I was playing with my 5 month old in her walker. I put her doll on one side until she spotted it. Then I slowly pulled it down below her vision and popped it back up on the other side. Sooner or later, she'd look over and there it was! This process repeated a few times and pretty soon she started looking to the other side as soon as the doll started to descend. She recognized the pattern.
When I was a teenager, I was fascinated with artificial intelligence. I wrote a program that would accept facts in the form of thing = thing (like "Doll = Toy") then compare the new fact against everything else it knew. I told it Doll=Toy and Barbie=Toy at which it prompted me, "Is Barbie a Doll?" It recognized the pattern. (No, it didn't know what any of those words meant and it was by no means 'intelligent'. Any programmer on this board could write a similar program in an hour or less.)
It dawned on me that we are all just very good pattern matchers. That could very easily be "it". Everything else we experience is just the emergence of the recognition of all of these patterns. As a baby, you notice that when you cry, they feed you. But when you cry all the time, they get frustrated. So you cry until you recognize the pattern of "they are preparing to feed me", and you stop crying. You're getting fed! You know this pattern!
Maybe I'm oversimplifying things, but I think not. The whole basis for thought and everything must be something simple that a series of connected neurons could pull off. Crack open a computer and you've got specialized doo-dads all over the thing. Crack open a brain and you just get grey goo. There's gotta be something simple happening there.
Wuddaya think?
Dave of the "admits something simple is happening in his brain" class