But they've been trying to do that since (at least) the 1950s! And indeed moving the goalposts further and further as our own ideology of "what is intelligence" evolves. The evolution of programming languages and programmed systems goes hand in hand with that.
Until we get to the present situation where someone invented a program so generic and all-encompassing (a language model, ffs!) that it turns out all "meaning" and "reasoning" is just a moderately illusory effect induced by correlations between morphological tokens: to a large language model, things that "rhyme" (more like "appear in proximity within a corpus of text" - but that's a criterion of similar complexity to "sound alike or have similar morphological origin") are the things that make sense. And a lot of people can't tell the difference.
> Instead of training NN, why not use the analytical foundations of the philosophers to create it? A language like Self, or its relative Javascript, could be the tool to create a self in a machine.
You could imagine Human Language alike to a cellular automaton of virtually infinite complexity, serving as the substrate for all thought; programming languages, and indeed any formal language, such as mathematics and its subsets used in different sciences, are abstractions over that infinite field of possible patterns: they hide the messy details and provide idioms of varying (but not infinite) complexity, for achieving particular goals (such as making webpages dance). While a neural network could be said to "see everything simultaneously", in JavaScript you can't even be sure what the keyword "this" refers to (from context - you gotta trust the docs or look under the hood). Vastly different scopes aside, AFAIK you can't beat the notion of "selfhood" into neither a program nor a NN, because neither actually has to fend for itself in order to keep thinking.
>When beauty is truth, how is it distinct from reasoning?
One of those is a subset of another, and for many people the need for "intelligence" and "reasoning" never went any further than knowing how to operate the right machine. (There exist unimaginably many beautiful and useful things that each one of us fails to grasp, because we're busy parroting the opinions of whoever reached the opinion-parroting machine first.) But it inevitably turns out that when beauty does not figure into the equation, there remains very little in this world worth reasoning about - other than ensuring adequate caloric intake and that sort of thing.
It would be interesting to see what GPT has to say to your question though. Anyone feel like asking it? I dropped my barge pole in the swamp