Also a layman, but I think OPs point wasn't that it isn't possible, but that's it's not effective or analogous to how humans or other species learn. For exampl

Also a layman, but I think OPs point wasn't that it isn't possible, but that's it's not effective or analogous to how humans or other species learn. For example, your cat's brain isn't just a randomly initialised neural net. Your cat comes pre-wired in such a way that it understands certain things about its environment and has certain innate biases that allow you to train it to do simple tricks with relative ease through a reward mechanism. A more analogous example would be building a cat-like robot with four legs and a neural processor then switching it on and expecting to be able to train it with treats. Without a useful initial neural state (founded with an understanding of cognitive psychology and neuroscience) it would be almost totally useless.