I think we can relax that a bit. We "just" need to understand some definition of cognition that satisfies our computational needs.

Natural language processing is definitely a huge step in that direction, but that's kinda all we've got for now with LLMs and they're still not that great.

Is there some lower level idea beneath linguistics from which natural language processing could emerge? Maybe. Would that lower level idea also produce some or all of the missing components that we need for "cognition"? Also a maybe.

What I can say for sure though is that all our hardware operates on this more linguistic understanding of what computation is. Machine code is strings of symbols. Is this not good enough? We don't know. That's where we're at today.