Logic or instinct. Why not both?

Are you an impulsive decision maker, letting your gut make those occasional knife edge decisions instead of your head, or do you choose the option you can best justify?
When the head and the heart conflict, there's a strange sort of tug-of-war between the logically defensible option and the one that just feels right.

I believe they're simply different descriptions of the same process. We identify patterns of varying complexities, and we're better at noticing patterns than we are at describing them. When we lack the words to describe a pattern we observe, we can't accept it on a logical level since we can't build an internal argument. We still discern the pattern though, and that's what we call instinct.

Michael reads broadly and deeply. He engages ideological opponents with a sharp wit, and never met an argument he didn't savour. If he notices a pattern, he can describe it to himself and pitch it to others using examples and metaphors to make the pattern come alive in their minds.
He can explain his reasons for making a given decision in advance or hindsight and makes accurate predictions about the outcome.

Trevor was just a child when he was the sole survivor of a plane crash onto a tropical island. He remembers just a few words of English, but is an accomplished fisherman, hunter and builder.
He isn't sure why he goes fishing when and where he does, or why he doesn't eat certain berries. He doesn't even have a word for berries, or fish. He can't describe his actions to himself, let alone justify them to others. He's just as smart as Mick, but lacks the verbal acuity to build arguments and explanations, he operates almost entirely on what we'd call instinct. He doesn't predict what will happen, but things tend to turn out well for him.

“Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thought-crime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by eactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. . . . The process will still be continuing long after you and I are dead. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. Even now, of course, there's no reason or excuse for commiting thought-crime. It's merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control. But in the end there won't be any need even for that. . . . Has it ever occcured to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?”
― George Orwell, 1984

My wife is the 6th woman I've dated, and the first one I've married. It only occured to me recently that she's the only one younger than I, and the only one who has a brother. Did my mind see a pattern of failed relationships with older women? The others were either an only child, or had only sisters; did I notice this on some level and embrace the difference as pointing to a more viable relationship? Perhaps my decision to marry her moved from an instinctive to a logical one only when I discerned the pattern, and could describe it to myself.

Now, I'm not suggesting we adopt gut instinct as our preference; our minds aren't perfect. They're prone to missing patterns which are there, and seeing patterns where they don't exist. Without language to properly frame our arguments, we can't bounce them off of each other or examine them for ourselves, scrutinising them for inconsistencies.
It's fun to ponder though.

Have a fantastic day.