I think the key point is that serialized words symbolize concepts and other logic such that if you can't retrieve that concept into your awareness, you will not understand the word. Learning and forming the concepts comes prior to attaching common word symbols to them based on the region you live in. So if you start with words, you never get anywhere, hence the complete lack of any intelligence in the LLM approach.
Exactly. Thought is prior to language, and much confusion happens when you conflate the them. In particular the surface syntax of language tells you next to nothing about the "syntax" of thought, which is hypergraphical, not tree-structured.
