I recently flipped through the "Cartoon Guide to Physics", expecting an easy-to-understand rehash of ideas I was long familiar with; and that's what I got - right up to the last few pages, where I was presented with a fairly fundamental concept that's been absent from the popular science media I've enjoyed over the years. (Specifically, that the uncertainty principle, when expressed as linking energy and time, explains what electromagnetic fields actually /are/, as the propensity for virtual photons of various strengths to happen.) I find myself happy to try to integrate this new understanding - and at least mildly disturbed that I'd been missing it for so long, and with an increased curiosity about how I might find any other such gaps in my understanding of how the universe works.
So: what's the biggest, or most surprising, or most interesting concept /you/ have learned of, after you'd already gotten a handle on the basics?
I don't quite understand what you mean by that, can you elaborate?
Some AI have a limited understanding of their own bodies; they can learn kinematic models of the actuators in the robots they control or form "affordances", ideas about what kind of interactions with their environments they can effect. But very few (apparently no?) cognitive architectures or AI designs model thier minds as being algorithms executing on their computing hardware, so whatever metacognitive representation and processing they have, it's "disembodied", like old ideas of the mind being made of spooky stuff. The combination of physical bodies and spooky minds is called Cartesian Dualism after philospher René Descartes.