If there's anything we've learned as AI moves forward, it's that introspecting about how the human mind works doesn't help much. We're just not wired for enough internal access to look at how our own minds work.

Machine learning is starting to demonstrate that something that starts to look semi-intelligent can be built, using rather simple techniques and enough compute power. Convolutional neural networks don't take much code to implement. They just hammer hard on a simple numerical computation. The amazing thing is that it works.