Consciousness.

Or self-awareness, sentience, the spirit, soul, mind, whatever you may want to call it. Without it, the ability to manipulate symbols would be of little use.

I agree that we have developed mechanical extensions to our senses that allow us to perceive manifestations of reality which our biological equipment is totally unaware of. But we are still unable to analyze or understand that reality with the conceptual equipment which we evolved. For example, we know quite a bit about UV and IR EM radiation, but we still can’t explain how it can be independently described as both a particle and a wave.

As I mentioned, our tools of language and mathematics (which we presumably evolved either accidentally or for totally unknown reasons) are extremely powerful and useful, but still seem to be totally inadequate in achieving a fundamental understanding of reality.

We also have other mental faculties which we suspect are extremely powerful and profound (like our ability to create and understand music) which appear to be totally unnecessary
as an aid to understand reality.

As for the alleged sexism of artificial intelligence, well, I feel totally unqualified to comment on that.

Relativity tells us the nature of the observation is a function of the temporal/spatial relationship between the observer and the observed. Quantum theory tells us the very act of observation determines which values can be observed and what the possible measurements can be. Thermodynamic concepts like Entropy are all about the amount and nature of disorder, certainly a question of perception and subjective definition.

Our means of reasoning about reality are restricted to a brain which evolved with no need to properly perceive or conceive of reality, except to allow an organism of the order of 1 meter/1 second spatio/temporal dimension to operate–most of the time. I.e., in order for us to have the perceptual equipment necessary to survive long enough to reproduce we simply do not need to understand the entire universe, just our little piece of it. Our brains evolved sufficient complexity for us to survive and prosper in our ecological environment, plus a bit more for safety purposes. We just don’t need any more.

We’ve developed ingenious mechanical (sensors and computers) and conceptual (language and mathematics) devices to help extend our understanding of the unknowable, but they will always be inadequate to complete our knowledge. Any philosophical theory or AI capable of successfully modelling reality will be unable to communicate its findings to our brains.

The more we learn about reality, the less ‘real’ it seems…

The scientific method relies on facts, established through repeated measurements and agreed upon universally, independently of who observed them. In quantum mechanics, the objectivity of observations is not so clear, most dramatically exposed in Eugene Wigner’s eponymous thought experiment
where two observers can experience seemingly different realities. The question whether these realities can be reconciled in an observer-independent way has long remained inaccessible to empirical investigation, until recent no-go-theorems constructed an extended Wigner’s friend scenario with four observers that allows us to put it to the test. In a state-of-the-art 6-photon experiment, we realize this extended Wigner’s friend scenario, experimentally violating the associated Bell-type inequality by 5 standard deviations. If one holds fast to the assumptions of locality and free-choice, this result implies that quantum theory should be interpreted in an observer-dependent way.