So many questions, John/Ken! Your illustration begs the following Yogism: when you come to a fork in the road, take it. To most all of those questions, I will proffer the following notion: most all of us have an ingrained spider sense, or gut feeling if you prefer. This sense develops, over time and experiences gained. (I am not great with words like heuristics, hermenutics and such like.) Your expert, GG, probably knows a lot about these things. In any case, "training" comes with personal experience. Those of us who live longest, without encountering "bad luck" (or poor decisions), leading to early death, finally develop a pretty good spider sense, or as you have characterized it: gut feelings. Irrational feelings and biases are bumps in the road---part of the learning curve---which we may eventually overcome if sagacity prevails. (If not, that early death becomes and ever-more present possibility.) Gut feelings are not science yet. But, even though there are "life sciences", neither is life.

Thanks for all the great comments, everyone! greenlibertarian - much of Gladwell's book Blink was based on the research of our guest, Gird Gigerenzer.

~~  McCOY
       (imploring)
     Jim, try to be open about this.
       KIRK
     About what? That I've made the
     wrong choices in my life? That I
     turned left when I should've turned
     right? I know what my weaknesses
     are. I don't need Sybok to take me
     on a tour of them.
       McCOY
     If you'd just unbend and allow
     yourself -
       KIRK
     And be brainwashed by this con man?
       McCOY
     I was wrong. This "con man" took
     away my pain.
       KIRK
     Damnit, Bones, you're a doctor.
     You know that pain and guilt can't
     be taken away with a wave of a
     magic wand. They're things we carry
     with us - the things that make us
     who we are. If we lost them, we
     lose ourselves. I don't want my
     pain taken away. I need my pain.
Study the chicken picker carefully. You will note her extending the chick's wing and examining its leading edge.
 
 

THE RELIGION OF CAUSATION      
 It was so refreshing to hear a philosophical discussion of some aspect of consciousness (?gut feelings?) without reference to neuroscience.  And this was probably due to a correct gut feeling that ?gut feelings? are antithetical to neural and structural brain stuff; that they are not really caused by brain actions.  Another telling remark was ?An idea pops into my brain?.? This is not a description of ?brain? workings; it is a description of consciousness workings. Setting consciousness in the brain is just a way of reassuring ourselves (falsely) of causality; that there is a mechanical, scientific, chemical, etc. process going on in the organ which produces our consciousness stuff. This is indicative of the harm that science (and especially, neuroscience) has done to philosophy. 
I call this strong, natural need for causation the religion of causation.
?Why do you think everything needs an explanation??  Prof. Jennan Ismael
It is a ?belief? that everything has a cause; when there is no evident proof of a cause, people try to fill one in. Because they ?believe? in causation; they believe that the cause is somewhere and if it can?t be found, one will be created from the great explainer, science.  John said ?Evolution provides a feed-back mechanism?? This is the Religion of Causation speaking: Darwinian evolution takes place entirely due to randomness and mutation. But because that feels to be an unsatisfying methodology for anything worthy of our fealty, we have attached the notions of ?survival of the fittest? and ?adaptation? to the representation of the process, to give us comfort that really there is some direction, some reassurance of reliability. (Almost like believing in God, which few Darwinians would admit). When John says ?Evolution provides a feed-back mechanism?? all he is really doing is saying ?I ?believe? something scientific says that something caused ?? But there is no scientific causation, in the sense of direction or certain repeatability, to DE. The urge to supply it is a classic human urge, like religion.
 I love the ?chicken sexing? discussion. All I can say is that I have chickens, and when I buy day-old chicks represented to me to be females, there is always the advice that ?If you want to have four hens, buy six chicks because one might be a male (illegal to have in the city where I live), and one might die.? It will be hard for us rationalists to believe, I know, but I can hold the one-day old chicks, and look at them, and I can ?sense? male or female. I think it might be an ability for which the ?practice? or ?exercise? is being ?open? and ?receptive? to these kinds of non-scientific matters, which you can tell is an interest of mine. At least being open enough to take them seriously enough to investigate them.
 
 

Eliminativist neuroscientists do indeed misrepresent consciousness, but the honest ones note that they cannot find it, and that the methodology they generally apply, either stimulating or damaging, or studying brains damaged, in certain areas somehow is telling the story of mind. And more, that the conclusions they derive from such stimulation or damage, such as making one's left thumb twitch or noting that destroyed tissue in a specific area causes the loss of a certain mental faculty or acuity, can be obviated by the subject in ways that repudiate the research results and so its methods.
 
Chickens make a wonderfully soothing clucking noise that roosters do not. Perhaps this is sensed even in the chicks. I learned of the chicken sorting trick on an epsiode of Mr's Rogers. The roosters, as I recall, have some rather more ragged feathers on the leading edge of their wings. In any case, mystery does not imply mysticism. I was riding my bycicle today and, looking down to see if the wet of the road was spraying onto me from the front wheel, I almost lost control of the bike. It seems that my reflex inverted with the upside-down perspective, and my steering went awry. It is easy to forget how much that we do is intuitive. (intuition--dare I say?-- "=" a commensuration between the empirical and the rational impossible but for the intervention of a mode of being capable of surviving the change between two incommensurate systems. I call it person, though consciousness will do in a pinch.)

The "honest" neuroscientists are beginning to admit to what neuros and philosos are calling "the gap," between as far as neuroscience can take you, and the constitution of consciousness.  It would be very welcome (though not very popular in TED talks) if neuros stopped insisting that they, someday, will bridge the "gap." Honor the gap, neuros, you will be more respected for acknowledging limitations, rather than steam rolling over them.
Your continuing, fascinating, discussion of the calculus of philosophy reminds me of a state of mental rational paralysis I reached pursuing the unattainable end of meaning via deconstructive thinking and pondering.  Gary, paralysis can occur when trying to continually half the distance to the goal. That is when the metaphors of poetry (and the ironies of comedy) provide relief. And after a while you can resume the halving.

