Gut feelings are what we experience

Gut feelings are what we experience. They appear quickly in con sciousness, we do not fully understand why we have them, but we are prepared to act on them. Rules of thumb are responsible for producing gut feelings. For instance, the mind-reading heuristic tells us what others desire, the recognition heuristic produces a feeling of which product to trust, and the gaze heuristic generates an intuition of where to run. Evolved capacities are the construction material for rules of thumb. For example, the gaze heuristic takes advantage of the ability totrack objects. It is easy for humans in contrast to robots to track a moving object against a busy background; at three months old, babies have already begun to hold their gaze on moving targets. Thus, the gaze heuristic is simple for humans but not for present-day robots. Environmental structures are the key to how well or poorly a rule of thumb works. For instance, the recognition heuristic takes advan-age of situations where name recognition matches the quality of products or the size of cities. A gut feeling is not good or bad, rational or irrational per se. Its value is dependent on the context in which the rule of thumb is used

— from The Instruments (Awareness/Perception/Expectations)

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