By Geoffrey Chen
When we speak of reason, we usually attach a positive value to it almost automatically, as if reason meant reliability, clarity, and correctness. When we speak of the non-rational, by contrast, people often immediately associate it with disorder, impulse, or absurdity, as if it were naturally opposed to reason and therefore untrustworthy. But this understanding is not really accurate. The non-rational does not simply mean irrational in the sense of being unreasonable. It often means that one is not proceeding through strict logical derivation, but through intuition, experience, emotional response, or an overall grasp of a situation. It is not groundless. Its grounds are simply not always expressible in the formal language of logic.
So the first misunderstanding that needs to be corrected is the tendency to treat the non-rational as if it were simply anti-rational. Of course the non-rational can go wrong. Intuition can become illusion, and emotion can mislead judgment. That is not in dispute. But none of that means that the non-rational is by nature opposed to reason. In many cases, human intuition is in fact consistent with reality, with experience, and even, at a higher level, with reason itself. Intuition is a native human capacity, while reason is more clearly a developed one. Reason does not emerge out of nowhere. It grows gradually out of the total activity of life, becoming stable, abstract, and disciplined over time. In that sense, reason should fundamentally be able to adapt to intuition and explain it, rather than stand in lasting and basic opposition to it. A completely counter-intuitive reason may be possible in isolated cases, but it cannot be the norm of reason, nor can it serve as the durable foundation of human civilization.
On the other hand, to say that reason has limits is not the same as saying that reason itself is false. This is where another misunderstanding often appears. Some people notice that reason cannot explain everything and then move straight to denying its reliability, as if reason were worthless the moment it ceased to be universal. That view is just as weak. The real issue is not whether reason is valid, but that its range of application is limited. Within its own domain, reason is reliable, credible, and must be respected. Where that domain truly applies, intuition should not override reason, but should yield to it. In mathematics, formal logic, engineering calculation, or institutional design, reason matters precisely because these fields require stability, repeatability, verification, and deduction. In such areas, replacing clear judgment with vague feeling usually leads to serious consequences.
At the same time, reason is not a master key. It does not automatically handle every kind of problem. Human life contains a vast number of questions that do not fully belong to the domain of formal inference. They involve holistic judgment in complex situations. They involve value, trust, risk perception, aesthetic sense, accumulated experience, and sometimes a kind of sensitivity that has not yet been fully conceptualized. In those areas, the attempt to force everything into explicit logical form often produces distortion instead of clarity. So there are two mistaken attitudes toward reason. One is to become excessively fascinated with it and extend it into fields where it does not truly apply. The other is to deny its validity simply because it has boundaries. Both are misunderstandings.
A more accurate way to put it is that reason and intuition each have their own range of validity. They are not simply arranged in a hierarchy, nor are they locked in permanent competition. They are two different channels of cognition. Where reason is effective, intuition should accept its correction. Where intuition is effective and reason has not yet fully unfolded, reason does not need to suppress intuition by force. Mature cognition is not about turning one side into an idol. It is about discerning boundaries and knowing which capacity should be trusted in which kind of situation.
And there is another point that matters. When reason and intuition are both valid at the same time, they cannot truly be in conflict. The part in which they overlap must also be the part in which they agree. What we call conflict is often not a contradiction between reason and intuition themselves, but a mistake in our grasp of one of them. Either we mistake impulse for intuition, or we mistake reasoning that has moved beyond its proper scope for reason itself. If both operate within their real domains of validity, they should ultimately reinforce one another rather than cancel one another out.
The reason I want to redefine the relation between reason and intuition from this angle is that this is not just an abstract philosophical question. It is directly tied to the challenge that the age of AI poses to subjectivity. In the past, when we discussed epistemology, we usually assumed that knowledge had to be carried by a human subject, by some self-conscious being capable of understanding its own acts. Today that assumption is under pressure. With the development of artificial intelligence, especially various forms of agentic systems, we are facing a new possibility. Non-human systems are beginning to exhibit functions that resemble subjectivity in some important respects. They can perceive environments, generate language, make decisions, complete complex tasks, and in some contexts even perform more steadily and efficiently than humans.
