The mechanism of instinct has emerged from the evolutionary process to provide a survival and reproduction advantage over others. Instinct most certainly is an advantage for species (may be just random path-dependent mutation), not for the individual. Thus we shouldn't trust on instinct alone to find an optimal solution for sense/meaning problem.
That's my feeling too. We have lots of famous examples of intuitive, breakthrough, "a-ha" moments by great inventors, so we use that for inspiration.
However, there have been billions of bad-instinct decisions as well, ranging from "should have zigged instead of zagged" while driving a fast car around a curve to Napoleon invading Russia.
