Article excerpt. Brian Eno.

We sometimes tend to think that ideas and feelings arising from our intuitions are intrinsically superior to those achieved by reason and logic. Intuition or the ‘gut’ becomes deified as the Noble Savage of the mind, fearlessly cutting through the pedantry of reason. Artists, working from intuition much of the time, are especially prone to this belief.

a) ‘Deterministic’ doesn’t mean ‘predictable’,

b) we aren’t good at intuiting the interaction of simple rules with initial conditions (and the bigger point here is that the human brain may be intrinsically limited in its ability to intuit certain things?like quantum physics and probability, for example), and

c) intuition is not a quasi-mystical voice from outside ourselves speaking through us, but a sort of quick-and-dirty processing of our prior experience. That processing tool sometimes produces incredibly impressive results at astonishing speed, but it’s worth reminding ourselves now and again that it can also be totally wrong.