Rather than trying to mimic the way we think we think, they try to mimic physical aspects of the brain.
Neural networks take a different approach to artificial intelligence.
Rather than trying to mimic the way we think we think, they try to mimic physical aspects of the brain. I would not say that mimicking the physical aspects is not a fruitful venture. Due to the uncertainty of AI, there can never be any certainty to which is in fact a fruitful approach or just a shot in the dark. When there was the desire to put an artificial heart in a human, the creators of the artificial heart did not create it the way they thought it worked, they looked at a human heart and mimicked the physical aspects of it. This works perfectly for most things, but it seems to me that this will not work for simulating the mind.