This brings up a question which I have often wondered - whether our consciousness is just a combinatorial explosion of the echoes of the external world - that our abilities and thoughts are predetermined by our environments. If I believed that, then perhaps I could model the human brain and say it was my own. But there is also the way humans choose to chop up the world, where the line is drawn between 'neuron' and 'neuron connection' and 'stimuli'. So, shrug.