I haven’t seen anyone talk about it, but when 47 goes into Tom’s tailor shop, he immediately knows it is 47 before he even says a word, and knows exactly where he is before he says anything.
This could mean that in this universe, 47’s instinct isn’t just some super power, but is instead just the same kind of ability blind people get when they always have to rely on things other than eye sight.
What do you think?
47 already knew he had this ability, Diana is just pointing out that they’re aware of it after examining him and instructing him on how he can use it to better his performance for the test.
Tommy the Tailor, as a blind individual, pays more attention to his other senses than most individuals who retain their sight do. It’s one of the myths of being blind: the other senses don’t improve to compensate, you just pay more attention to then because you are no longer distracted by the sense of sight. Most sighted people rely so heavily on sight that they must actively focus on their other senses to use them properly and not just have them as background stimuli. Coming back to Tommy, he probably makes a mental note of the sounds, scents, and behaviors of regular customers, especially since he seems to be a vendor for ICA when agents on a job in the USA need to be dressed properly to enter a public event. So he likely recognized 47 either by his scent, or by the specific way he opened the door and didn’t say anything immediately.
The difference here is that 47, through both his physical enhancements and lifetime of training, is able to pay as much attention to his other four senses as his vision, and all simultaneously, allowing him to pick up on cues in the world around him that others would not be able to. This is further enhanced from his study of human behavior, the special awareness of his surroundings that he inherited from Jegorov, and a general emphasis on a “killer’s instinct” that Ort-Meyer would have built into him, all allowing 47 to just kind of mentally follow the domino effect of where his target will be and what will happen to them. And even those who are trained to pay attention to their other senses better, like the ICA agents in Berlin for example, they still don’t have their senses as fine-tuned as 47 does due to his genetic superiority.
So 47’s instinct isn’t really shared with the rest of the human world except for some of the other clones that are near 47’s level. Everyone else who is able to just kind of know things is really just filtering out what their other senses are telling them over what their eyes see, and probably none of them are doing it as easily or as clearly as 47’s “instinct.”
Some NPCs randomly use instinct and that is how you get spotted through walls doing something illegal. In one case someone on the opposite side of the map saw me climbing in a container to hide from guards I was in combat with. It took several minutes for far off NPC in question to arrive to tell the guards so I thought I just barely escaped and was just waiting for everyone to standdown so I could make my way to the exit when suddenly I was locked in combat again and the container had become my grave. Had to wait 12 hours to try again…