Every evidence shows that humans have a preverbal understanding of their world even before they learn language. If you've ever seen a crying baby encounter a nipple, you know what I'm talking about. We don't start with a prompt and iteratively predict tokens based on the ones we've just uttered until we stochastically output __STOP__. We don't conjure words from the void. We have higher level concepts, understanding, experience and response that are not unconscious, but do not have to make a round-trip through language.