Islands

The human mind's ability to problem solve is quite different from a computer programs in the fact that humans have slippery paradigms which may be shifted when examining a problem. This is much harder to do for a computer program, as only the problem presented may tell if it is time to shift the importance of a technique forward or back on the scale. As Hofstadter says, the computer program fails at the figure/ground switch.

His reaction to this rigidness in computer program structure is an attempt to allow fluid templates to alter importance of pattern-finding techniques in Seek-Whence's architecture.

The human mind works all at once, and as needed. There is no single CPU running the tasks of the operating system, there is (to use the computer analogy further) countless processing units taking on very small subtasks and calculations, clustering together to push information to the next set of units, and so on..

By this fact, it is not hard to see that our mind's may make use of both the number-savvy (expert knowledge) and pattern-sensitivity (theory-based knowledge) techniques temporally parallel but intersecting at the right moments. This may create the illusion of a single stream of consciousness which branches along a set of possibilities that all appear to be related to one another, but I don't think this is actually what is going on in the brain.

I think that there are a very large number of solutions which are posed and logically worked out simultaneously, with almost all of them quickly being downvoted in the first few milliseconds of thought. From there, the remaining set of solutions is positioned for scrutiny in the form of truth from knowledge and also for patterns.