Ramblings in pursuit of the truth...

How are we any different than a computer? We have no creation of thought from within the brain. Every thought is the result of a stimulus or is the result of a thought that was the result of a stimulus. All of our neurons are firing all the time at very small levels. Occasionally something happens that cause the level of a group to jump and causes a chain reaction that results in a thought. The thought then causes other thoughts to be created and a chain is followed to some end. The end, usually being that the chain of thought is interupted by another thought.

Example: You are looking at a bird. Photons reflected off the bird strike your retina and cause rods and cones(neurons) to fire. This causes more neurons to fire and the chain reaction works its way back into the occipital lobe where the info is interpreted. Result, you see the bird. Then, you may think about a past experience of seeing a similar bird. However, that thought was not created by you. It did not come about through some mystical conciousness. When the occipital lobe recieved the info from the eyes, it automatically actived the hippocampus to recall past memories related to the image. This happens for many reasons, one being that your primal systems are evaluating the image to determine if the objects in it pose any sort of threat. For instance, if the scene you were looking at was a person with a gun, you memory systems would "remind" you that this is dangerous, and you would leave the area (hopefully with some speed!). But those supposedly random thoughts you had about a day hike in California when you saw the same bird where NOT the result of a soul or mind, or anything metaphysical; they were the result of the hippocampus focusing your attention.

How is that any different than my computer? I put input in, and it responds accordingly. It knows it is turned on (power system monitors), knows when it is getting tired (battery monitor), and could easily be programmed to know it will "die" in the future. Now that is an interesting part though: does a computer "know" it is going to die? If we taught a learning computer (one with a neural network) about death and how all things die (even planets and galaxies), would it ever think about its own death? I suppose we could teach the computer to analyze everything based on itself, and then it would think about its own death. But then if we can teach a computer anything, what makes us any different?