You probably know the Law of Archimedes. Many people do. But do you know it in the same way Archimedes did? No. You were told the law, then taught how to apply it. But Archimedes discovered it without any of that.

Can we repeat the feat of Archimedes? Yes, we can, but first we'd have to forget what we were told and taught.

The way we actually discover things is very different from amassing lots of hearsay. Indeed, we do have an internal part that behaves the same way LLM does. But to get to the real understanding we actually shut down that part, forget what we "know", start from a clean slate. That part does not help us think; it helps us to avoid thinking. The reason it exists is that it is useful: thinking is hard and slow, but recalling is easy and fast. But it not thinking; it is the opposite.

> But to get to the real understanding we actually shut down that part, forget what we "know", start from a clean slate.

Close, but not exactly. To start from a clean slate is not very difficult, the trick is to reject some chosen parts of existing knowledge, or more specifically the difficulty is to choose what to reject. Starting from a clean slate you'll end up spending millennia to get the knowledge you've just rejected.

So the overall process of generating knowledge is to look under the streetlight till finding something new becomes impossible or too hard, and then you start experimenting with rejecting some bits of your knowledge to rethink them. I was taught to read works of Great Masters of the past critically, trying to reproduce their path while looking for forks where you can try to go the other way. It is a little bit like starting from a clean slate, but not exactly.