p.265 Herbert Simon made overlapping substantive contributions to the
fields of economics, psychology, cognitive science, decision theory, and organization theory. Simon's work was motivated
by the belief that neither the human mind, human thinking and decision making, nor human creativity need be mysterious.
His life work was devoted to proving this point.
p.266 Simon's preference was to refer to intuition as subconscious pattern
recognition.
p.268 For Simon, problem solving was a ‘‘search through a vast
maze of possibilities, a maze that describes the environment’’ (Simon, 1982h, p. 66).
p.271 Simon's view of thinking affected by AI is that thinking
is a form of information processing. Both human thinking, and information-processing programs perform three similar
operations: they scan data for patterns, they store the patterns in memory, and they apply the patterns to make inferences
or extrapolations. In fact, some programs reproduce and even outperform human experts at problem
solving. Simon concluded that there is sufficient reason to believe that some kinds of human thinking closely parallel
the operations of an information-processing computer program.
p.275 if human rationality and problem solving is limited by our computational
capacities and memory, can computer programs with greater computational capacity and memory help extend our problem
solving abilities?
Simon's challenge to economics and his work on AI led him to view
human thinking as an example of information processing. It led him to view human and artificial intelligence
as depending upon information processing leading to pattern recognition. And this lead him to his understanding that
human intuition is subconscious information processing leading to subconscious pattern recognition. John
Stuart Mill held similar views about intuition as subconscious pattern recognition. Unfortunately for him, he lived before
Simon helped developed the field of AI.
Simon makes it clear that intuition or subconscious pattern recognition
is a positive externality of an extensive period of study, and is part of the process of human information processing, albeit
a subconscious part. With this in mind, intuition extends our ability to use our computational capacities and memory,
extends the boundary of our ability for rational behavior, and hence enhances our ability for procedural rationality.
