What's the evidence that human brains do not understand language in a statistical way?

Which is fantastic for knowledge work. A lot our work as engineers, heck even me writing this sentence, is constructing text together based on patterns I've seen. I view tools like ChatGPT as having observed a huge number of patterns and inferring based on that.

Would I treat it like a thought partner to trust and verify? Yeah. As a monk that I'm seeking life insights on? Probably not.

"An abacus for the mind"