Even space cannot be divided endlessly. That is why the infinitesimal is so problematic. But if the least term of space is the infinitesimal that cannot be decisively placed within any more than without the calculation, or its governing law, can time be divided even further still? If the least term of space is in contrariety to its geometric perfection or mathematical certitude what would the least term of time be? The conviction that everything material is enumerative, can be counted which one and how much it is, is incommensurable between these differing modes of being one, what divisions of that conviction but a kind of dialectic in the character of it? A sort of ebb and flow? Like, say, emotions? And if the last final and least yet most encompassing term of that conviction is its loss, then that dialectic is act. Act in a sense the concept of agency is but immanent to as a sort of epiphenomenon. Of course, like any contrariety, it is anomalous to its nominal or antecedent law unless it is in some sense enabled a response that completes its being the even more encompassing context of it. It is literally true that the least term of time is all the differing it is. The image of Achilles arrow or the tortoise and the hare is just an evasion, a putting off of the moment. The dilemma being that the most real act is loss and the most articulate term is what responsibility of the worth of that loss yet lives amongst us. Between loss, and responsibility of its worth being recognized (love), time is emancipated of its ordering and tempo. We cannot prepossess that moment, for there is no enduring it is.
Bertie Russell (not Wooster) somewhere says (I paraphrase) that a philosopher should start with commonplaces and derive outrageous truths. On a discussion board like this there is little scope for the extensive argumentation this requires. It necessitates outrages as the starting point, in hopes someone will show enough patience to hear some of the (more or less) commonplace reasons of it. The usual response, of course, is outrage, so I am gratified when I meet with a kinder one!

So provocative, your thoughts I differ with; so brilliant, your thoughts I agree with. Haha.  
Time: See the Four Quartets by TSEliot (first stanza of each quartet is about time).  I think of time not as "dot dot dot" but as "white noise." Very liberating, especially when everyone is equally qualified to describe "what time is."  Re: infinitesimal vs. finite: again, I caution against the paralysis that is coming from too much wondering about this, while trying to "find out" something.  "Ebb and flow" is a much more rational description of creation and change, than "big bang." There is so much more ebb and flow around than there is "infinite nothingness into which the explosion of all matter (intrudes?)."  I accept all dialectics; and I accept the Hegelian synthesis that sometimes results, as part of the process: Q: how we look at randomness and mutation to try to find reassuring causation (which isn't there); how to recognize (invent) responsibility for the worth of the loss.  The Greeks (the greatest philosophers) had two ways of looking at things: 1. what they called "normal" which meant what everyone (except nutcases) knew was the case, and 2. the product of phlosophical investigation, a rational dialog about thoughts. I am a BRussell fan because of his wonderful History of Western Philosophy, which I consult all the time (in fact, it is the only phil hist I read); but I am not a fan of his methodology: define terms. "Defining" sophistically makes the rules, asks the question, and then answers it, without examination. Defining is not doing philosophy; phil does not seek "definitions" it seeks "meaning," or significance, or what comes from the realization that EVERYTHING is representation.

Schopenhauer? (The World as Will and Representation, the inspiration of Nietzsche's 'Will to Power')

My problem is that I have to reference a vast body of unpublished justification.

Richard Feynman has written a fine little book, QED, about the behavior of light that might give you something to think about. Time is neither monadic nor epochal. There is a torrential cascade of activity hidden by the obvious. Light and matter are not individual events but a cavalcade of strange improbables which themselves hide even deeper impossibles, though the calculus Feynman guides us through, with ease and humor, is guilty of the flaws I mentioned in another post. The point is, time is not simple, it is a dynamic of gestures that offer opportunities for yet other gestures is a bewildering array of maybes. But none of it is real alone. Only where there is some sense in which what is no more within the laws of causality or reason than without is more completing of time than that law is there anything real at all. The infinitesimal is not obviated the ordinary perspective of time as an even tempo of regular events because it is too small to be fixed there, but because it is too unalone. If it is indeed as without as within the law, this offers the rest of time the opportunity of be so, without as much as within regulating tempo, to be outside the law in the same sense and to the same extent. And so the character of time is the change that comes about in the law even as it seems, for all the world, to impose its tempo upon it. The only power the will has is to get out of the way as the rest of time finds its freedom from the grinding tempo of necessity in the sense its loss offers it. No god can save us. No act of will can expropriate or represent to itself what time means. We engage in a dialectic of inner reverie through which the very rigor of preserving our convictions end in the final term their loss is. This loss is the act of our needing each other free. But the world is sustained as the conviction of a regular and regulated tempo of time that deflects responsibility of that loss, and maintains that conviction, as an offer of facile understanding. We take for granted what our words mean and that we are understood. But insofar as that needing each other free is recognized, not in the lost conviction, which remains a personal reasoning, but in the demise of that facile presumption the world is offered us, there is meaning more real intimated here. In other worlds, the dialectic is the growing recognition of the joke the world is in its offering us the language of its steady constancy in the face of our growing recognition of its changing wildly. Who is the agent of that change? Every changing mood of the world presents itself as the paradigm of time and tempo, and many find profit in pretending to keep abreast of it or even to generate it, but the freedom we derive through each other in the dialectic of a changing mind and recognition of the freedom it wins for us can never become a public property, any more than a private hoard.