An analogy. That is precisely the point I am making. OP says we are a long way from achieving intelligence because we don't understand many of the components o

An analogy. That is precisely the point I am making. OP says we are a long way from achieving intelligence because we don't understand many of the components of human intelligence. We don't need to believe that artificial intelligence will arise from similar properties as human intelligence. In much the same way aeroplanes don't fly using the same mechanics as reached via evolution. Not sure what you mean when you say a statistical model is not a neural net. If we are talking LLMs, they are neural nets.