Often occurring outside of our conscious awareness, intuition relies on our brain's ability to instantaneously evaluate both internal and external cues, and make a decision based on what appears to be pure instinct.
Intuitions are quite different from sense-data as classically understood; we can become conscious of intuitions only after acts of synthesis and only by inference from these acts, not directly.
In human intuition, conscious occurrences must be given immediately in order to avoid introducing at the same time certain interpretations.
They often emerge when the conscious, the subconscious, intuition and knowledge are given room to merge in alchemical bloom.
If so, any purely dispositionalist account fails to capture the occurrent conscious character of intuitions in much the way dispositional analyses of other conscious states fail.
Psychological studies of highly creative people have characterized this tension in terms of such dualities as intellect and intuition, the conscious and the unconscious, mental health and mental disorder, the conventional and the unconventional, and complexity and simplicity.
Again, consider the intuition that conscious properties are ontologically distinct from physical ones, as displayed in our immediate reaction to zombie scenarios.
The most frequently used argument in favour of dualism is that it appeals to the common-sense intuition that conscious experience is distinct from inanimate matter.
While it is true that some members of the public and physicians treating patients in vegetative and minimally conscious states have strong intuitions about their subjective experiences [ 54, 55], we will argue that intuition may provide poor insight into what life is like after a serious brain injury.
[A9] (see Pust 2000, p. 46) requires a single occurrent conscious psychological state in rational intuition and distinguishes that state from physical intuitions while allowing that a naïve agent might have a rational intuition even though not currently deploying the concept of metaphysical necessity.
