Knowing someone with a brain injury, something that is hugely apparent is how much we take for granted "sequencing" - that is, the ability for the brain to hold a sequence of events, ideas or actions in a coherent order over a period of time. It's much more fragile than you would think. People with specific brain injuries suddenly can't work out whether to put their shoes on before their socks etc.
Why I mention this is that I see both language and reasoning as rooted in this more fundamental cognitive ability of "coherent sequencing". This sits behind all kinds of planning and puzzling tasks where you have to project forward a sequence of theoretical actions and abstractly evaluate the outcome.
Which is all to say, I don't think language and reasoning are the same, but I do think it is likely they stem from the same underlying fundamental mechanisms in our brain. And as a consequence, it's actually quite plausible that LLMs can reconstruct mechanisms of reasoning from language, in a regressive model kind of fashion. ie: just because their are other ways to reason doesn't exclude language as a path to it.
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