Intuition and meaning

Intuition and meaning go hand-in-hand; through intuition we gain true understanding of subjects with which we are grappling, through deep understanding we come to further intuition. However, although intuition can lead to valuable breakthroughs, it can be hard to come by.

It is worthwhile understanding what intuition is, so that we can increase the natural flashes of insight that give us new understanding.

Microchips and intuition

One of my favourite stories about intuition relates to the 741 op-amp.

The 741 op-amp is the godfather of all chip-based amplifiers, it was designed by David Fullagar in 1968 at Fairchild Semiconductor.

The IEEE Chip Hall of Fame relates the following story:

David Fullagar… realized that the chip, however brilliant, had a couple of drawbacks. The biggest of these was that the IC’s input stage, the so-called front end, was overly sensitive to noise in some chips, because of semiconductor quality variations.

“The front end looked kind of kludgy,” he says.

Fullagar embarked on his own design. The solution to the front end problem turned out to be profoundly simple—“it just came to me, I don’t know, driving to Tahoe”—and consisted of a couple of extra transistors. That additional circuitry made the amplification smoother and consistent from chip to chip.

Fullagar took his design to the head of R&D at Fairchild, a guy named Gordon Moore, who sent it to the company’s commercial division. The new chip, the μA741, would become the standard for op-amps. The IC—and variants created by Fairchild’s competitors—have sold in the hundreds of millions.

Part of David Fullagar’s brain had been thinking about the chip design problem in the background. When that part of his brain finished processing, it told David the answer.

Why was the background process in David’s brain able to come up with the correct chip design, when David could not consciously come up with the answer?

Types of knowledge

Our first impressions of the world come through direct experience via sight, sound, touch, taste and smell. After this brief introduction to the world, we are sent to pre-school and our education begins. The teachers tell us that the way to think is to use words to label those things which we have directly experienced. Using words, we can define relationships between those things. These relationships allow us to know about things which we have not directly experienced.

• This is a car.
• Look, the car has wheels and an engine.
• Not only does this car have wheels and an engine, but all cars have wheels and an engine.
• So if ever you see a car, you can know that it has wheels and an engine.

By using words and classifications, we have converted experiential knowledge into abstract knowledge, which can then be applied to further real-life situations.

Words as an interface

Every writer has a different way of expressing the same idea. As Strunk and White say (page 64):

All writers, by the way they use the language, reveal something of their spirits, their habits, their capacities, and their biases. This is inevitable as well as enjoyable. All writing is communication; creative writing is communication through revelation — it is the Self escaping into the open.

The way a writer puts words to paper gives a unique insight into the way that the writer themselves perceived their subject matter. Therefore, we can understand a writer’s thoughts and feelings through their writing, just as we can understand an artist’s thoughts and feelings by admiring their art.

This rule does not only apply to writers. Every time anyone speaks, they do so in a way which reflects their unique way of perceiving the subject of their speech. Speech is the interface between our internal sensations and our external expression of our inner world. Our inner world is wordless, it is where we maintain our internal equilibrium. It is the world beyond our inner-selves, that is created by people communicate with each other using speech, that contains words. Our inner sensations and thoughts are invariably richer than the words we use to express ourselves, which is why we sometimes find it difficult to find the right words.

The problem with learning

We learn from others in many ways; by attending lessons and lectures, by reading textbooks, by listening to the radio and by watching TV (or their modern equivalents). In most cases, the majority of the information is transmitted verbally.

When we absorb that verbal information, we assimilate the way that the speaker has subsciously decided to string the words together, as well as the words they used. Subsequently our thinking on that subject is coloured by the way the speaker decided to express themselves. When this happens, we can become locked in to thinking in the same way as the person who introduced us to the subject. Even if we formulate our own thoughts concerning the subject matter, our new thoughts are simply an extrapolation of the essential intuition that lay in the words that we first heard on the subject matter.

Therefore the problem with learning is that the more we learn, the more we tend to lose touch with our own natural way of thinking.

The art of forgetting

When we turn the lights off in the study, we give our inner-selves a chance to figure out the true meaning of our studies. By turning away from the artificial world of words and entering the world of naturalness and spontaneity, we break free of the circular thought-patterns that result from thinking like other people.

Intuition occurs after we abstract and internalise the verbal knowledge that we have learnt from other people. Once we understand the knowledge on our own terms and in our own way, we can home in on the basic principles and think intuitively and about the best way to build on our understanding.

In other words; after you have figured out what your knowledge means to you, you can gain intuition. But in order to know what something means to you, you sometimes need to stop thinking about it!

As David Fullagar was driving to Tahoe, he had entirely forgotten about the chip design problem, to the extent that he was surprised when the correct solution popped into his head. But it was exactly because he had forgotten what he was working on, that he was able to break free of the old thinking in chip design and come up with circuitry that is still in use today.