There have been attempts to understand intelligence with intelligence (logic, symbols, reasoning etc.) for 30 years, to not much effect, now AI and machine learning are advancing quite steadily, so why the snark? All evidence suggests that the way the brain itself learns things is statistical and probabilistic in nature. There are also new disciplines now, like Probabilistic Graphical Models, which are free of some of the traditional downsides of purely statistical methods, in that they can be interpreted and that human-understandable knowledge can be extracted from them. This is something that really seems promising, and to some extent is an union of the old and new approaches, despite the claims of a big division, but it is hard to see much premise in purely symbolic methods invented merely by some guy somewhere thinking very hard.
I for one am very happy that people seek inspiration in the way human brain works, that's what science is, if you just come up with things without consulting the real world it's not science, it's philosophy, the one discipline that has yet to produce a single result.