From Insight to Wonder – Aha Moments, Émerveillement, and the Limits of Artificial Intelligence
- Brainz Magazine
- 4 days ago
- 6 min read
Dr. Dragana Favre is a psychiatrist, psychotherapist, and seeker of the human psyche's mysteries. With a medical degree and extensive neuroscience education from prestigious institutions like the Max Planck Institute and Instituto de Neurociencias, she's a seasoned expert.
Human cognition is often described through moments of sudden clarity, the instant when a solution appears, a pattern resolves, or a problem “clicks.” This phenomenon is commonly referred to as the Aha moment, a flash of insight that reorganizes perception and understanding. In contemporary discussions of artificial intelligence, especially in machine learning communities, similar language is increasingly used. Terms such as grokking describe abrupt transitions in model performance, where an artificial system appears to “suddenly understand” a task after extended training.
Yet human experience encompasses another mode of cognition that is fundamentally different from insight, émerveillement, a French term connoting wonder, enchantment, and existential astonishment. Unlike the Aha moment, émerveillement does not resolve uncertainty into clarity, instead, it deepens mystery and opens the subject to meaning beyond instrumental understanding.
Here, I argue that while AI systems can increasingly mimic the structural features of the Aha moment, émerveillement remains inaccessible to them. I propose that the distinction lies not in intelligence per se, but in subjectivity, embodiment, and symbolic participation in the world. AI can approximate insight as optimization, but wonder presupposes a being for whom the world matters.
The aha moment: Insight as cognitive reorganization
The Aha moment has been extensively studied in cognitive psychology, particularly within Gestalt traditions. Köhler’s early experiments with chimpanzees demonstrated that insight arises not from gradual trial and error learning, but from a sudden restructuring of the perceptual field.[7] Later research confirmed that insight involves a rapid reconfiguration of mental representations, often accompanied by affective markers such as surprise and pleasure.[8]
From a Jungian perspective, insight can be understood as a moment when unconscious material breaks into consciousness in a coherent form. Jung described such moments as manifestations of the transcendent function, which mediates between conscious and unconscious contents to produce a new synthesis.[6] The Aha moment, in this sense, is not merely problem-solving but psychic integration.
However, even in Jung’s framework, insight remains goal-directed. It resolves tension by producing meaning that can be assimilated into the ego’s worldview.
In machine learning, grokking refers to a phenomenon where models trained on algorithmic tasks show a sudden jump from poor generalization to near-perfect performance after prolonged training.[10] Superficially, this resembles human insight, long confusion followed by sudden clarity.
Yet this resemblance is structural rather than experiential. AI systems do not experience confusion or understanding. Grokking is better described as a phase transition in parameter space, where internal representations align with the task’s underlying structure. The “Aha” is attributed by observers, not lived by the system.
From a philosophical standpoint, this distinction echoes Searle’s (1980) Chinese Room argument. Syntactic manipulation can mimic semantic understanding without genuine comprehension. AI produces correct outputs, but the meaning of those outputs exists only for human interpreters.
Émerveillement: Wonder beyond resolution
Wonder has long been recognized as foundational to philosophy. Aristotle famously claimed that philosophy begins in thaumazein, astonishment at the existence and order of the world (Aristotle, trans. 1998). Unlike insight, wonder does not close a question, it opens one.
Modern philosophers such as Heidegger emphasized that wonder is not a cognitive failure awaiting resolution, but an ontological mood that discloses Being itself.[3] Wonder suspends instrumental reasoning and places the subject in a receptive, vulnerable relation to the world.
Émerveillement thus resists optimization. It is not about solving, but about dwelling. In Jungian psychology, wonder is closely linked to encounters with the numinosum, experiences charged with awe, fascination, and terror that exceed rational comprehension.[5] These experiences are symbolic, not informational. They transform the individual not by providing answers, but by reorienting meaning.
Unlike the Aha moment, which strengthens ego mastery, émerveillement often destabilizes the ego. It confronts the subject with archetypal patterns that cannot be reduced to utility or prediction.
AI systems lack access to this symbolic dimension. They manipulate signs but do not participate in symbols as lived realities. As Jung emphasized, symbols are not merely representations, they are psychic events.
