The Illusion of Understanding

Drawing on her reading of Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day — where she 'read beyond the lines' to sense the emotions Stevens leaves unsaid — neuroscience PhD and technology executive Stephanie Shen argues that real understanding goes far beyond the literal meaning of words and requires emotions, memory, and imagination. Using Wittgenstein and modern neuroscience, she explores why language is not the same as thought in either humans or AI, and why large language models can manipulate text fluently while producing only the illusion of understanding.