Feb 1, 2025 bb-projects

Intuitive recursion

A recursive deep dive into meta-awareness, thinking about thinking, and the role of intuition.

Introduction

Do you ever think about thinking?
Do you ever think about thinking about thinking?
Would you be interested in a blog about thinking about thinking?
Have you ever thought: where the hell did this thought come from? Why am I thinking this? Do I even want to think what I am thinking? Is there a pattern in these thoughts? Are the thoughts even voluntary? Do they arise from consciousness or the unconscious? Is consciousness even real?
This waterfall of thoughts is a common pattern in my brain, so I thought let’s go on an recursive deep dive and see how far we’ll come. Join me on this meta adventure :)
This blog is written with many questions and written in bullet points, so bear with me.

Do you catch yourself thinking: this thing “is” important? Full stop?
What happens when you think that? Nothing? Or does it send you into immediate doubt? Thinking, important, on what scale? On a cosmic scale? No nothing human is important on that scale. On a scale of a lifetime? Maybe, but usually not. Important on a scale of your year, week or day? Probably. Important to you and people close to you? Even more likely. Important to how you feel about it? Most likely. Can you view different levels of these scales at the same time?
If you don’t waterfall into an importance scale, it can be a useful exercise to put things into a healthy perspective. But don’t zoom out too much, you might regret it.

Do you ever analyze yourself when you said something? Such as: should I have said that? Did I say that the right way? Did I say too much? Very good, very human of you.
Do you ever analyse yourself while you are saying something? Like you are split into two persons, the one talking and the one analyzing? Do you only have this when you are insecure in some situation, or do you have this more often? Or all the time?
What happens if you get angry? You blame and that’s it? Or do you think what evolutionary purpose caused humans like me to respond like this? Does being made have some utility in this current situation?
Can you observe your thoughts as they pop into your head? Can you actually see the thought emerging? Can your consciousness observe what your unconsciousness throws at you?
This is a display of metacognitive awareness. But it’s exhausting, isn’t it?

In your meta awareness states, do you ever observe yourself nuancing or questioning all things you think or say? Doubting everything, even conventions and facts? What is truth? Is truth absolute? Is truth constant?
This natural waterfall of questions happens to me all the time, the former sentence is a live example of that. Some other patterns:
I don’t like X […however I can understand that Y…]
One shouldn’t do X […but who determines shoulds and oughts]
All X are Y […but happens when a single X is not Y]
This person is a jerk, he so mean […but at the same I pity him, there must be something sad going on with him to make him act like that]
This constant doubt is your second metacognitive personality showing you that nothing is as it seems and nothing is fixed. The experience of reality is a floating middle state and fixed opinions don’t actually exist.
Doubting your consciousness is in itself a sign of consciousness, is it not?

Are you already questioning yourself if you’re metacognitive enough to question your own metacognition? Good! Then you’re on the right track, let’s keep going.
Did you ever think about something that is explaining itself, …. a recursive thought about recursion? Do you ever consciously doubt your doubt? Which is also a sort of doubt you can doubt?
Do you ever think about why you want what you want? Why you like what you like? Or do you just “like” something and that’s it? Do you think that’s just the way you are, or do you think there’s some flexibility in your preferences and in your interests? Can you make yourself find something interesting? Or can you be interested in the concept of what you find interesting?
In the previous paragraphs you can find multiple examples of recursion. Do you ever find yourself thinking: am I explaining the thing with the same thing?

Do you sometimes observe yourself holding two contradicting views at the same time and are fine with this?
Do you have a singular opinion about a piece of music? Or do you realize it’s always good and bad piece at the same time? Opinions + zooming out = a stable paradox? Subjective rationales can differ among people and across time. A piece of music “IS” not anything, subjectively speaking. The opposites are always there, together.
Trying to explain illogical things logically makes you understand said logical thing even less. So can more thinking lead to less understanding?
Have you noticed that deep questions about consciousness emerge from the unconscious? And the moment you notice you are getting closer to the deepest questions about self awareness, you can’t really explain it other than by intuition? This is paradoxically consciousness moving away from itself.

As per the conclusions of the paradox section, it seems paradoxically that consciousness is limited by itself, and deeper levels of awareness lie in intuition.
I would like to distinguish two types of intuition, namely pre- and post-intuition.
Pre-intuition is intuition as we all know it. Post-intuition is intuition after awareness. It’s when the meta observer is observing intuition and is able to (some degree) decipher what it all means. “Observed intuition” vs. “unobserved intuition” if you will.
Post-intuition is actually using consciousness to direct the unconsciousness into a certain direction, such as reading/writing/thinking about meta awareness, and letting one’s mind dwell on the topic, and then again consciously trying to reap these insights.
But who am I to say that pre-intuition doesn’t have these insights already, unconsciously? But here I’m questioning my own meta awareness which is a very meta aware thing to do.. another recursive loop!

A proof of the powerful force of intuition is the title of this blog. I named the blog “intuitive recursion” because I wanted to find out intuitively how deep I dive into meta awareness, not knowing I would end up where I started: intuition.
I openly admit that my proposed layers are not perfectly hierarchical and non-overlapping and some claims or questions are a bit of a stretch. Please take everything with a grain of salt, and see it as an inkijk of how my brain often seems to work.
I wrote this in one go on a highly conscious evening. Reading it backs gives me back that “zoomed out” or rather “zoomed inward” feeling I had on that particular evening.
Unfortunately I inevitably have to end with a (for me) fundamentally unknowable question: Are there any deeper layers on this metacognitive scale?

Do metacognitive skills differ greatly in humans or do they just differ in their explicitness? Would there be any reliable way to test this? Would it make sense to treat people differently on these differences, for their own benefit? How is it correlated with intelligence. It’s a very slippery topic, and I will therefore not answer any of these questions.

Intuitive Recursion