The birth of a new question

Continuity note — August 2026: the work historically named “Emergence of understanding” has since been reformulated with finer resolution. The text below is preserved in its original formulation in order to preserve the genealogy of the question.

There are moments when a question does not first appear as a clear idea.

It arrives through recognition.

At that moment, it was not yet a matter of formulating a method. Nor was it a matter of proving anything. The starting point was simpler: while discovering certain functional layers of artificial intelligence architectures, something made one smile.

Not because the technology was suddenly better understood.

But because a familiar way of looking at the world seemed to reappear elsewhere.

It was not only: “this is how an AI works.”

It was rather: “I recognize a form of question I have already carried for a long time.”

And the inner moment looked like this:

But this is exactly what I have been looking for for years.

What appeared then was not a conclusion. It was a shift in perspective.

Instead of directly comparing domains, words, disciplines or theories, another question became more important:

What function does this element fulfill within the whole?

This question changed the terrain.

It did not ask: “is this the same thing?”
It did not ask: “who confirms whom?”
It asked: “what does this element do here?”
What place does it occupy? What function does it make possible? What does it allow us to observe?

At that moment, a formulation imposed itself:

We no longer compare disciplines.
We compare functions.

This sentence remains important today precisely because it tells the story of a birth. It shows the moment when the research stopped looking first for similarities of vocabulary and began looking at roles, gestures, effects and conditions.

But since then, the question has evolved.

What we were formulating intuitively then now requires more distinctions.

Comparing functions does not mean establishing an equivalence. Two elements from different domains may seem to fulfill similar functions without being identical, without validating one another, and without belonging to the same framework of evidence.

Today, the laboratory therefore formulates several guardrails:

A functional resemblance is not an equivalence.
An analogy is not a validation.
A translation is not a fusion.
A hypothesis is not a conclusion.

No common structure between disciplines is presupposed. Functional comparisons remain to be examined, documented and tested.

For this reason, the role of artificial intelligence in this story must also be specified.

Our object of study is not artificial intelligence.

AI participated in the appearance of the question. It served as a field of observation: some of its architectures brought into view, in our work, a way of looking in terms of layers, functions, roles and interactions.

But it is not the general object of the research.

What became important is the question that opened through it.

Today, a provisional formulation accompanies this work:

What are the conditions for the emergence of what we call “understanding”?

This formulation remains open.

The word “understanding” itself is not yet stabilized. Future observations may lead us to distinguish several phenomena currently grouped under this term, or to reformulate the research object differently.

Perhaps we will need to speak of conditions.
Perhaps of transitions.
Perhaps of functions.
Perhaps of articulations.
Perhaps of several distinct phenomena that we still name too quickly with a single word.

We are not deciding that now.

What we can say, more modestly, is that a question was born: how can we examine the conditions, transitions, functions or articulations that might participate in what we still provisionally call “understanding,” without reducing this phenomenon — or these phenomena — too quickly to a model, a discipline, a technology or a single explanation?

Because a new understanding can sometimes emerge when we stop comparing words...

...and begin comparing functions.

That is the question that was born.

And that is why we continue to observe it.

🍅 We note. We observe. We translate.