It consists, in broad terms, of building up relationships among incoming data without any pre-imposed structure, by trial and error, so to speak. This approach is much closer to a model of human thinking, though it is still actually programmed manipulations of data. All its actions are explainable in terms of its program, although this program may be quite small compared with its accumulated information structures. The AI view of intelligence equates thinking with information processing. But this is another inversion.
Information is a teleological concept.
Apart from an imputed purpose of relating one set of events to another, there is no way to distinguish information from noise. It does not escape association with a purpose, though. Thus, defining thinking in terms of information puts things backwards. Only because there are thinking beings does the concept of information make sense. A machine that processes information is one which deals with data which are meaningful to a thinking being, or conducive to some human purpose.