Sometimes I think peoples’ self-awareness (internal world, whatever you want to call it) makes them think they’re smarter or more competent than they are. My partner has a better memory than me and she will continually point out cases where I make the exact same comment when responding to similar situations across time (driving past a mural on the road, walking past the same flower bed, etc.) I really do feel like a program responding to stimuli sometimes. And sure I have a rich internal world or whatever, but that isn’t so easy to discern from my external behavior. I think as I grow older the magic dissipates a bit and I can see how really, humans aren’t
that unique and incredible. What’s incredible is that all this random faffing around at scale without much individual brilliance leads to the wonders of society. But we could divine that by looking at a termite mound.
All of which is to say that memorization as you describe it seems like a plausible path to AGI, and humans don’t deal with weird inputs well either. It’s not like we are trying to make the ultimate single intelligence that rules humanity (although that may eventually come to pass). But something of roughly human competence certainly seems achievable.