The Third State of Knowing |
For most of human history, there were two fundamental ways of knowing.
One was slow and effortful. We learned by building understanding over time, through the bumpy path of reasoning, trial, error, revision, and discovery. Ideas became stable only after they had been pressure tested. The moment of insight—the satisfaction of “now I see it”—carried weight because it marked a culmination of genuine cognitive labor.
The other was fast and intuitive, but only on the surface. It’s the clinician who recognizes a pattern in a patient’s face, the musician who feels when a phrase resolves, the athlete who senses where the play is about to unfold. It feels immediate, even effortless, yet it is anything but. It is the compression of diligent practice into fluid judgment.
These two modes—construction and embodiment—are different, yet biologically entangled. Both arise from a living system that learns by doing its own work and paying the price of being wrong. In both cases, the feeling of understanding has become a reliable and trusted signal.
Let’s push on this idea a bit more, in the context of AI. Recently, I’ve begun to suspect that something genuinely new and important is entering the picture.
Not simply faster access to information.
Not merely more efficient reasoning.
But a different way in which the experience of knowing itself can arise.
Consider a familiar moment. You ask a complex question to an AI about medicine, strategy, philosophy, or meaning, and within seconds, you are reading a response that is structured, complete, and coherent. As you follow the logic, something very familiar happens inside. The sense of........