Can Humans Truly "Think"?

[Utah]

I am interested in peoples thoughts on this, especially rduke55 as he has expertise in this area. I apologize in advance if this is a bit scattered but I have been up for almost 24 hours thinking about it.

Yesterday, I got into a valuable but heated argument with my head of technical development. I had made some very cool new AI improvements to a neural net based expert system and I was talking a bit of smack to him as we are very competitive. He then floored me with a simple challenge: "Make a neural net learn addition". I said, "piece of cake" and I made a quick net that took about 2 seconds to derive the simple function. But, then I realized that it hadnt learned addition at all and it had no "concept" of addition. Worse, it was assuming it already knew the number system and it was using addition itself to learn addition. I had accomplished nothing.

So, we started digging into it and we realized we couldnt do addition until we first learned to count. But we couldnt learn to count until we learned what an object was. We played with it a bit and came up with the first concept being "greater/less than". We decided to start there and we are going to teach it to first recognize greater/less than using images of irregular dots only. Then, we would teach it to count and then teach it addition using nothing but images with no numbers.

We realized that everything we were talking about is simply classification. That fact is really Neural Net 101 stuff. But I never really thought how far that concept extended. Formulas are merely classification. Numbers are classifications. The problem is that greater/less than is also merely classification. So, it must be possible to reduce the problem further.

After thinking about it almost non-stop, I think the answer is symmetry. We, at birth, are simply given a main imperative to find symmetry as symmetry can define any discrete situation - ie, once you understand it it looks the same from all directions. Basically, this means that once you know the rules of the situation they will always yield the same results. Examples, E=MC^2, solving a puzzle, playing poker, etc.

So, if this is correct, the mind doesnt truly think or create anything. Rather, it simply classifies the environment within which it lives. Thus, while we have more power to classify situations than a computer, we are still just as "dumb" as we are simply operating a BIOS command - classify everything you can.

Where is the flaw if my thinking? If it is flawed, how does a human learn starting from ground zero? How does a baby go from womb to counting to 10?

Is there anything worth reading on this as this may have all been thought through before?