Lose your intuition and you have lost ‘it’. Everything that makes you human. Are the signs of simplex society not clear? We no longer trust our intuitions. ‘Stupid rules’ are taking over our lives. Every day one more rule. Even sport contests, where skill and spontaneity meet, are decided after the event, through video referees or court cases as in football, cycling and F1.Footnote 1 Intuition has always saved humans from that by telling when a rule is not or no longer needed. A bunch of thoughts and observations converge in an instinctive response, which is not a reflex like fear. Sometimes fear is necessary to institute protective measures, but without allowing guidance by intuition, how will we know when it is time to wrap up the security lines at airports, lift the facemask obligation and trust measures launched by the government or new advice by scientists? Societies and their technologies can promote human intuition. Or they can destroy it. Dating apps, quantum computation and election of the GOAT are three cases that illustrate the antagonism of simplex society with intuition and particularly with its claim to sense destiny, which lends intuition much current in the undertow.

Is not everybody looking for love? Many dream of that special kind, the falling in love. Everybody is an expert on the topic because of romances and heartbreaks, or sadness for never having known love. So, anything I say might irritate. We should be careful to speak about it at all, says relationship coach Dionisio, ‘The number one reason for suicide is love. The number two reason is no love.’Footnote 2 When trying to understand the energy between humans it is an inevitable topic.

Anyone tempted to sum up reasons for falling in love will eventually end up with the unknown element evoked since time immemorial by popular songs, poems and novels: destiny. Love ticks off all the boxes, rather than the other way around; than that someone ticking off all the boxes will make you fall in love. The timing and your feeling make it right. The sense of timing is not a matter of individual reason, but of delusion, or of destiny. The latter points to collective reason. How is that revealed? The mysterious shivers strike because you intuit, and do not doubt but ‘just know’, that things are right. Intuition, which post-knowledge society undermines, and destiny, which intuition may sense, form a pair.

If this is the case, that destiny decides, why do people nowadays put so much effort into Tinder and similar dating apps, swiping candidates left or right after ticking off boxes, starting with the looks? In this way they can meet candidates, feel them out and let their intuition come into play, await the butterflies, so that eventually they find the person to live with, their soulmate? It is crazy to believe that. In reality, the Tinder app loads so many potential candidates into the user’s inbox, showing their likes, and continues to, that anyone chosen on the basis of a number of traits will soon be superseded by another scoring a trait more. Since everybody can send likes to a countless number, and ‘superlikes’ to many, the recipient cannot know how unique the interest is. As a result, users will over time get a like of a candidate scoring higher than they had initially even dared to hope for, and they will concentrate on that person. They will be punching, or appropriately ‘boxing’, above their weight. It is the Peter principle (everybody gets promoted until incompetence) applied to love.

The Peter principle in love works both ways of course, so that the user convinced to have found the match of a lifetime will soon discover that person to be pondering about a better candidate and dating that one, after which the established bond with the former is demystified and there is no way back to romance. If intuition ever had a chance, now it makes way again for the game of comparing and statistically increasing one’s chances of success, of getting the best possible catch. That is what the app counts on to amass subscriptions. The quest for quantity sounds perfectly reasonable since the alternative is a naïve belief in destiny. Even users learning from past mistakes and being content with a lesser number of boxes ticked will never know if the other party has reached that point too. Candidates keep on appearing on the app. A common solution is to log out after a match. But how long before the feeling nags, that one has been naïve to settle for the current combination of traits? Because, in the end, what more does this match amount to than autosuggestion connected to a number of traits? Belief in destiny is the antidote to the commodification of matches, likes and relationships, as much as to simplex society.

The popular app creates a culture of its own, which reflects a wider reality, that of a society injected with social stress and semantic impoverishment. Destiny overrules the list of pixels, simplex traits. The app in itself is not the problem. If both parties are willing to believe that destiny was involved to meet on this app, then the kind of answers typical of our opening question return whereby the moment of the first date is romanticized. And a process is given a chance to take root, namely an evolution toward accepting the other person, discovering the undivided whole s/t/he/y/x are (dating apps are usually gender sensitive), and toward admitting the unexpected boxes the person introduces.

