I didn't claim that pattern recognition is useless, I claimed that by itself is not enough. And you can see that your model uses it in the calculation iteratively, that is, arbitrary number of times. It is not just giving out the result that is closest to the database of stored results.
Yet my argument exactly is that the logical abstraction you were talking about is a relatively simple pattern, and what is beyond it less important.
The author is right that what we do for NLP is not enough for reasoning. But it does not mean that we are too far from it.
Even in your variation of the room experiment, if the person in it could reply something along the lines of "here is what I think is a part of solution", which you simply had to feed back to eventually get the whole thing, would you claim it is a weak abstraction?
