I agree with your overall description, but I still think reasoning is a term requiring autonomy.

A calculator doesn't reason.

'Abductive reasoning' in this special ML sense is a matter of statistical calculation.

My point being that we should stop implying that we're reconstructing human behavior, when what we are doing is _mimicking it_ through advanced recursion and statistics over huge amounts of inputs (big data).

Abductive reasoning OTOH relies on huge imperfections: human bias, flawed logic, misremembered facts, invented facts, all of whom are culturally situated, a sense of abstract self, a biological self and always an overarching, immanent telos.

Speculatively we might be inventing an entirely new category of existence whose logical categories (such as a special case 'abductive reasoning') cannot be understood in anthropomorphic terminology without distorting it. To me that's still science fiction, so far I've only seen automatons; shallow mimicking robots.

I agree that we won’t create a human intelligence. If we create an intelligence it’ll at best be a warped “something else.” However I’ll make the trite point that I don’t think we understand what makes human intelligence manifest. There’s no reason to believe its not at its basis a statistical optimization based on reinforced gradient descent. In fact it’s fairly likely to be the case. My assertion is as we mix other AI techniques in a feedback cycle we will see something more than this simple single model exploration can do and it’ll converge to what we would consider intelligence. But I agree fundamentally it won’t map to a human intelligence modality.