Reading Response: How To Create A Mind

I am currently reading How To Create A Mind.  If it sounds like this book was written by a some crazy mad scientist to you, it is probably because it was written by a crazy mad scientist.  The author, Ray Kurzweil, has created some of the most revolutionary technologies of the 21st century such as the first omni-font optical character recognition.  He wrote this book to discuss reverse engineering the mammalian brain to create artificial intelligence.

In this book Kurzweil challenges the reader to recall a walk or, more appropriately for most of us, a drive from their day.  I know that I could hardly remember anything from my morning commute, and you probably don't remember many details either.  With this experiment he brings up a fascinating point:

The primary reason we believe that we are not conscious when under anesthesia is that we don't remember anything from this period.... So with regard to the walk I took this morning, was I not conscious during most of it?

Is this us on our commutes?

This question is slightly terrifying, but it is evokes deep thought.  That would mean millions of people drive many miles to work and school unconscious everyday.  With this question Kurzweil ultimately concludes that we do not store memories as pictures, videos or sound recordings, but rather sequences and patterns.  This serves as the basis for Kurzweil's theories describing how the human brain is actually made up of many pattern recognizers  that are constantly predicting the future.