[ffwd]

I agree, but I think human knowledge can be represented as either a graph, hierarchy or network of patterns. Like my knowledge of the letter 'A' is a network of connections to patterns 'language', 'english', 'alphabet', whatever else, and if the computer can do the same, it can use that knowledge of that network (as a whole separate entity) to make a decision, so to speak.

Consciousness does come into it since we have a pretty visceral sense of it, and especially when we mentally trawl through our patterns to make some story, but really understanding should just be creating new patterns from existing patterns and the ability to utilize them as distinct entities in some way (rather than being emergent in the system implicitly and only being utilized by accident, say as emergent behavior randomly occurring because of local constraints)