No matter how far we go, we end up with generation / discrimination architecture.

Its is the core of any and all learning/exellency; exposure to chaotic perturbations allow selection of solutions that are then generalized to further, ever more straining problems; producing increasingly applicable solutions.

This is the core of evolution, and is actually derivable from just a single rule.

I don't think generation/discrimination is fundamental. A more general framing is evolutionary epistemology (Donald T. Campbell, 1974, essay found in "The Philosophy of Karl Popper"), which holds that knowledge emerges through variation and selective retention. As Karl Popper put it, "We choose the theory which best holds its own in competition with other theories; the one which, by natural selection, proves itself the fittest to survive."

On this view, learning in general operates via selection under uncertainty. This is less visible in individual cognition, where we tend to over-attribute agency, but it is explicit in science: hypotheses are proposed, subjected to tests, and selectively retained, precisely because the future cannot be deduced from the present.

In that sense, generation/discrimination is a particular implementation of this broader principle (a way of instantiating variation and selection) not the primitive itself.

It's a feedback loop.

I've always felt that the most important part of engineering was feedback loops.

Maybe nature is the greatest engineer ever?