I believe we do understand, broadly speaking, thinking and consciousness. There remains a lot more to learn, as in anything in science...
IMO the main difficulty is that humans have terrible self-awareness or self-insight. We want to believe we're special, we want to believe we're intelligent, we want to believe we're different than machines. We're in denial about that.
Our brains aren't any more special than computers, other than that it's really quite formidable that we evolved them by chance in this universe of chemical soup we find ourselves in. At the end of the day, however, a computer is a computer, and "thinking" and "consciousness" simply do emerge from low-level computations given some special structures.
IMO the main difficulty is that humans have terrible self-awareness or self-insight. We want to believe we're special, we want to believe we're intelligent, we want to believe we're different than machines. We're in denial about that.
Our brains aren't any more special than computers, other than that it's really quite formidable that we evolved them by chance in this universe of chemical soup we find ourselves in. At the end of the day, however, a computer is a computer, and "thinking" and "consciousness" simply do emerge from low-level computations given some special structures.