Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

“Unconscious knowledge” is just a fancy way of describing our mostly stupid “lizard brains” that evolved for life as hunter gatherer not modern life. Yes sometimes we unconsciously understand something valuable but that’s the exception not the rule.

Can't really be true because the vast majority of subconscious ideas are culturally transmitted. For example the meanings of most words are understood subconsciously, reading works subconsciously etc.

Also many people speak of the importance of "intuition" in their endeavours. It is often deemed to be incredibly valuable and the main thing that makes people really good at things. What is intuition if not subconsciously held ideas?

Do you want an structural engineer to intuitively design a bridge? An aerospace engineer to intuitively design planes? Modern society is built on science/tech and science/tech is built on careful, conscious cognition. To overvalue intuition is to undervalue science imo.

I think you’re seriously underestimating how many scientific & mathematical advances are the result of both conscious deliberation & spontaneous, consciously inexplicable insights, layered one on another with frustration & excitement to fruition

I’m not. The insights almost always depend on the frustrating, repeated *conscious* effort preceding imo. The subconscious doesn’t create, it coalesces.

...which is what David was saying, no?

Not afaict. “Creative resolution is needed and the condition for that to be possible is to do only what is fun—hard or not.” Much of hard work that leads up to the insight is clearly not “fun”.