I am going to start reading Ray Kurzweil’s new book tomorrow. I’m excited about it. I gather that the book present the hypothesis that the structure of our mind is many, many interlinked pattern recognition modules. That reminds me of this image…

Clearly our pattern recognition modules are not perfect. They recognize movement even when there is none. What I think is remarkable is that we share this glitch in our pattern recognition modules with cats, evidently:

So maybe there is some validity. Maybe the complexity of the human mind stems from the simple fact that the human brain just has a lot more modules than a cat brain. That also suggests that, eventually, the internet as a whole will have sufficient computers all acting as (relatively simple) pattern recognizers. Then will the internet become conscious? If so, I hope my computer is devoted to recognizing something cool like Feynman diagrams rather than something stupid like areolae.