The fact that something is possible in principle doesn't mean there's any easy way to do it in practice. The easy way to produce arbitrarily complex intelligent behavior in practice is to produce something that can abstract to an arbitrary degree of generality, and that means recognizing abstractions like "goal", "good," and so on.

I actually had specific examples in mind, basically all GOFAI approaches to general AI. But in any case this logic doesn't seem to hold up. You could argue that something needs to HAVE goals in order to be intelligent -- I don't think so, at least not with the technical definition typically given to 'goals', but I will grant it for the purpose of discussion. It still doesn't follow that the thing has to be aware of these goals, or introspective of them. One can have goals without being aware that one has them, or able to represent those goals explicitly. Most human beings fall in this category most of the time, it is sad to say.