Intuition and feeling are often all we have to start with, and we can often make great leaps by combining intuition with our best facts, observations, and reason. There is nothing wrong with proposing hypotheses based on intuition as long as those hypotheses don't contradict known falsehoods. This is especially true in fields such as consciousness about we which we know so little and in which great advances can be made. As much as possible, we should try to use reason and science to support or disprove these hypotheses, but we must accept that at some point we may not be able to, or we may have to wait until we understand more.
Intuition can be very misleading and can be a hindrance when trying to understand new concepts. Intuition is intellectual drag.
Think about what intuition is. It is your brain applying known patterns of how the world works to a new situation. If something works as expected, or close to what is expected, that's great for normal situations, but leads to false positives, where you get an expected result for completely different reason. Intuition teaches you nothing about the underlying processes.
If you come across a situation which doesn't behave intuitively, the human brain scrambles to find something - anything - that might come close to explaining how how it works, filling in the blanks as appropriate. The human brain is great for filling in the blanks and finding patterns where there are none. In other words, it often makes stuff up. Again, intuition and feelings are not helpful for understanding underlying processes except for formulating an initial hypotheses.
The supreme task of the physicist is to arrive at those universal elementary laws from which the cosmos can be built up by pure deduction. There is no logical path to these laws; only intuition, resting on sympathetic understanding of experience, can reach them. In this methodological uncertainty, one might suppose that there were any number of possible systems of theoretical physics all equally well justified; and this opinion is no doubt correct, theoretically. But the development of physics has shown that at any given moment, out of all conceivable constructions, a single one has always proved itself decidedly superior to all the rest. Nobody who has really gone deeply into the matter will deny that in practice the world of phenomena uniquely determines the theoretical system, in spite of the fact that there is no logical bridge between phenomena and their theoretical principles.
The state of mind which enables a man to do work of this kind is akin to that of the religious worshiper or the lover; the daily effort comes from no deliberate intention or program, but straight from the heart.
FYI, the comment directly above is all quoted from someone who might have had more experience on the subject matter than anyone in this thread - Albert Einstein.
Appeals to authority also instinctively make sense but cloud judgement.
Einstein famously said "God does not play dice"; his instinct was that probability did not have a place inside the fundamental laws of physics. His stubbornness prevented him from fully accepting the Heisenberg model for some time, although as an exemplary scientist he was able to put aside his instincts and accept that a probabilistic quantum model did describe the known observable a very well.
