Maybe the concepts of “cognition, reasoning, modelling, creation of counterfactuals” etc. were not well-formed to begin with. Maybe intelligence, like gravity,

Maybe the concepts of “cognition, reasoning, modelling, creation of counterfactuals” etc. were not well-formed to begin with. Maybe intelligence, like gravity, is nothing like what we came up with using intuition. The fact is that black-box function approximators regularly beat systems designed around intuitive notions of cognition on observable metrics. Yes, the function approximators are bad. But the fact that they do better than more intuitively-satisfying symbolic systems suggests that our intuitive ideas about intelligence are even worse.