a) thought is a type of patterned neural activity
(but wouldnt thought be the result of a type of patterned neural activity?)

b) thought in essence is the evolutionary response to what is known as consciousness, in a sense, to be conscious one must have thought. Thought is really the mind taking in various stimuli from the 5 senses and interpreting those stimulai into thoughts. What we are really looking at here is the result of the learning mechanism, taking stimuli, putting it through a neural network and the output is thought. Since thought/interactivity with/about reality is the primary requisit for consciousness, we can deduce that the origins of consciousness can be found at the end of the neural network

I think its the output of neural activity, if you go over how the learning process works in neural networks. You quickly find that one simply gets the output, feeds it to the network, modifies the error % and continues until the right process is found. In other words, when you are thinking about how to solve a problem, the answer does not always come out of the blue. I see know diffrence between thought process and the learning process. One simply obtains a output (thought) evaluates it to see if it is correct and either continues thinking (more outputs) or uses the current result to solve the problem.

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