I am not interested so much in behaviour from which you infer consciousness because that is a mug's game. I don't know whether you're conscious. I ta… - Igor Aleksander

A neural network is a massively parallel distributed processor that has a natural propensity for storing experiential knowledge and making it available for use. It resembles the brain in two respects: 1. Knowledge is acquired by the network through a learning process. 2. Interneuron connection strengths known as synaptic weights are used to store the knowledge.

Trying to understand the brain's abilities leads to philosophical difliculties. Penrose (1994) argues that the task is sterile and that science, including neural networks, has not yet advanced to the stage where it can explain conscious thought. At the other extreme there are philosophers such as Fodor (1975) who believed that thought has language-like properties and can be analysed in the same logical way as one can anlayse the structure of language.

Consciousness is an incredibly delicate subject because it offend. It's a subject that scientific groups kept away from. They said it was a philosophical concept.