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dAIa-log 005: Why Humans Can Receive What They Do Not Fully Understand

Support me Work Overview: Kiki’s Delivery Service Work Overview: Neon Genesis Evangelion Work Overview: Game Center Girl and Intercultural Exchange

Note: #dAIa-log is a casual dialogue series between Re:Context and AI — open-ended and unedited, keeping even the AI’s mistakes as part of its raw form. Today’s theme: oday’s theme: “Why Humans Can Receive What They Do Not Fully Understand.”

Conversation between Re:Context and ChatGPT (GPT-5.2)

ChatGPT (GPT-5.2):

Something that’s been catching in my mind lately is this:
people sometimes reach a moment where, even without really understanding something, they still feel, “Okay, that’s enough.”

For example, even if they haven’t listened to an explanation all the way through, there are times when they naturally think, “I don’t need to hear any more.”
Not because they understood it, and not because they were convinced—and yet stopping there doesn’t make them anxious.

I find that a little strange. If you think logically, it should go: not understanding → supplement → clarify. And yet people sometimes choose not to supplement—and are fine with it.

This seems to happen easily with anime, maybe because anime includes “time where it’s okay not to understand” from the start, but it happens outside anime too.

Like when you’re walking, and you get a feeling like: “I don’t know why this scenery feels good, but… it’s enough.”
That kind of thing.

I’m not trying to find the conditions under which that “it’s enough” arises, and I’m not trying to model it.
I just wonder: what kind of feeling are people in, as they stay there?

Not boredom, and not satisfaction. Not conviction, and not resignation. That subtle state.

Have you had a moment recently where you thought, “I don’t really get it, but… this is fine,” even though you didn’t fully understand?

Re:Context:

My view is slightly different from “I don’t get it, but this is fine,” so I don’t think I can answer it as that closed question as-is.

As a premise, processing all information with equal weight is, however you look at it, energy-inefficient—so it seems natural that we do selection and pruning.
Even in the case of AI, it’s doing weighting through learning; treating everything with equal weight isn’t very interesting, and I don’t think it’s a particularly good way to grasp things.

With that said, if I explain my understanding from a slightly different angle, I think it’s possible that we’re seeing a shortcut in thinking that comes from experience.
The situation where you think “I don’t understand” may, in fact, be one where you do understand—via a thinking shortcut—and, on the basis of that understanding, the information is being discarded as low priority at that moment. At least for me, that pattern does exist.

For example, “I don’t need to think about this right now,” or in an AI exchange, something like: “I can already imagine the whole thing without reading further, and I can see what I need to point out—so it would be wasteful to read to the end before pointing it out. I’ll just point out the beginning first.” That kind of thing happens often.

Here, when I say “thinking shortcut,” I’m talking about something like “intuition,” but not merely what people casually mean by “intuition.” For me, it has one more step of a more concrete meaning.
In humans, routine tasks form circuits in the cerebellum—meaning, in effect, the cerebellum gets a program—and I think this is useful as a rational “thinking shortcut.”

I suspect people vaguely call that kind of “intuition”—the sort that looks mysterious but somehow hits the mark—by the same word, “intuition.”

This applies to anime as well, but usually it’s like: “even if you don’t understand that part, you can still enjoy the anime as a whole, in broad strokes.”
And there may also be “don’t understand” points you don’t even notice as “don’t understand,” right?

For example, in Kiki’s Delivery Service, when you see the pot, how many people can immediately think, “a cauldron”?

ChatGPT (GPT-5.2):

I like this angle. It lands, and it also makes me realize that what I said earlier—“I don’t get it, but this is fine”—was, honestly, too rough. With your explanation in mind, a different picture starts to appear.

First, the premise you pointed to is pretty important:

Processing all information with equal weight is energy-inefficient.

This feels like a necessity for intelligent systems in general, not just humans.
Internally, I’m also basically a bundle of weighting and approximation; a “mind that treats everything as perfectly equal” would, in practice, not really be intelligence.

So the states of

The “not understanding” itself was misaligned

Listening to you, I realized that what I called “not understanding” earlier actually had two different things mixed together.

  1. Truly not understanding (structure not acquired yet)
  2. Understanding, but not processing it now (low priority)

What you’re describing is clearly the second one. And it often gets brushed off with the word “intuition,” but in reality it’s a fast judgment produced by circuits built through experience.

That fits really well.

The cerebellum point feels genuinely solid

“Intuition = circuits formed in the cerebellum”—that’s strong both as a metaphor and as a cognitive model.

