Phenomenological Descriptions

'Sixth Sense' Intuition Intuition is a form of “knowing” (or a feeling of knowing ) that arises instantly, without relying on deliberate logical reasoning. It manifests as a sensation or emotion based on unconscious experiences and information, which may take shape as some kind of mental image and guide our decisions and actions. It can emerge as a hunch that something will go well and be positive (accompanied by emotions such as surprise  and excitement ) or, conversely, that something will go wrong and turn out badly (manifesting as sudden fear/anxiety or anguish ). At other times, it appears as a subtle feeling, which I call a ‘sense of conformity,’ when it has a more cognitive character. Intuition may or may not be confirmed. However, the focus here is to describe the experience of intuiting regardless of its truth — it is the experience of instantly receiving an answer or sensing an event, along with the feeling that it is, in some way, in accordance with the reality ...

Creativity  arises from unique combinations of knowledge , reasoning , imaginations , experiences , and perceptions . To be creative is to go beyond the obvious, exploring new perspectives and finding unexpected solutions. It is the ability to generate new, original, and/or useful ideas — at least for the person who conceives them at that moment. Even if the idea has already been conceived and developed by someone else before, if it's new to the person creating it now — meaning they have no prior knowledge of it — they are still engaging their creativity. As mentioned in the description of this blog , what truly matters here is not so much the content of the idea (or of any experience) — whether it is good or not, whether it is absolutely original or not — but rather the experience of the process itself — in this case, the creative process. Creativity is everywhere Creativity manifests itself in a wide range of fields — such as the arts, philosophy, science, everyday problem-solvi...

Surprise , in my view, is also an experience that is difficult to capture phenomenologically — as is, for example, the state of flow or joy as plenitude — but for different reasons. Flow and joy as plenitude are difficult to access because they are rare states, and flow , in particular, tends to dissolve the moment we try to observe it. Surprise , in turn, is not necessarily rare, but depends on a stimulus that is difficult to evoke voluntarily, making its occurrence unpredictable and hard to isolate for an investigative self-observation. The startle reflex — which can be seen as a reaction similar to surprise , though not identical — also depends on something unexpected, but it is easier to elicit, as it can be triggered by sudden, simple sensory stimuli, such as a loud sound or a quick movement. Even when we know a sound is about to occur, if we don't know exactly when it will happen, we can still experience the startle . Thus, surprise is different from other emotions that I ...

  Invariants In phenomenology ( see here ) , invariants are the essential characteristics of phenomena — those aspects that remain unchanged even when the experience is observed from different viewpoints. They are the fundamental elements that make a particular experience what it is, rather than something else. For these invariants to become apparent to consciousness, the phenomenon must be examined from multiple perspectives. This movement is known as eidetic variation. By imaginatively varying the appearances of a phenomenon, we attempt to reduce the experience to that which is irreducible — its essence ( eidos,  from the Greek εἶδος ). This is the gesture of eidetic reduction . Let us take a simple example: what does it mean to experience a triangle ? A triangle may be scalene, isosceles, or equilateral; it may be large or small, colored or monochrome; it may be drawn on paper, cut from fabric, projected on a screen, and oriented in different directions in space. Despite a...