and less intuitive in the way it thinks. So it's natural for us to think more in terms of principles, but intuition is still important too.

The real intuitive players are the ones who learn Go from a very young age, as if it's a second language. People like Lee Sedol.

I find it really hard to believe that anyone, even Robert J, doesn't rely on intuition to some extent when playing Go or doing other things that they may be skilled at. Surely there is nobody here he feels the need to rationalize every minute decision they make throughout a day?

There are countless examples of case studies that scientists have looked into to try and understand our brains better. Like the famous one about the more senior fireman in Britain who sensed that he had to get his team out of the building before it exploded (when none of the young guys had any inkling about it). I remember studying that one at university. That kind of 'sense' is a product of great experience.

Going back to Go... Relying on intuition doesn't mean you just play moves without thinking about it. It means you might have a feeling that 'this is the important place' (some might call that temperature) or 'this is the move', but after that you read and analyze the situation to see if your intuition is good.

Using my personal experience as a reference point, when I get my games reviewed by a pro, I notice that most of my biggest mistakes these days are made when I choose to ignore my first instinct and rely on some sort of principle instead. One of the biggest improvements to my game occurred when I learned to listen to the strange feeling that tells you 'this move is heavy'. And heavy is a very vague term.

Robert, with regards to this comment:

You've hit on something interesting here and I started to see things from your perspective. Think about what it 'feels' like trying to read one of these books with 'useless text if any' and then imagine that some people might feel very similar when reading a book about capturing races. I'm not trying to devalue your work, so please don't feel the need to defend it. I respect your books. I'm simply pointing out that people are different and learn in different ways.

A lot of the logic that stronger players present to explain the reasons for a particular move is presented in a post hoc manner anyway. Intuition comes first and reason comes second.

Personally, I don't feel a burning need to define all things and explain how intuition works. For me it's just enough to know that it works and to make as much use of it as much as possible - because it produces better results in less time. I'd rather spend my time working on other things and, if I have any time left, I still like to play Go now and then .

Some might call that laziness, I see it more as pragmatism.

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David

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When I started go, I still believed my school's biology teacher that there was intuition. I did all those thousands of games, problems, pro games, examples. To improve, what helped me, was to find understanding in the sea of all those samples. The more I searched for and found understanding, the more I realised that "intuition" is only pretence of laziness of better explanation by reasons.



It is not magical, but reasoning. For those who do not care about the reasons, the brain takes care of it nevertheless to process its prior learning "experience".



I am claiming that I can found out how it works for me.



I have no doubt any longer:)



Not explicitly. I am not saying that the brain would be working only rationally. I am just saying that the concept of intuition is a fake. vitation (well, unless the universe grows infinitely);)



But... experience is not intuition.



Reasoned thinking, not feeling.



Rough reasoning is replaced by detailed reasoning.



Change your principles or their priority or relative connection!



Heavy can be derived from efficiency, which can be defined.



I have usually made the opposite experience.

Thanks Robert,

To make things clear, I'm not trying to argue against your position that logic and reason are valuable tools, but I do disagree with the claim that something which we choose to call 'intuition' doesn't exist in any form. The premise of this thread is misleading insofar as it pits logic and intuition against one another, when really one complements the other. We don't fully understand how the brain works. When we don't have a complete understanding of something, creating definitions and principles can be helpful, but can also create the illusion of certainty where there is none.

If you tell me that intuition doesn't exist in your experience of the world, I'll believe you. It's impossible for me to understand how that would work, but I'll trust you anyway. And likewise, if I tell you that in my experience it does exist, please believe me, even if you can't comprehend it. We all formulate our own interpretation of the world inside our own minds and that's why when you play Go with someone you see a game and a person, instead of vibrations of light and sound.

You're never going to convince me to agree with you by just quoting a selection of what I've said and stating what amounts to the opposite back to me. Think about it. If I did the same back to you, it wouldn't change your opinion either.

We can have an interesting discussion though if you address the important point of whether dogs can do calculus . I joke, but this is something that's important to your argument. Please answer these three questions to help me understand:

1. If intuition doesn't exist in any way shape or form, then both people and dogs don't have intuition. How is it that they know where to run to catch balls? Are dogs reasoning logically? Are they doing calculus? Are they some sort of automaton?

2. Are you able to drive a car? Do you have to make hundreds of mathematical calculations while driving and, if so, how can you do them so quickly?

