What is "intuition" but any set of heuristic approaches to generating conjectures, proofs, etc., and judging their correctness, which isn't a naive search algorithm through formulas/proofs in some formal logical language? At a low level, all mathematics, including even the judgment of whether a given proof is correct (or "rigorous"), is done by intuition (at least, when it is done by humans). I think in everyday usage we reserve "intuition" for relatively high level heuristics, guesses, hunches, and so on, which we can't easily break down in terms of simpler thought processes, and this is the sort of "intuition" that Terence Tao is discussing in those quotes. But we should recognize that even regarding the very basics of what it means to accept a proof is correct, we are using the same kinds of thought processes, scaled down.
Few mathematicians want to bother with actual formal logical proofs, whether producing them or reading them.
(And there's an even subtler issue, that logicians don't have any one really convincing formal foundation to offer, and Godel's theorem makes it hard to know which ones are even consistent--if ZFC turned out to be inconsistent, would that mean that most of our math is wrong? Probably not, but since people often cite ZFC as being the formal logical basis for their work, what grounds do we we have for this prediction?)
While reading the answer to the question 'What is it like to have an understanding of very advanced mathematics?' I became curious about the value of intuition in mathematics and why it might be useful.
It usually seems to be a bad idea to try to solve problems intuitively or use our intuition as evidence to judge issues that our evolutionary ancestors never encountered and therefore were never optimized to judge by natural selection.
And so it seems to be especially strange to suggest that intuition might be a good tool to make mathematical conjectures. Yet people like fields medalist Terence Tao seem to believe that intuition should not be disregarded when doing mathematics,
The author mentioned at the beginning also makes the case that intuition is an important tool,
But what do those people mean when they talk about 'intuition', what exactly is its advantage? The author hints at an answer,
At this point I was reminded of something Scott Aaronson wrote in his essay 'Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity',
Again back to the answer on 'what it is like to have an understanding of very advanced mathematics'. The author writes,
Humans are good at 'zooming out' to detect global patterns. Humans can jump conceptual gaps by treating them as "black boxes".
Intuition is a conceptual bird's-eye view that allows humans to draw inferences from high-level abstractions without having to systematically trace out each step. Intuition is a wormhole. Intuition allows us get from here to there given limited computational resources.
If true, it also explains many of our shortcomings and biases. Intuitions greatest feature is also our biggest flaw.
Our computational limitations make it necessary to take shortcuts and view the world as a simplified model. That heuristic is naturally prone to error and introduces biases. We draw connections without establishing them systematically. We recognize patterns in random noise.
Many of our biases can be seen as a side-effect of making judgments under computational restrictions. A trade off between optimization power and resource use.
It it possible to correct for the shortcomings of intuition other than by refining rationality and becoming aware of our biases? That's up to how optimization power scales with resources and if there are more efficient algorithms that work under limited resources.