Then sitting in Miami and thinking of cheese, or the number 7. Makes no difference, you can obviously have thoughts which are not based on stimulus (e.g. my brain, when wanting "something random" picked cheese and 7.)

There are any number of stimuli that could trigger thoughts about cheese. The smell of food, being hungry, a colour, another thought about a time in which you were hungry, something round, something wedge shaped....

The fact that humans are so bad at picking random numbers and so often pick 7 does not seem so unusual if we are based on patterns. Actually, that is the sort of emergent phenomenon that seems rather obvious to me.

Humans are good at finding (or projecting) patterns, but there's more to a human brain than that. Memory is one of those things which is not just pattern-recognition.

I suppose I don't see a distinction between memory and pattern recognition. To me, memory is implied in the definition of pattern recognition. The definition of recognition is "the identification of something as having been previously seen, heard, known, etc." i.e. memory

Not necessarily. If you have some stymulus like

> rrrrrrrtrrrrrryrrrrrurrrrirrrorrpr

you can recognize patterns in it even if you have never seen, heard, or known them before.

EDIT: of course this example is maybe too simple.

i completely agree with that. that is what i am intending to convey.

the point of others and the author is that pattern recognition doesn't explain the mind because it doesn't account for memory. my point is that the term recognition obviously implies a mechanism for memory.

when i first read that, i thought it said mirror at the end.