Intuition is fuzzy and abstract, right? Science has to be clear, solid and material … right?
These two seemingly opposite ways of knowing can, nevertheless, be well combined. Dr. William H. Kautz believes that this is the foundation of the future of science.
Kautz received his Ph. D. in biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1951, and for 34 years he conducted research at SRI International (Stanford Research Institute) in computer science, as well as geophysics, health care, chemistry and social sciences.
In 1977, in San Francisco, he founded the Center for Applied Intuition, which conducts research into the nature of intuition and studies the possibilities of its application in various fields of science.
“Science is now in the throes of birth, trying to find a way to turn on the mind without turning on the mind,” Dr. Kautz laughs at the paradox. "She tries to investigate the subjective by objective means."
The crisis in science, the need for change
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There are many indications that the mind (subjective) plays an important role in material scientific experiments (objective events). The advent of quantum mechanics showed that our conscious acts of measurement have a physical effect on what is being measured. Quantum mechanics has also shown us that there is something fundamentally wrong with our science as a whole.
In 1999, Brian Greene wrote in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Elegant Universe:
“In the form in which they are currently formulated, general relativity and quantum mechanics cannot be right. These two theories that underlie the tremendous progress of physics over the past hundred years, the progress that explained the expansion of the heavens and the fundamental structure of matter, are incompatible."
While scientists are looking for a “theory of everything” that can reconcile this incompatibility, Dr. Kautz is doing his part to push science toward what he believes might be a more holistic approach - intuition. This can allow one to explore the subjective and the intangible by objective means.
In the seventeenth century, the mystics and their intuitive knowledge were aloof from the scientific method of Sir Francis Bacon. Now Dr. Kauts is showing that intuition can have great benefits when used in science.
He began to use intuition to clarify some of the questions that science had not answered. He then conducted routine scientific research to test the knowledge gained through intuition.
Using intuition to understand the nature of earthquakes
In the late 1970s, Dr. Kautz gathered eight people with strong intuitive abilities. He asked them, each separately, to think about ways to predict earthquakes. These people were not scientists.
Kauts summarized their answers to questions about earthquake precursors. More than 30 years later, in 2012, he wrote an article about it in the fall issue of the Journal of Scientific Exploration.
“A re-examination of these intuitive insights 30 years later, in light of many subsequent discoveries recorded in the main geophysical journals, showed that people using intuition presented new, significant and startlingly reliable information about the signs of the onset of earthquakes,” he said.
For example, one of the predictors suggested looking for signs of earthquakes in the upper atmosphere, the ionosphere, which was unthinkable for seismologists at the time. But in the 1980s, new satellites discovered several signs of large earthquakes there shortly before they occurred.
In recent years, researchers (including NASA scientists) have already developed several programs for monitoring the ionospheric, thermal and electromagnetic indicators of earthquakes using satellites and other means.
Pierre Richard Corneli, an electrical engineer at Eastern Nazarene College in Massachusetts, presented his new research in this direction in 2014 at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Society. According to Earth Magazine, he discovered unusual electron activity in the atmosphere, recorded by satellites over Haiti.
On January 12, 2010, a magnitude 7 earthquake struck the country's capital. Corneli hopes to use Haiti's GPS network to obtain electron density data that will help detect signs of future earthquakes.
Using intuition to reconstruct the ancient Egyptian language
Evie Carter Beaumont, a teacher in England in the 1930s, spoke an unusual language, and spoke a lot. She claimed it was an ancient Egyptian language, although Egyptologists in London denied this at the time, they refused to take it seriously enough to study the phenomenon, Dr. Kautz said.
Dr. Kautz found original research from past years, including 44 phonetic notebooks and audio recordings of Beaumont's speech. He also studied recordings of her conversations with an amateur Egyptologist, who inserted her vowels into several dozen Egyptian texts so that he could conduct a dialogue with her.
Egyptian written texts on ancient monuments and documents do not contain vowels, so no one knows what this now-dead language sounded like.
That Beaumont was perfectly aware of what the Egyptologist was telling her after he inserted her vowels shows that she was indeed able to speak Ancient Egyptian, noted Dr. Kauts.
Further research carried out by him confirmed that the language of Beaumont was the same as that preserved on Egyptian monuments.
“This Egyptian experiment is absolutely empirical,” said Dr. Kautz. “It's really a question of how to integrate this innate ability that humans have - intuition - into a science that works in a very different way. Any change in science must be slow, we know, because there are many people to be convinced and many beliefs to be changed. So we try to do what is conclusive and requires careful thought, that is, refers to the empirical side of science."
What is intuition?
“Intuition seems to be another way of knowing,” said Dr. Kautz. - It is also called innate knowledge. When you usually get information intuitively, you tend to reject it, sometimes the truth can be upsetting, but sometimes it gets right to the point, and you just know it; no question, no doubt about it. This is intuition."
When asked how intuition arises, Kauts replied, “Where does kindness come from? You were born with her, such is the person."
Dr. Kautz says of himself that he was a "rather conservative scientist" when he started his career. His wife, a woman of a lively mind, opened new horizons for him. She introduced him to people with intuitions who could say things about him that he had never told anyone and answer his unspoken questions.
These "moments of revelation," he said, led him to seek a place for intuition in science. “Rather, I found a place for science in intuition,” said Kautz.