Many cultures assume some form of fate or providence to play the main part in love. Although nobody is in a position to assess the truth of that, we do know that meeting a person by chance carries a value in its own right. The meeting of the other happens in a certain environment with all its material, natural and social aspects: it was lunchtime and raining, some flowers next to the bridge were in bloom, the temperature was mild, the coat a little too warm, her eyes glistened and muddy kids played in the park. Yet the here and now of that situation is experienced as a whole. The moment is not dissected in its constitutive factors. No comparison is made with other possible outcomes. The event is allowed to be, and granted a force of its own, which in turn strengthens any intuition the person may have at that moment, for instance, about having met the love of one’s life.

Intuition is not dissectible in verifiable constituents like knowledge. Besides the mentioned environing aspects in the now—the given—the moment of intuition has a pregiven that is equally relevant to predict feelings: a series of events, antecedents of a process, collective expectations, past achievements, personal aspirations, all of them ‘institutionalized’ because linking the individual experience to a group and history. Again, few or none of these elements will be lifted into consciousness. The given and the pregiven are the subject of scientific research after the event, post facto. The lab dissects their various constitutive factors and designates them as ‘determinants’ to explain the event into detail. The coat worn at the bridge materially carries along infrastructure and the results of scientific innovation, textile industry and global economy.Footnote 3 The asset permits for those able to afford it—social class enters the material given too—to enjoy the rain instead of shivering from cold. The coat may be recycled, carrying along a sustainable value chain. The aspiration to partner is informed by cultural expectations about relationships, whose origins have little to do with material necessity. And so forth.

Still, one element will remain irreducible to the given and the pregiven. I tentatively call it immission, referring to what is immitted in an event. Immission stands for the remaining bit of utter creativity and explains the actual selection among possible determinants. Why does for the other person about to be kissed at that very instant the shouting of kids obtain more weight than the pleasant smell of flowers? Why do I in turn intuit that her loss of focus is not due to declining interest in me, while at other times I would presume the worst? The moment is not in my hands. Thinking does not consist in sending thoughts to myself. I have a past accounting for the thought, in part, which is the pregiven, while environing stimuli also have impact as a given. And the remaining bit of creativity that gives the experience a decisive direction cannot be controlled either.Footnote 4 Where is the ‘outside’ of consciousness? We may situate events in the middle between given, pregiven and immission, instantiating a mix of environment, institution and consciousness, respectively. Our sense of reality, by which I understand ‘intuition’, is the extent to which we capture that middle. Crucially, intuition evolves with experience and openness to inspiration. It is a learning process about what works, without relying only on past experience. ‘Yes, this event came at the right time’, the lover said about the first meeting. The intuition is partly given, pregiven and immitted. No reasoned comparison of factors can beat that feeling.

Being conscious of an immission is pre-ception, perceiving an event before it occurs. The very idea sounds bizarre unless we consider an even crazier thought: to think something before the thought arrives. Anyone refuting such ‘pre-thought thought’ is inadvertently claiming that thoughts are always immitted without control over them, nor even control over the subsequent thought correcting the previous as it too will have to be immitted to be thought. That seems to be true, except at times of pre-ception when someone perceives what is destined to occur and can decide to intervene or not.Footnote 5

Conscious Machines

A perfectly rational solution can fail to work because it does not take into account cultural expectations and the material environment. Yet, the latter two comprise so many aspects, how to know which ones the decision should factor in most? For example, a total lockdown in the face of epidemic clashes with people’s desire to move freely across natural borders. Conversely, group immunity will never be achieved precisely because there will always be subgroups hiding to prevent infection, or natural borders temporarily isolating them. The role of intuition is to feel when which idea applies. Reacting entirely in tune with the environment (the given: ‘my best friend is unvaccinated so me too’) is a reflex and not a good idea. Being stuck on a hunch (immission: ‘I distrust that scientist’) is not helpful either. Nor is applying a rule out of habit (the pregiven: ‘I always obey the government’). In each you have one of the three poles dominating excessively. An intuition’s selection of determinants translates a complex multilayered bunch of parallel events into a thought. It simplifies reality through a complicated transformation. We called this process simplication and contrasted it with the sedimented form in simplexes, which are one-layered ideas, impulses denuded of context. Allow me to touch on the related issue of consciousness in machines.

