The topic sentence was the mantra of nearly all AI research back in the days of good-old-fashioned-AI, AKA symbolic AI. Understanding how reasoning is implemen

The topic sentence was the mantra of nearly all AI research back in the days of good-old-fashioned-AI, AKA symbolic AI. Understanding how reasoning is implemented by our brains was a much more compelling prospect than being able to implement 'intelligence' compositionally but without understanding how software achieved it -- which is largely where we find ourselves now. Today's AI is theory-free leaving us unenlightened about the continuum of intelligence -- across species, or within a human as our brain matures or goes pathological. Many scientists outside the AI field have long shared an interest in the objective of how to "think like people" using software. Far fewer care if the AI is inexplicable (or if it can't be dissected into constituent components, thereby enabling us to explore the mind's constraints and dependencies among its cognitive processes).