Nice to see an "associationist" coming back! It has life as the fundamental symmetry of brain computation. Association is really a fundamental empirical construct in the science of psychology.

With this symmetry we can see how neural systems most fundamentally compute. Here are the details on that. Please read to the end where the relationship to association is defined. Association comes from a pairing symmetry in all neural computation. Here lies it's 'DNA':

https://medium.com/liecatcher/100-billion-sources-of-hate-between-your-ears-d34baf503c98

Association is also fundamental to the science of AI of natural language processing and its manifestation in ChatGPT and other modern implementations of advanced perceptrons.

With it we can also define an empirical science of natural language specific to humans and correctly refine the Turing Test:

https://medium.com/liecatcher/defining-the-science-of-ai-nlp-5373972c70d1