The material and bodily understanding of computational incomprehensibility

Attitudes and discourses expressed in phrases such as “until we understand what we do not understand” pervade society, forming the foundation of a naive faith in AI. Yet might understanding, in its original sense, be something quite different? We attempt to compare and match an object outside the brain with representations stored inside it, but ultimately fail to do so. Understanding may instead be a material and bodily experience that arises beyond such computational matching.

At this point, existing computational models, including logic and language, no longer work. We encounter the limit at which matching becomes impossible and undergo an experience akin to being torn apart at the level of the body and matter. This is the raw state of “not understanding” in its true sense. If, however, we expand this impossibility of matching - this “not understanding” - onto a meta-level, internally formalize it once again, and recuperate it as “understanding not understanding,” we ultimately remain within a mode of understanding confined to computational matching between what is understood and what is not.

In other words, the discourse of “until we understand what we do not understand” recuperates the crisis of the “impossibility of matching,” or “not understanding,” into a safe meta-level inside the brain. Its structure is as follows: one observes “oneself in a state of not understanding” from a still higher, meta-level perspective and internally formalizes, or codes, this state as “having understood it in the form of not understanding.” As a result, everything is ultimately contained within the brain’s framework of “computational matching,” or the equivalent exchange of symbols, while the original material and bodily crisis is transformed into nothing more than a pose or sign.

Consequently, those who perform this metacognitive operation merely end up implicitly displaying their own ethical and intellectual superiority: “We are sincerely confronting the impossibility of ‘not understanding’ because we are capable of recognizing it metacognitively.” At the naive stage are those who fluctuate between satisfaction and disappointment within a first-order, one-dimensional process of computational matching: “I understand” or “I do not understand.” At the meta-stage are “we,” who supposedly occupy a higher position because we include within ourselves even the impossibility of “not understanding” and continue to think about it.

Thus, while implicitly looking down on, and criticizing, others who remain at the first-order level, those occupying the meta-discursive position do not move a single step away from its safety. Instead, they stage, or market, their own intellectual integrity. This structure is calculated and performative in precisely the sense conveyed by the Japanese term azatoi. Such a social condition will accelerate the process through which human beings become increasingly AI-like. This is because a computational process that internally formalizes metacognitive operations is precisely the process of intelligence realized by AI.

Is it possible, then, to turn toward understanding while remaining at the bodily and material level of “not understanding,” without recuperating the meta-level into an internal form? Here, we propose one possible approach. A clue can be found in motion sickness.

The brain is commonly thought to avoid motion sickness by matching vestibular sensation with visual information. Yet such matching is impossible in principle. The gap is merely treated as though it did not exist while the gap itself remains concealed and intact. What does this mean? For the gap to be treated as nonexistent while remaining structurally preserved means that consciously intended computation ceases and unconscious, material, and bodily computation begins to operate.

The alleviation of motion sickness, therefore, does not mean that the gap has been reduced or eliminated. The gap is simply treated as nonexistent. This process is ordinarily called “habituation.” But might habituation actually consist in abandoning the computable effort to reduce the discrepancy between vestibular and visual sensation, thereby allowing unconscious computation to begin? In other words, the body spontaneously and involuntarily moves, independently of consciously directed calculation, and the problem is resolved through those movements.

This, we suggest, constitutes a material and bodily turn from “not understanding” toward understanding. Here, we seek to generalize and theorize this process.

From this perspective, understanding is not achieved when an internal representation successfully corresponds to an external object. It emerges through structural coupling: a recurrent interaction in which the organism and its environment perturb and transform one another. Neither side contains a complete representation of the other, and no external object is simply copied into the brain. What is produced instead is a temporarily viable coordination among perception, bodily movement, and environmental change. The original gap is neither closed nor correctly represented. It remains, but ceases to function as an obstacle because the coupled system reorganizes itself around it.

Habituation to motion sickness can be interpreted in this way. The body does not necessarily acquire a correct correspondence between visual and vestibular signals. Rather, recurrent exposure may reorganize posture, muscle tension, eye movement, autonomic activity, and involuntary anticipatory movement. These adjustments alter the conditions under which the discrepancy is experienced. What has changed is not the accuracy of an internal representation but the relation between body and environment. Understanding, in this sense, is not a state stored in the brain; it is an event occurring within a structurally coupled system.

Bayesian and inverse Bayesian inference, or BIB, provides a formal model for this transition. Ordinary Bayesian inference presupposes a relatively fixed set of hypotheses and revises their probabilities in response to incoming data. The model is applied to the world, while learning and application remain conceptually distinct. Such inference therefore retains the structure of computational matching: data are evaluated according to already available possibilities, and the best-fitting hypothesis is selected.

Inverse Bayesian inference intervenes at a different level. When existing hypotheses fail to accommodate experience, it does not merely assign them lower probabilities. It changes the relation between hypotheses and data itself. In a minimal BIB implementation, a hypothesis that has ceased to be useful can be reconstructed on the basis of recent experience. The system therefore applies its current model while simultaneously altering the conditions under which future application will occur. Learning and the use of what has been learned are no longer sequential processes; they become inseparable.

BIB should not be regarded simply as another meta-level that represents and manages failure from a safe distance. Its significance lies in modeling how failure can modify the internal distinctions through which the system encounters its environment. “Not understanding” is not encoded as an object called “not understanding.” It remains an unresolved perturbation that changes the system’s repertoire of hypotheses, actions, and sensitivities. The system does not discover a previously prepared answer; it creates a new way of responding.

Understanding can therefore be defined as a creative experience: the emergence of a relation that did not exist in advance on either side of the organism-environment coupling. What is created is neither a representation of the object nor a metacognitive explanation of one’s ignorance, but a new mode of coordination through which action becomes possible. Its truth is not guaranteed by symbolic equivalence but tested through the continuing viability of the coupling. From this viewpoint, understanding is not the elimination of “not understanding.” It is the bodily and material transformation of an impossibility into a new possibility of living and acting.