But the central question remains this. If a system can pass the Turing test, is that enough to show that it possesses intelligence in the full sense? I do not think so. At most, the Turing test shows that a system can produce external behavior sufficient to make people take it for a human conversational partner. It proves a form of surface-level imitation, not the essence of intelligence itself. Once we seriously ask what intelligence is, we begin to see that it cannot be reduced either to formal reasoning or to language output alone. Genuine intelligence must include at least some capacity for situational grasp, some ability to judge that cannot be fully reduced to explicit rules, something analogous to human intuition. Without that dimension, a system may simulate intelligence, but it does not necessarily possess it.
Of course, modern science and technology have always been engaged in a similar movement. They constantly take aspects of human life that once appeared mysterious or elusive and turn them into something analyzable, controllable, and engineerable. Many things that once looked like inspiration or intuition have gradually been partially explained by psychology, neuroscience, and computer science, and have even been modeled, simulated, and operationalized. From that point of view, some human intuitive mechanisms can indeed be progressively uncovered, decomposed, and technologized. That is one of the central achievements of scientific progress.
Even so, I still think that human decision-making and subjectivity will always retain some part that cannot be completely reduced. That part does not have to be mystical, supernatural, or dependent on some metaphysical substance. But it does suggest that the grounds of human action can never be compressed one hundred percent into a closed logical system or a fully explicable artificial model. Neuroscience, brain science, physics, quantum theory, computer science, and artificial intelligence may continue to move closer to certain mechanisms involved in the process, but they are unlikely to seal it off completely. There will always remain a dimension of indeterminacy. And it is precisely this indeterminacy that marks one of the most important differences between a living subject and a non-living system.
This does not mean that machines can never develop, nor that artificial intelligence will always remain at the level of imitation. It means that once we seriously discuss subjectivity, we cannot avoid this problem. Life is not only life because it is complex, nor only because it can react to feedback. It is life because it preserves within itself something that can never be fully exhausted in advance. That may be the very thing philosophy has pursued for thousands of years without finally resolving. Philosophers have not failed to notice it. On the contrary, they have always been circling around it. But most of the time, in order to preserve the stability of knowledge systems and social order, civilization has chosen to place this dimension outside certain boundaries, or temporarily contain it within a theoretical framework, so that research, institutions, and division of labor can continue. Because once this fundamental indeterminacy is fully released, many of the systems on which different disciplines rely begin to shake. The classifications, definitions, criteria of judgment, and methodologies by which fields operate would no longer feel secure. It is not that people do not know the problem is there. More often, they are not able to bear the disorder that would follow if it were completely opened up.
So to return to reason and intuition is not to argue for the supremacy of one over the other. It is to see more clearly the structure of human cognition itself, and also to reconsider what subjectivity really means in the age of AI. Reason is not the enemy, and intuition is not the enemy either. The deeper problem is that our definitions of both have long been too rough. We sanctified reason and stigmatized the non-rational. As a result, we misunderstood both reason and intuition. Now that the development of artificial intelligence is forcing us to rethink what counts as intelligence, what counts as a subject, and whether knowledge must still depend on human understanding, such crude divisions are no longer sufficient.
What I really want to emphasize is that reason and intuition do not stand independently. Both belong to a larger cognitive structure of life itself. Reason matters because it gives us stability, verifiability, and the order on which civilization depends. Intuition matters because it remains connected to the whole of life, to those processes of judgment that are already at work before they have been fully formalized. Neither can be erased, and neither can be infinitely inflated. To redefine their relation is, in the end, also to redefine the place of the human being. And in the age of AI, that is no longer a marginal question. It is becoming one of the central questions.