"Does this mean that minds don't ever naturally build symbolic models of the world" I think you need to pin down what you mean by "mind" there. The raw neurons

"Does this mean that minds don't ever naturally build symbolic models of the world" I think you need to pin down what you mean by "mind" there. The raw neurons of (say) the human vision system seem to work by learning useful features, combining them in later layers etc. - analogous to how an ANN might be trained. i.e. it's not symbolic at its core. In contrast, the creation of a new scientific insight (e.g. Newton's law of gravity), seems to use a more symbolic search method, which is thought to be built on top of the raw neural processes. An analogy might be the use of GPT-3 to "solve" various language problems. Of course, these are just guesses based on our current research - no-one really has any idea exactly how the brain works.