I just finished reading How To Create A Mind by Ray Kurzweil, a book that claims to reveal the secrets of human thought and I will admit it did make me think a lot about my own thoughts.
First just a tiny bit about the author, Ray Kurzweil is a futurist who has written a number of books related to the future of technology in particular intelligent machines or AI.
In this book, he dived into how neuroscientist and computer scientist are attempting to reverse engineer the brain, in particular, the neocortex in order to build AI programs that use the same sort of systems as the biological brain. I found this to be a really interesting perspective to approach how the brain works, as an engineer breaking the biological system of the brain down into algorithms and systems really helped me better understand the function of the human brain.
The book focuses on modeling the biological neocortex. this is the part of the human brain that is responsible for intelligence and thought to be or source of conscious. Kurzweil theories that the neocortex is made up of a hierarchy of pattern recognizers. These pattern recognizers at the lowest level of the hierarchy receive input from the world around us by use of the senses. They are looking for the pattern that they are responsible for recognizing. When they succeed they fire and the pattern recognizers on the next level of the hierarchy start to put together more complex patterns. Almost all of these pattern hierarchies are learned behavior that develops over time through education and experience.
It is really interesting to think about the fact that all your knowledge is just patterns of information that you have encountered. Kurzweil goes on in great detail about methods of how these pattern recognizers can be modeled in AI and make a case that these machines are not too far into the future.
I love reading work by futurists I have always been excited to hear intelligent people postulate on what the word is going to be like in ten years 20 years maybe even 50 years. The one this that seems clear is that it is going to be radically different than the world that exists today.
Anyways if you are interested in the human brain and the current advancements in AI I recommend you check out How to Create a Mind from your local library definitely worth a read.