Comment by dsign

> some lower form of intelligence

Anecdotally, but I have lived in different cultures with entirely different languages and/or dialects, and the thoughts and even entire categories of thoughts people from these cultures express, or can easily express, are very much shaped by their language. Relatedly, I've also often witnessed multilingual people switch out of their native language to a second one just to express a particular idea or nuance, because they can do it with two words in that other language but would need at least a couple of sentences to say the same thing in their native one.

We use formal language to express symbolic relationships, e.g. "A implies B". But even "A implies B" has multiple meanings: material conditional, strict implication, logical entailment, etc. So, symbolic systems are not "pure and hard", they are also contaminated and softened by the vagaries of language outside them, which is our primary access to those systems: "valid" natural language and its strings of words. A statistical system that can string words into valid(=allowed by the distribution) language asymptotically approaches reason. So, the mind is not in the words, but in the laws that permit many words to come together, i.e. the probability distribution.