Some thoughts and catching up

I recently thought of something peculiar that I wanted to add to my journal. A computer does the same task over and over again the exact same way, but humans would find doing something the exact same way over and over again harder, just as computers to get variation, we've come up with math and a time in order to create a "random" number and use that, adding additional tasks to get a computer to do something slightly different.

However I have been thinking about this stuff for at least a couple months, and just started a blog yesterday, so I have some catching up to do.

I have thought originally that a computer should have a basic goal to make it feel "happy" in order to get it to do tasks. We humans will look at a tree see it's there and maybe climb it, or cut it down to make shelter, or any array of things we can come up with because it allows us to survive or simply get 'happy'. Computers could understand-- understanding is a bad word, I'll get to that later-- everything about a tree and leave it at that, it's just there, even if it knows how to make all the stuff we do, it's incapable of thought in regards to why it would ever do that or get any sort of meaning.

This brings me to my thought on what understanding is. A computer records information very, very well. It can process things that would take an entire population of people to do, right at your fingertips. However, it can't do what I am doing right now, express something through fluent language. It cannot come up with thoughts outside regurgitated text, we as individuals are infinitely better than that than any piece of technology. To me at this moment, an important question is, "what is meaning?". I know what the word 'cat' means, but not by a simple text definition, and I can infer if somebody means something different than a physical cat by context - rather everybody can - but all a computer sees is C next to an A next to a T, and maybe stored bits of information.

What is meaning?
Is it complex patterns?
Can we as humans come up with this algorithm for meaning?
Do emotions matter when making something that can learn?

I have much more thinking i have done I need to write down -- including a sure way to get there but not necessarily safe, or necessarily efficient, but a simple thought that I promise would work if it were possible to make.