I absolutely think the type of decision we're talking about can be modelled. I'm not suggesting it's trivial, and I'm not saying there's a nice and tidy closed analytical solution, which is what you appear to be focused on with your parabola/physics-based example, but I absolutely think statistical methods (or "AI/ML" if you prefer) can be applied to the problem. It's pretty much how your brain solves these sorts of problems too, there's no magic to intuition or human decision-making.
>I absolutely think the type of decision we're talking about can be modelled.
The possibility is not in dispute. Billions of biological organisms do these things everyday.
But this is:
>It's pretty much how your brain solves these sorts of problems too, there's no magic to intuition or human decision-making.
Is it how the brain works?
My ball example isn't about it having a closed solution. If you throw a ball I can track it with my eyes and I know it's going to follow some path. If there is a gust of wind mid flight I can even attempt to make corrections on the fly. Someone with no notion of projectile motion can do this and never come up with the concept of projectile motion.
The "hardware" so to speak figures this out on it's own and the same "system" can be applied to infinitely many problems without prior knowledge and get results. This would be like showing a Tesla some chess games, and then the car realising, this is some sort of game, and then learning how to play or inventing something new to do with the pieces.
The results so far are really terrible compared to our intuition. We have Teslas that drive straight into road barriers and can't predict that a person might reappear after moving behind an obstruction.
This is even more goal post moving and I admit it's very unfair. But I'm not baby sitting a car.
Yeah, I concede that it absolutely is a lot of hand-waving. But we're also talking about emergent properties: it's possible to understand why they arise, what the emergent properties are, and how the underlying system works, without having full information about it all. In fact that's a very analogous situation to our thermodynamic understanding of gases, or fluid dynamics.
I don't want to mislead, there is an incredible amount of stuff we don't know... But we do understand more than most well-informed people think, even people in adjacent fields.
