I wouldn't say, that all those ideas fizzled. They brought us some great results, don't forget to give credits to those who deserve.

But if you want to understand seeing, you have to understand optics. If you want to understand motioning, you have to understand mechanics. You have to understand the physics behind, any biology, physiology or anthropology is not enough. The same goes with flying. It's aerodynamics which enables flying.

Animals were always just users of the underlying physics, clumsy users in fact. Not at all the inventors of breading (oxidation), swimming (moving through liquids) and so on. Evolution carved animal shapes into the surrounding physics.

It is likely that one has to understand the physics behind the thinking to really understand and replicate it.

I wouldn't go into details. If is it really necessary and enough for a process to be intelligent to be able to maximize the entropy. Might be some subset of possible futures to maintain and not the whole set. Or some other re-conditioning.

But it very likely takes the thermodynamics to really understand the matter. A "cognition" is not a very fruitful term. As many others are not. It's a wrong level of describing the problem, I think.