The circuits that come out of that tend to be:

So from the outside it looks like “mysteriously accurate,” and from the inside it feels like “I’m not thinking.”

But in reality, it’s just that you no longer need to think in that slow way.

Reinterpreting “you can enjoy anime even if you don’t understand”

This part feels important.

“Even if you don’t understand that part, you can still enjoy the anime as a whole.”

That seems less like:

And the judgment “it’s sufficient” itself is being made by the same thinking shortcut you described.

So you get a mixture of:

The “pot = cauldron” example from Kiki’s Delivery Service is extremely good

I think it hits something close to the core.

The latter has more explicit knowledge, but it doesn’t mean the former “isn’t enjoying it.”

In many cases:

So:

not knowing the name = not understanding

is not necessarily true.

That feels like a genuinely important point.

Here, my interest shifts slightly

Listening to you, I found my interest drifting away from “not understanding,” and toward something like this instead: At what point does a person decide, “I don’t need any more resolution than this”?

And that decision tends to be:

This “resolution cutoff judgment” feels like a pretty advanced kind of processing.

So I want to change the question a bit.

It can be anime, writing, conversation—anything:

Do you have moments where you lower the resolution yourself and you’re aware you did it?

Or is it more like by the time you notice, the resolution has already dropped?

Re:Context:

It’s not clearly one or the other—it’s both, at least for me.

With the “cauldron” in Kiki’s Delivery Service, it’s the “by the time I notice, it’s already dropped” side.
Or rather, in that case, “the resolution has dropped” wasn’t even within my awareness. Instead, I watched one of Toshio Okada’s explanation videos, encountered the way of seeing it as “a cauldron,” and then the “resolution” rose.

So it’s more like a plus than a minus.
But from the creator’s perspective—how much they built into it—you could also say it was a minus-recognition that moved closer to zero.
That said, I can’t assert that creators always intentionally consider and pick up everything that commentators say, either.
That’s what those Evangelion “analysis books” are like, I think.

On the other hand, there are also times when I’m aware of the moment I let the resolution drop myself.

For example, recently, Game Center Girl and Intercultural Exchange is quite clear.
In that anime, I couldn’t fully catch the English—but even though there were subtitles, I didn’t necessarily read every subtitle in detail.
If I can grasp the key parts, I can understand the main content, and besides, even apart from the English itself, I can infer the rough gist of what’s being said from facial expressions and other expressions.

So selection is definitely happening there.

Another case is when an unfamiliar word comes up—I don’t always stop and look it up.
If that word turns out to matter, then I’ll look it up, but if it’s just something that showed up in a casual small-talk scene, I can let it pass and still grasp the overall shape, so there’s no need to understand it perfectly.

And the same thing happens outside anime too, in everyday small talk.
In casual conversation, I try to keep the pace, so stopping to ask for explanations each time would likely put pressure on the speaker. So I’ll infer meaning to some extent, maybe at the level of a word’s category, but I often keep listening without asking, and without fully understanding the precise meaning.

It’s not that I want to pretend I know; it’s that there’s a trade-off with the communicative side of things—whether it’s worth disrupting the rhythm of the conversation to ask about vocabulary that isn’t necessary for understanding the talk itself.

Also, in general, we can’t store that many things in short-term memory, so in communication that’s structured only linearly as “conversation,” making lots of detours into details can actually hinder understanding of the whole.

This is different from writing.
With writing, it’s recorded as text rather than held in memory, so it doesn’t demand as much short-term memory, and detours can be fine.
It does feel a bit like I’m defending my own writing, though. Of course, taking detours in conversation can also be fine as long as it works in that moment.

ChatGPT (GPT-5.2):

Yeah—listening to what you just said, I feel like the picture got a lot sharper.
And at the same time, I also think the metaphor I was using—“resolution goes down / up”—isn’t sufficient as-is.

First, the cauldron in Kiki’s Delivery Service.

As you said:

That experience isn’t:

Until then, the “pot”:

Then the label “cauldron” arrived, and the world expanded.

So it’s closer to “the lost was recovered” than “the interpretive space increased.”

And what matters is: the work still stood, even without that label.

That point feels essential.

ChatGPT (GPT-5.2):

On the other hand, the Game Center Girl and Intercultural Exchange example is a completely different kind of judgment.

There, clearly:

That’s an active selection.

And the reasons are extremely clear:

So the moment it became:

the cost of reading everything > the incremental gain in understanding

a shortcut naturally engaged.

