This is a sound argument, but I think it's operating a level abstract enough to gloss over some of the niggling details that might make the parent's argument va

This is a sound argument, but I think it's operating a level abstract enough to gloss over some of the niggling details that might make the parent's argument valid. - We don't know that our brains are heavily based on networks of simple pattern recognition neurons. Some parts of them certainly seem to be; especially those parts that seem to correlate to certain tasks that our current ANNs are really good at solving (i.e., basic-to-intermediate image processing). The fundamental mechanism of the brain, if there is one, seems to involve neurons pretty significantly, but we're still not entirely sure what the whole picture is. - The evolutionary argument is interesting and two-sided; yes it implies that any progress can be 'part of the evolutionary process', so to speak, but it doesn't guarantee that the particular route of the tree being discussed terminates in the desired outcome. It doesn't even guarantee it's on the same tree. It may be the case that image recognition as a task was fundamental to the evolution of high-level human behaviors. It may be the case that it works as a transitionary state, assuming other sets of solved problems unified under the same model, but when treated as foundational, it leads to an evolutionary dead end. - Following on the 'humans didn't emerge out of the aether' argument from another angle, there's another important consideration to be made. State-of-the-art research is often starting with 'randomly'-wired nets, maybe some lightly-informed initial weights from previous models. It's a kind of tabula rasa, "if you wish to make an apple pie from scratch" picture. The human brain, however, seems to acquire a very specific structure (down to a pretty low level), that is pretty universal amongst, well, humans. So it's not entirely out of the question that some of the things we do aren't strictly learnable from a base, blank initial state; the evolutionary process may well have hardcoded structures pre-wired to know or learn these things. This, of course, is the fundamental principle behind Chomskyian universal grammars. - I take issue with saying that we are starting to get NNs capable of complex natural language understanding tasks. We really aren't; they are basic-to-intermediate at best, with no real evidence to suggest that they are (A) doing anything interesting with respect to semantics beyond the already well-established distributional semantics strategies, and (B) are not going to dead-end in the near future, like the GOFAI techniques their advocates never tire of feeling superior to.