Unlike intuition, instinct has had very little influence in the development of Panosophy, containing the art and science of causality that explains human creativity and behaviour. For we humans are the least instinctive of all the animals.
Using the metaphor of a computer, very few of our thoughts and actions are hard-wired. The innate instincts and automatic reflexes of babies to suck, grasp, cry, and respond to stimuli mostly disappear within the first few months of life. Our learning—corresponding to software and data in computers—mostly determines the way that we view the world and ourselves, and hence our behaviour.
If we are to be free of our cultural conditioning, it is thus vitally important to distinguish instinct and intuition, which are much more antonyms than synonyms, as they are often used today. For while instinct denotes mechanistic behaviour patterns, in the horizontal dimension of time, intuition lies at the heart of creativity, in the vertical.
Before 1420, ‘incitement or impulse; a prompting’, from Latin īnstīnctus ‘instigation, impulse, incited, impelled’, from past participle of īnstigāre ‘to incite, provoke’, or *īnstinguere, from in-, intensive prefix, from PIE base *en- ‘in’ and stinguere ‘to prick, goad; extinguish; annihilate’, from PIE base steig- ‘to prick, sting’.
Meaning ‘animal faculty of intuitive (sic) perception’ is from mid 1400s, from notion of ‘innate prompting’. From the Century Dictionary: “Instinct is said to be blind—that is, either the end is not consciously recognized by the animal, or the connection of the means with the end is not understood. Instinct is also, in general, somewhat deficient in instant adaptability to extraordinary circumstances.”