The Fall of Imagination |
In my recent post, "The Third State of Knowing," I described a new way understanding can arrive in the age of large language models. It's not through slow cognitive construction or embodied intuition, but through resonance. A finished pattern appears, it fits, and the mind experiences the same internal signal it once associated with hard-earned insight.
The response to that piece was interesting. Many readers recognized this third-state feeling immediately—the clarity or even the sense of “this is exactly it.” But as those conversations expanded, another question came to mind. If understanding can now arrive fully formed, what happens to the mental space that used to come before understanding? What happens to imagination?
Before we know, we first have to be able to picture. Every genuine act of discovery begins as a possibility that has not yet been confirmed. Imagination is the mental searchlight that sweeps across that unknown terrain and sketching shapes before they take form or are even proven. Knowledge comes later, and it's what remains after logic and experience have done their work.
In that sense, imagination precedes knowledge the way a hypothesis precedes a proof. You don't (or can't) prove what you cannot first conceive. Even the most rigorous scientific insight begins as a fragile internal model, or a “what if,”........