I have always believed that Hofstadter's (or FARG's) models like copycat or metacat go much further in the direction of AI than any neural network. The results

I have always believed that Hofstadter's (or FARG's) models like copycat or metacat go much further in the direction of AI than any neural network. The results and advances of neural networks in the past decade are impressive, but essentially, they are function approximations (or "stochastic parrots" as mentioned in the article). Would anybody know if there were further developments of metacat or similar systems? It even would be interesting to combine blackboard systems with neural networks as knowledge sources.