Could meditation on thought processes lead to breakthroughs in machine learning?

I came across this in Godel Escher Bach:

“Look at your conversations,” he says. “You’ll see over and over again, to your surprise, that this is the process of analogy-making.” Someone says something, which reminds you of something else; you say something, which reminds the other person of something else—that’s a conversation. It couldn’t be more straightforward. But at each step, Hofstadter argues, there’s an analogy, a mental leap so stunningly complex that it’s a computational miracle: somehow your brain is able to strip any remark of the irrelevant surface details and extract its gist, its “skeletal essence,” and retrieve, from your own repertoire of ideas and experiences, the story or remark that best relates.

“Beware,” he writes, “of innocent phrases like ‘Oh, yeah, that’s exactly what happened to me!’ … behind whose nonchalance is hidden the entire mystery of the human mind.”

After reading, I decided I wanted to get a better look at this phenomenon, so I mentally leapt through a sequence of 'random' thoughts/images as quickly as I could, while taking note of the inherent connection they held in tandem with each other. As I watched this process, I noticed that as a thought arose, many little categorical markers would accompany it, the pool of which grew as certain patterns in the thought were noted. Once this pool grew great enough to distract from the initial thought, it would 'spill over' into a thought that shared a large subset of markers. It should be added that emotions guide the subset selection process greatly as well. The ratio of emotion to size in regards to the selection outcome would be difficult to observe as concentration meditation tends to quell emotions.

Now, I've heard of people who come to realize through meditation, on one experiential level, that 'everything' is cause and effect. Daniel Ingram writes about this realization:

...if one is using a mantra, one may notice that at some point one shifts to being able to stay with mantra clearly and perceive it as an object, ... Once the mantra is clear, one may notice all sorts of things about the process of mentally creating the mantra, such as the stream of intentions being followed shortly behind by the string of the mantra itself follow slightly behind by the mental echo of the perception of the mantra, making what appear to be three separate streams of the mantra. This is direct insight into Cause and Effect

Essentially, my mantra is that phenomenon. If I could observe a mantra closely enough to believe it's just cause and effect, then could I observe cause and effect the same way through this phenomenon? If a scientist could see clearly enough into the workings of the mind that they become convinced that 'everything' is cause and effect, would the mind then be known sufficiently enough for them to make great contributions in the field of machine learning? Has anyone out there already proved this true?