We don’t have any proof of that, as we don’t have proof also about its opposite. We have no idea why neural nets work, or how our brain works in context of this. There is definitely something human-like in neural networks, but we don’t have any idea why, and what exactly. It’s a completely empirical field and not a theoretical one. We don’t have any good idea what would happen if we could built a 180 billion neuron large neural net, because there is no theory which would prove what would happen even the current ones. That’s why I’ve seen almost every single prediction about what AI would solve in the following years in the past 40 years fail. We have no clue.

There is research that shows humans are also predicting the next word.

I posted that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34875324

But you don't know that humans don't reason by stringing words together and seeing how statistically likely they seem.

Related to this topic, see "Babble and Prune": https://www.lesswrong.com/s/pC6DYFLPMTCbEwH8W

I don’t think it’s a stretch to say humans aren’t great at assessing the truth or accuracy of anything either.