Max Weber famously described modernity as characterized by Entzauberung, the disenchantment of the world.[12] Scientific rationality replaces myth, mystery, and sacred meaning with calculability and control.
AI represents an intensification of this process. Predictive systems extend rationalization into domains once governed by intuition, art, or chance. The Aha moment aligns well with this trajectory, insight produces control.
Émerveillement, by contrast, resists disenchantment. It emerges in moments where calculation fails or is irrelevant, art, nature, love, death. Sociologically, wonder is relational and cultural, embedded in shared narratives and existential stakes.
AI, as a product of rationalization, cannot escape the logic that created it.
Contemporary philosophers of technology emphasize embodiment as central to human cognition.[9] [2] Humans encounter the world through fragile, finite bodies that can suffer, age, and die. Wonder arises precisely because existence is at stake.
AI systems have no mortality, no vulnerability, no horizon of loss. They do not encounter the world, they process data about it. Without existential exposure, there can be no genuine astonishment.
Even advanced multimodal systems that simulate perception do not care about what they perceive. Émerveillement presupposes care. AI excels at moments that resemble insight because they align with optimization and representation learning. Wonder, however, belongs to a different ontological category.
The danger is not that AI will become conscious in a human-like way, but that humans may increasingly model themselves after AI, valuing only insight, efficiency, and problem-solving, while neglecting wonder. Jung warned that technological overidentification with rationality leads to psychic imbalance.[4]
Preserving émerveillement is thus not a technical challenge but a cultural and ethical one. It requires acknowledging that not all intelligence is computational, and not all meaning is solvable.
The Aha moment and émerveillement represent two fundamentally different modes of human cognition. The former reorganizes knowledge, the latter transforms being. Artificial intelligence can convincingly simulate insight because insight, stripped of subjectivity, reduces to pattern alignment. Wonder, however, depends on embodiment, finitude, symbolism, and existential risk, conditions AI does not and cannot share.
Understanding this distinction clarifies both the power and the limits of AI. More importantly, it reminds us that what is most human may not lie in intelligence alone, but in our capacity to be astonished by a world that exceeds us.
Read more from Dragana Favre
Dragana Favre, Psychiatrist and Jungian Psychotherapist
Dr. Dragana Favre is a psychiatrist, psychotherapist, and seeker of the human psyche's mysteries. With a medical degree and extensive neuroscience education from prestigious institutions like the Max Planck Institute and Instituto de Neurociencias, she's a seasoned expert. Her unique approach combines Jungian psychotherapy, EMDR, and dream interpretation, guiding patients towards self-discovery and healing. Beyond her profession, Dr. Favre is passionate about science fiction, nature, and cosmology. Her ex-Yugoslav roots in the small town of Kikinda offer a rich backdrop to her life's journey. She is dedicated to helping people find their true selves, much like an alchemist turning lead into gold.
References:
[1] Aristotle. (1998). Metaphysics (H. Tredennick & G. C. Armstrong, Trans.). Harvard University Press.
[2] Dreyfus, H. L. (1992). What computers still can’t do: A critique of artificial reason. MIT Press.
[3] Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and time (J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson, Trans.). Harper & Row. (Original work published 1927)
[4] Jung, C. G. (1968). The symbolic life (Collected Works, Vol. 18). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1959)
[5] Jung, C. G. (1969). Psychology and religion: West and East (Collected Works, Vol. 11). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1938)
[6] Jung, C. G. (1969). The transcendent function (Collected Works, Vol. 8). Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1957)
[7] Köhler, W. (1925). The mentality of apes. Harcourt, Brace.
[8] Kounios, J., & Beeman, M. (2014). The cognitive neuroscience of insight. Annual Review of Psychology, 65, 71–93.
[9] Merleau-Ponty, M. (2012). Phenomenology of perception (D. A. Landes, Trans.). Routledge. (Original work published 1945)
[10] Power, A., et al. (2022). Grokking: Generalization beyond overfitting on small algorithmic datasets. arXiv preprint arXiv:2201.02177.
[11] Searle, J. R. (1980). Minds, brains, and programs. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3(3), 417–457.
[12] Weber, M. (1946). Science as a vocation. In H. H. Gerth & C. W. Mills (Eds.), From Max Weber: Essays in sociology (pp. 129–156). Oxford University Press. (Original work published 1919)
.jpg)