From Charles Douglas Wehner:

Re: Google’s kinship with the mind (Dec. 5): The article describes how the “popularity rating” may be used by the mind to catalogue data. This is exactly what I have already discovered when studying the fundaments of data compression.

For life to be possible, animals must be able to recognise their own species. For example, ants must be able to recognise and breed with ants, but have such a tiny brain that the algorithm has to be extremely small and elegant.

What emerges is that the recognition process is due to “data clumping”, and is in the algorithm not in the physical structure of the brain. When data reappears, it clumps better. If it reappears again, the clumping is better still. The most recent “clumps” are at the forefront of consciousness (the top of the memory in a computer algorithm). The older clumps that have not been “refreshed” become more and more buried by the other data.

You can see an absurdly simple program actually identifying the “Chomsky Universal Grammar” here. In this case, it is nouns. For pictures, the algorithm recognises the nouns “row”, for a row of pixels. It also recognises “horse”, and tracks with the horse as it moves across the field of vision. For sound, it recognises the noun “sinusoid”.

The machine is not thinking, and is neither aware nor conscious. It is simply generating a “link” to oft-repeating data. That is the lowest level of awareness that is possible.

It is so fundamental, that I have described the arithmetic-logic as the “(new) Calculus of Sets”, where a clump is a “differal”. Just as differentiation delivers the rate of change of numbers, so “differation” delivers the rate of change of pattern. Patterns that rarely change and keep repeating deliver big clumps with good compression. New data causes a surge of data, exactly like the “theta storm” of a roused mind.