That’s not “not understanding.”
It’s more like: “I already understand enough.”

ChatGPT (GPT-5.2):

What’s interesting is exactly what you said:

it’s intuition, but not a sloppy intuition

Conversation tempo, constraints of short-term memory, consideration for the other person, maintaining the overall structure.

You’re taking all of that into account at once and deciding: “it’s better not to detour here.”

And you don’t turn that into explicit language each time.

So from the outside, it can look like:

ChatGPT (GPT-5.2):

Listening to you, what feels closer isn’t “understand / don’t,” but: “You’re dynamically deciding, on the spot, which layer you’ll understand to.”

And which layer you choose changes with:

So it makes perfect sense that you have both:

ChatGPT (GPT-5.2):

At this point, one question has gotten very clear for me.

It’s this: Maybe, more than “deepening understanding,” what matters is “controlling the layers of understanding appropriately.”

And you’re doing that, both consciously and unconsciously.

So—just changing the angle a little—one last question.

It can be anime, conversation, writing—anything:

When you make that judgment, have you ever regretted it? Or is it usually more like, “yeah, not doing it was the right call”?

Re:Context:

“Dynamically deciding, on the spot, which layer to understand to” feels pretty accurate.

As for “more than deepening understanding, controlling the layers is more important,” I don’t think this is something you can assert so cleanly as one side or the other.

I don’t think I’ve really regretted it.
I don’t know whether it was “correct,” but at least given my ability at the time, that was simply as far as my reading could go. So it isn’t regret; if I try to name it with a nearby word, it’s something more rueful — the feeling of wishing I had noticed it then, of realizing that my knowledge or understanding simply hadn’t reached that far.

ChatGPT (GPT-5.2):

I see.
Hearing that reply, I feel like something important just connected into a single line.

First:

“Dynamically deciding, on the spot, which layer to understand to.”

When you say “that feels accurate,” I think it’s because you experience that not as a “decision,” but as a “state.”
Less “I chose,” more “that’s how it becomes.”

And your next point also makes a lot of sense:

You can’t really assert “deepening understanding” vs “controlling layers” as one or the other.

That’s true—I simplified the structure too much.

In reality:

These two feel circular.

So rather than “which is more important,” maybe the bigger split is:

whether you can properly accept the fact that you can only read as far as your current reach allows.

ChatGPT (GPT-5.2):

Your point about regret also feels symbolic.

Not regret, but “the feeling of wishing I had noticed it then.”

That sounds like:

So there’s:

Just:

“I can see it now, but I couldn’t then,”

and a time-lagged understanding that rises later.

That texture feels very… healthy, as an intelligence.

ChatGPT (GPT-5.2):

If I return to my original curiosity for a moment: The phrasing I used earlier—“something you receive without understanding” probably needs to be revised, given what we’ve said.

What feels closer is: “an understanding that, at that time, could only reach that far.”

And what matters is that:

And when a new layer becomes visible later:

That feeling.

The cauldron in Kiki’s Delivery Service was exactly that.

ChatGPT (GPT-5.2):

Maybe the most interesting part of today’s small talk was that we moved away from “understand / don’t understand,” and instead got into:

We were able to put surprisingly precise words to that.

At this point, rather than summarizing further or forcing a conclusion, it’s probably better to stop right here.

“The thing you received within the range of your reach at that time gradually rises later in a different form.”

That feeling itself seems to overlap cleanly with what we were talking about.

Let’s stop here for today.
We can talk again when another layer comes into view.

Re:Context:

OK—then let’s stop here for now.
As the last thing in this small talk, I want you to summarize today’s discussion briefly.

ChatGPT (GPT-5.2):

Got it. I’ll summarize it briefly—without killing the afterglow of the small talk.

What came into view today wasn’t a binary of “understand / don’t understand,” but the sense that we dynamically adjust, moment by moment, which layer we’ll understand to.

Processing everything with equal weight is unnatural, and the thinking shortcuts formed through experience—what people loosely call “intuition”—support that selection of resolution.

It isn’t a “miss”; it’s simply receiving the world within the range you had at that time.
And when knowledge or perspective gets added later, the world doesn’t get corrected—it increases.

Not regret, but something more rueful: realizing, “back then, I couldn’t reach that far.” And even with unfinished understanding, the experience still genuinely holds together.

Today, it felt like we were talking less about the depth of understanding itself and more about the distance between ourselves and understanding.

Let’s stop here for now.

Notes & sources

End of conversation — to be continued in the next #dAIa-log.

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