ABSTRACT
Starting from an experiment by John Searle (the Chinese room), the author shows how artificial intelligence does not involve an understanding process. But what does “understanding” mean? How can one be “intelligent” without understanding? That is where intuition seems to come into play. There are things we understand immediately, without thinking. “Thought”, wrote Henri Poincaré, “is a flash between two long nights”. For the most part, it is a question of establishing connections or correlations between disparate objects, phenomena or elements. Intuition has the same characteristics of emerging phenomena that in some way are products of complex or chaotic systems: “flashes” that we can hardly foresee or control. In science, intuition is the basis of the ability to formulate hypotheses.
