I beg to differ.
We are social animals.
The amygdala is very good at picking at picking out faces and social cues.
Did what I did make mom smile or frown?
Did the alpha male groom us or strike us?
Do my peers emit affirming or threatening behavior?
All of this adds to emotional tone to my actions (not yet consolidated in my hippocampus memory buffer) and modulates learning rates. I would not consider this irrelevant to a complex civilization. In fact - we have examples of humans that do not have this influence baked into the cortex during the critical phases of development (abandoned orphans in the post-Soviet era) and these are deeply damaged persons.
This is also the area where social shapes & cues are recognized - secondary sexual characteristics, mating dances, pheromones, “my” species recognition. All part of civilization.
I know that it is attractive to focus on the exploration/play as the important parts and toss out all the rest as “unnecessary” messy bits but I don’t think that is wise.
Likewise - some would have us toss out the sensorimotor parts as unnecessary to making an AGI. These people will be on their own without guidance from modeling the brain as this is proving to be an integral part of how the brain forms semantic categories. Indeed - it is looking like speech is, in fact, a learned motor action encompassing broad swaths of the sensorimotor areas.
Like it or not - the only example we have of an actual working intelligence has messy biological sub-systems that seem to be needed to work the way we want it to work. Let me clarify to head off misunderstandings; not the actual bloody bits but the functions and arrangements of functions.