The Hard Problem of Imagination

Many mysteries feel insoluble because we can’t imagine the relevant state—nonexistence for death, subjective experience emerging from neurons for consciousness, or true magnitudes for large numbers. Our minds swap in vivid surrogates (dark paralysis, FOMO, dualism) and mistake those feelings for the thing itself. This 'imagination gap' then misguides philosophy and public judgment. — If much public reasoning rides on imaginative surrogates, institutions should discount vibe-based arguments and invest in tools (visualizations, scale training) that bridge human limits on imagining absence and magnitude.