Machine can't Think, and It still Is

Often we hear about or read headlines of articles claiming to report about machines that think or computers that can understand and reason. In each instance such information ought to be taken with skepticism.

One such recent article is Wired's Machine Thinks, Therefore It Is about an effort by Sandia's team:

"Over the past five years, a team led by Sandia cognitive psychologist Chris Forsythe has been working on creating intelligent machines: computers that can accurately infer intent, remember prior experiences with users, and allow users to call upon simulated experts to help them analyze problems and make decisions."

Infer intent, remember experiences.... yet, the rest of the article only reports on rules and patterns that are far from any type of thinking, reasoning, or understanding.

Nevertheless, the following quote is an attempt at the right direction, stressing that cognitive entities (such as humans) can interact intelligently because they each know something about each other or have some common/shared background that enables contextualization and understanding:

"When two humans interact, two (hopefully) cognitive entities are communicating. As cognitive entities -- thinking beings -- each has some sense of what the other knows and does not know. They may have shared past experiences that they can use to put current events in context; they might recognize each other's particular sensitivities."

So, how does one build a cognitive entity in its true sense, or perhaps approximate cognitive entity? Is it appropriate to even call a machine a cognitive entity by attaching the same connotation of the cognitivity as it pertains to humans?

I've raised similar issues in a previous entry why machines can't reason or think. The reason why the efforts of AI (artificial intelligence) so far have proven unsatisfactory in emulating the human reasoning and thinking process might have to do with the very fact that so far the approaches have been only mechanistic, thus incompatible with the very nature of the human experience and with the human mind in particular. So, we want computers to think intelligently, reason, learn, and think, and yet we apply mechanistic approaches to attempt to achieve these functions which require intellect?

Related:
the singularity paradox - machine intelligence