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Humans also have skills they cannot fully describe as rules.
For example, you may recognize a friend's face in a crowd without being able to list the visual rules you used. This illustrates the idea. It does not show that every human skill works in the same way.
Being unable to describe a mental process is not the same as lacking understanding. It means that explanation cannot be our only test.
This does not show that humans and machines understand in the same way. It shows why the comparison is difficult: we judge other minds through behavior while much of the process remains hidden.
# did you know?
In 1966, scientist and philosopher Michael Polanyi opened The Tacit Dimension with a simple claim: "We can know more than we can tell."
He called this tacit knowledge: knowledge shown in what a person can do, even when they cannot fully describe how they do it.