And the closest to solving this we seem to be at present is fuelled by deep learning, which is basically a big neural network with an absurdly vast amount of neurons (i.e., parameters for learning, like the brain). We can observe how this brute-force technique works, but unfortunately no-one can explain why (it's a black box model). The same story has been on for decades.

I would relate it to being a discriminative model, which is tailored to solving a specific task, in contract to generative models, which try to model and explain the world. Perhaps the brain is not meant to understand how the world works but how to do take advantage of it.