I agree with your point, but the solution isn't to instead model the underlying biological nuts and bolts (assuming this is what you mean by "underlying behavio

I agree with your point, but the solution isn't to instead model the underlying biological nuts and bolts (assuming this is what you mean by "underlying behavior of human brains"). Even if those approaches approximated human behavior (which they don't), it wouldn't be all that informative. Just as creating "artificial" intelligence by growing a brain in a petri dish wouldn't be informative either. (Well, it wouldn't be informative as to what the brain's job description is, although we could presumably learn plenty from of other things from the exercise). The better solution is to come up with creative experiments (with human experiments) that can arbitrate between competing implementations. With modern technologies like virtual reality, you can create almost any counterfactual situation and that to decide between theories that make the same predictions "in the real world".