What makes you think Newtonian physics is in any form more real than computation? If Wolfram is correct, physics is inherently a computation in the form of cellular automata.

Intelligence might be so messy that the only way to get to it is to grow it organically, which to me seems to be happening in research. People are trying a bunch of stuff based on intuitions for what may work, and post hoc adding some theoretical justification for why it's working. Human intelligence didn't emerge from some grand theory of intelligence either.