In your subtitle you pose the question: "Are humans machines?" This is not a new idea. Habits (repetitive actions that repeat with the bare minimum of thought, or by somatic actions) are analogous to machine algorithms. Certainly humans exhibit machine-like attributes, yet our brains are much more complex than AI at this time.

Thinking, in our current era is associative in nature and not very sophisticated. Although within the subset of association there are many sophisticated permutations.

Your review of the literature from a historical context is good and your current summary is better. You seemed to have touched all the bases, and that has been refreshing. Thanks.