> E.g. humans follow a deductive process to answer questions which they haven't encountered yet.

Rarely, actually.

More generally humans use all kind of inferences where problem at hand is intertwined with all other attention points that is occupying the mental load of the person. Giving a topic full mental attention and finding a path through pure deduction about a circumscribed subject is a rarity, even if you consider only those situations that require any conscious attention at all to perform some action before moving on.

All of our deductive reasoning is founded in induction. For example, the basis of all arithmetic is physics analogies regarding things that exist and the understanding that a thing implies another thing is not based in deduction. Similarly, I suspect from my own experience that general reasoning requires a basic understanding of physics if its origin isn't something ineffable. The ability to connect and find implications cannot itself be purely deductive and it would seem to me that an understanding of physical reality would have to be the origin for that ability.

> an emergent phenomenon from having enough connections in a graph, or ... some other special sauce

For humans, it is emergent. But when we reason about reason, we invent special sauce.

If we build our theories of reason into our models, they achieve the strengths and limitations of our models.

If we don't, we're limited by the pace of evolution, because we don't have enough connections in our graph.

So I think we'll have something immediately more useful if we embed ALU special instructions into a neural network.

I must be in the minority here, but I don't think most people exercise any reason. I'd even venture that the vast majority of people haven't reasoned recently at all. In my mind, reasoning is an ability... a willful act to engage in thinking through an abstract problem. Most people don't do this and just use rationalization and learned behavior, which our brains are good at.

> humans follow a deductive process to answer questions which they haven't encountered yet

nope. most humans fall in various traps such as pattern recognition, confirmation bias, and many others instead of relying on deductive analysis. Even scientists fail at being rigorous.