I have no idea if symbolic reasoning will be purely an emergent property or if it will also require new, as-of-yet-undiscovered breakthroughs. But as I wrote elsewhere on this page, if engineers and scientists on the "connectionist" side find ways to build an AI system that relies on "dumb" computation to reason about symbols representing entities in the external world, they would simultaneously silence and satisfy the critics -- who, as always and as ever, will surely say they were right all along.