Every intuition is a simplication, but not every simplication is intuitive. Machines simplicate too, but miss an element that humans have. Both quantum computers and human brains improve their algorithms by accumulating selections, trials and errors. Machines with feedback loops sophisticated enough to adjust their self-organization are aware, in their functioning at least, of former selections having omitted equally viable possibilities.Footnote 6 They rival humans in retaining a linkage with both the pregiven and the given of a choice. What quantum computers cannot have, and humans are often and sometimes overwhelmingly endowed with is the feeling of knowing the right path—all this because of the third element, the consciousness immitted.Footnote 7 Machines suffer from the fact that the options equidistant between two poles are infinite. Among humans a third pole, which I called immission, fixes the middle and can be pre-ceived.

Unfortunately, this human advantage can easily be feigned or abused. Personalized rule gives an unfair edge to dictators in comparison to democratic systems. A tyrant can embody a conviction that a bureaucratic machine like the EU has not. Systems and regulations are immissionless. The political party winning a democratic election still has many options that meet the party’s interests. Among the given and the pregiven, a human receiving immission picks one. How can a human know what is right? If we follow Damasio on consciousness, we should not be surprised humans do, because a thought emanates from an emotional response to events built up in the past and evolutionarily. That is a positivist answer to the so-called hard problem of consciousness.Footnote 8 A comprehensive view is the one just illustrated: our thoughts are only the reasoned part of an intuition, and even these are co-determined by institutions, namely culturally established meanings independent from emotions and natural selection, as well as by new elements in the here and now. An example of such element is a truth that carries the sign of destiny. Receptive individuals like artists can intuit this collective reason by interpreting multiple phenomena pointing in the same direction.

Accurate and reliable knowledge is not yet valid knowledge. An intuition can be more significant than a measurement, and therefore in certain situations agreed on to be more valid. Take the election of the GOAT, the greatest of all time in a sport. Why should there be an election, one may ask, since the statistical facts of individual performances are known? Going by the number of titles won, Michael Jordan is not the GOAT of basketball, and yet fans and colleagues alike intuit that is the case.Footnote 9 The sport journalist who made this interesting observation, also about Mohamed Ali, reasoned that if Jordan were born a generation later with the current training methods, he would still have been on top of the game thanks to his bodily constellation and mental drive. The statement holds on to objective measurement. It may be doubted. Would Jordan have thrived in the contemporary sphere of basketball, given the less heroic status of star players and greater emphasis on team spirit, courtesy of a less hierarchical society? And what about Ali, who only through extreme endurance incited by the Congolese spectators narrowly won his historic match against Foreman in Kinshasa? Still, and this is my point, such objections cannot undermine our intuition. Even if Jordan and Ali had never thrived as much in the current ‘local’ spheres of basket and boxing, they are the GOATs in their epoch as well as at the encompassing level of humanity. That is meant by ‘all time’ in GOAT: not a sum of periods, but in speciated history. They are heroes for having done their thing at the right time. That is the truth of the species, a collective reason.

Measurements cannot beat the validity of an intuition based on extensive experience and wide consensus. The collective carries a truth of its own. That is why before assigning the number one in sports we vote instead of measure. Collective reason enters that moment of the real when ‘we’ elect the GOAT. Also in democracy we plumb the depths of the group’s wishes to discover something we could not guess otherwise, our group’s destiny. External necessity eases the mind; popular dating apps can be criticized for undermining it. Group approval of a match, as observed in various cultures, eases too. The accuracy (and atomism) of meeting a list of traits will always pale before the validity (and holism) of a choice dubbed destiny. Similarly, a moral debate is not won by the most accurate speech, but by the most valid.

Intuition grasps without thinking. Is its instinctive sense of certainty not unfounded? It should accumulate and compare so many determinants, according to the atomistic approach in simplex society. The app Tinder in the field of romance is a reflection of that atomism. In contrast, intuition does not compare but takes the moment of meeting seriously. The moment gets its full weight. Intuition incorporates the growth of experience. It injects vision with the out-of-the-blue factor of immission. It supposes trust in what is immitted, without blind belief. Then one sees logics. One simplicates. Pre-ceiving is less of a reflex than thinking is.