3. I rely on intuition heavily in my own games - something you claim is irrational and doesn't exist. If intuition really is figment of my imagination, I must be some kind of crazed idiot, playing at the level of a retarded gerbil. But, somehow, I manage to play as a 7 dan on Tygem. How is this possible?

For the third point: if, as you said above 'For those who do not care about the reasons, the brain takes care of it nevertheless to process its prior learning "experience".' Which you followed with 'But... experience is not intuition.' Then what should we call the ability to instantaneously apply accumulated experience? Why can't we call that process intuition? We can use your term 'rough reasoning' if you like. How is it not the same thing?

A discussion for another time: I just checked your Joseki 1 and 2 and didn't find a definition of 'heavy' in there. Perhaps you could define it in terms of efficiency, as you suggest, but I think it has more to do with strategic freedom and flexibility on a global scale. The number of stones is much less important than the whole board context. One stone can become heavy if the game develops so that it has no effective way to move and giving it up would entail losing the game.

P.S. Your new book arrived today and I'll start reading it soon. Thanks!

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David

Go Game Guru: Learn Go | How to Get Better at Go | Go Game Shop | Go Boards | Baduk TV

Balls have size, location, speed, way of movement. An animal observes and stores these parameters. Then it uses this "database" knowledge and fits the currently flowing ball's parameters with (according to the quality of the database) the best match and acts accordingly. If there is no database and it is the first ball catch, then less useful knowledge about moving objects, arms and legs is consulted.



I do not know; I use a bike.



Database knowledge. (This is a simplification; there are also related "rules" or "principles".) Quickly: the human is very quick for the things it is familiar with. Why? Because neural nets process highly parallel.



No, it just means, IMO, that you have not studied your own thinking process analytically in as careful detail yet. Maybe you lack the ability of such analytical thinking to understand your "subconsience" better than by the excuse word "intuition".



Because your brain uses lots of subconcious decision making you conscious thinking is not aware of explicitly.



See above.



It is like calling a computer a "mystic black box", which would be nothing but an excuse for not bothering to study how it really works. "Intuition" and "instinct" are excuses for not studying the details of thinking.



"Intuition" comes with the implied notion of being magic. "Reasoning" is explicit about the (by me assumed) nature of thinking processes.



Heavy is "overconcentrated and currently without local life". For overconcentrated, see Joseki 2, p. 42. I know, I have not provided a strict definition for it; in the book, I have concentrated on defining strictly part of the more difficult terms. The book's description "stones situated closely together and one could remove a part of them without hurting the group involved" is good enough for the purpose of the book and indicates how to approach a strict definition, if one needs it.



This is an implication from "currently without local life", because it implies the player's need for defense or sacrifice in the global context.



A definition along the line suggested above does not prevent one from doing global positional judgement, which includes the heavy group and its positional context.

There are so many ways we could understand a "logic/intuition" distinction. Maybe we can profitably rename some of them.

[TL;DR: Nixon, and either we need more polls or almost everyone should probably vote Nixon.]

Sticking for the moment to the pandanet article linked in the OP, they characterize the distinction in terms of whether the player can explain or likes to discuss reasons for playing a given move (this is interpolating a bit). So it sounds like we've got something like a verbal/nonverbal distinction. But it's not totally clear to me how this is to be cashed out either in play or in study.

(Aside: as someone who always got stuck out of the way in right field, I like their idea that people who are good at math are the same people who are good at sports.)

But the article also has a bit of a weird mix between talking about learning styles and talking about playing styles. The above is a bit more toward the playing end of the spectrum, if we're interpolating the bit about discussing specific moves. So let's go the other way: they could have a distinction between learning via explicit and/or principled reasoning vs learning via example. So we might more suggestively talk about a distinction between learning a trade and developing a taste.

Actually, it almost sounds in the article like the distinction is between people who try hard to learn and people who don't--but that's a silly distinction so I'm not bolding it.

It seems at least from the first page of posts that most people here have in mind something more about playing habits--roughly, how do you read? There are lots of nice distinctions we could have here: maybe intuition gives you better breadth and logic gives you better depth in your search for a line of play. Put another way, are you more likely to miss the long-term consequences of your play, or do you have lots of short-term blindspots?

Or maybe we're interested in comparing vices. Maybe the question here is: are you more sloppy (intuitive/not logical) or unimaginative (logical/not intuitive)?

We could go on. It might be fun.

