In What Is Thought? Eric Baum proposes a computational explanation of                  thought. Just as Erwin Schrodinger in his classic 1944 work What Is Life? argued ten                  years before the discovery of DNA that life must be explainable at a fundamental                  level by physics and chemistry, Baum contends that the present-day inability of                  computer science to explain thought and meaning is no reason to doubt there can be                  such an explanation. Baum argues that the complexity of mind is the outcome of                  evolution, which has built thought processes that act unlike the standard algorithms                  of computer science and that to understand the mind we need to understand these                  thought processes and the evolutionary process that produced them in computational                  terms.Baum proposes that underlying mind is a complex but compact program that                  corresponds to the underlying structure of the world. He argues further that the                  mind is essentially programmed by DNA. We learn more rapidly than computer                  scientists have so far been able to explain because the DNA code has programmed the                  mind to deal only with meaningful possibilities. Thus the mind understands by                  exploiting semantics, or meaning, for the purposes of computation; constraints are                  built in so that although there are myriad possibilities, only a few make sense.                  Evolution discovered corresponding subroutines or shortcuts to speed up its                  processes and to construct creatures whose survival depends on making the right                  choice quickly. Baum argues that the structure and nature of thought, meaning,                  sensation, and consciousness therefore arise naturally from the evolution of                  programs that exploit the compact structure of the world.

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