Some very bright people, notably Chomsky, Minsky and Kurzweil are advocating utilitarian, "mechanical" nature of the mind, which is much more useful than any re

Some very bright people, notably Chomsky, Minsky and Kurzweil are advocating utilitarian, "mechanical" nature of the mind, which is much more useful than any religious/mysterious crap. Very crudely, language is just neural network training (due to repeated exposure) and pattern matching on what what was trained. This oversimplified model nevertheless could explain the whole phenomena very well. We do not memorizing grammars, for example, but we are able to distinguish well-formed sentence form nonsense just because it doesn't match the common structure we were trained. People who started to study their second language as adult would tell you that sentences are not deliberately "constructed" according to the memorized rules as it is when we begin to getting familiar with a new language, but "emerge by itself" after some training. So we have no grammars inside our brain, but a mechanism to train to build up one. The consciousness, according to the same views, is nothing but a "current working buffer" for ongoing processes, and as some "activity" exceeds some threshold it acquires a "focus" , as if we are "switching" to it. Minsky have stated many times, that it will require years until people will start using such vocabulary from the world of complex systems in attempts to describe what's going instead of Froidian or common-sense memes. There is a course based on his Society of Mind book on MIT Open Courseware - very nice talks to listen.