Anyway, as a start, that's at least four possible distinctions we could have in mind. We've also seen some discussion about what exactly "intuition" might mean here--but can we maybe worry about "logic," too? [Disclaimer: logic is sorta kinda an area of research for me, so the word may mean totally different things to me and to normal English speakers.] You can't play go without being a logical thinker. Any intuition relevant to go is logical intuition. Logic gives you the consequences of your moves; part of the beauty of go is that logic is all you need to derive the consequences of your moves. It's all logic! If you're a go player, you're a logical player! Or maybe you choose your moves with dice, I guess.

OK, I'll go back to lurking now. Hope I don't sound too cranky.

Logic, a piece of paper longer than the universe is wide, and more pencils than the universe has protons and neutrons. You might need less paper and fewer pencils if you start playing a purely logical style near the end of the game. I guess I'm being facetious.

Cool theory.

Speaking of pretenses for laziness, I assume that your comments indicate a carefully reasoned criticism of dual-process theories in psychology? If so, I would like to read it.

Edit: fixed quote tags, moved emphasis added note

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In the past, I have written a bit about intuition, since it is the case that philosophers make heavy appeal to intuitions in defending their theories, and it is not obvious that these intuitions are sufficiently good evidence for the claims they are used to defend (see Philosophical Intuitions and Scepticism about Judgment for the most prominent attempt to deny this claim).

My view is that it is best to think of intuition as an inclination to believe something without being able to state clearly what one's evidence for it is (this is almost but not quite Marc Lynch's definition in "Trusting Intuition" (not available online, but summarized here). This includes both absolute crap like the gambler's hunch that the roulette wheel will come up black next, and the fireman's sense that the house is going to explode in flames.

Some intuitions are capable of being eliminated. Firemen study the signs of backdrafts and flashovers, and have some degree of understanding of the physical processes involved. Thus, a fireman may suddenly intuit that the house is about to explode, and later realize that he had seen such and such signs which he had perceived. This type of post-hoc reconstruction of reasoning is often confabulated, but that doesn't mean it can't ever be accurate.

Other intuitions may not be eliminable. Often, what happens is that one intuition, i.e. that this extension is too wide, is capable of being eliminated in favor of other intuitions, i.e. that after a particular invasion, White will get a good result.

All of this bears some relation to things that psychologists talk about, like fast, subconscious heuristic based processes, versus slow, conscious rule based processes. But it's also slightly orthogonal. You can think about things and slowly develop intuitions--it comes to seem a certain way, but you still cannot state any particular reasons. Also you can have intuitions about very sophisticated things like mathematical theorems.

In the case of Go, what we're really talking about is different blends of intuition and calculation/logic. Any time we read, we're doing a great deal of filtering of moves, ignoring lines, things like that. Much of that can be classified as relying on intuition. But then there's also the phenomenon of deciding upon a particular invasion point without reading the followups.

In any case, it's not so clear what the original article was talking about. Takemiya's comments about playing a "natural" style of go with moves that appeal to you came to mind.

P.S. Lemmata: knowledge without justification is a somewhat tendentious definition of intuition. Some people may think intuited propositions can count as things we are justified in believing. See Reliabilism for an easy route there to that claim.

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Fair enough. I should have said "all Laplace's demon needs...," or maybe something about the logic of discovery vs the logic of justification.

But I still have my same gripe about what "a purely logical style" could possibly be.



Well, this depends on your reliabilism. Goldman's reliabilism certainly seems to be about providing an account of justification, but then there are people like Dretske who think justification is just the wrong thing for epistemologists to care about. (NB, Goldman wrote the SEP article you link to.) Anyway, I guess I'm bringing this up because reliabilism is where I'd look for someone who denies that intuition can be a source of justification--doesn't everyone else who believes in a faculty of intuition believe it's a source of justification? Oh, and the other reason is because hey I'm a philosopher too! let's talk philosophy!

RJ,

Do you argue that the subconscious mind plays no role in our thought process?

Intuition may be a logical process, but given the lack of interaction between subconscious and conscious, our choice to trust our subconscious is NOT logical.

Doesn't that seem odd to you?

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That'll show me to check the author--I thought there was a lot about Goldman in there, even relative to his obvious importance for the subject. I initially had a line in there about how you might deny that beliefs must be justified to be knowledge, but I can never remember what opinions are common in epistemology, or whether I'm using terms the way they're common used (or if there is even any consensus about them).

I think you're right that most people talk about intuitions as justifying beliefs, though I think it's pretty rare to hear contemporary philosophers talk about intuition being anything like a faculty. It's also currently very popular to deny that philosophy relies on intuitions, and that intuition names any important epistemological phenomenon.

And if you stick around, you'll be surprised how often philosophical topics come up on the boards.

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