[dragonwriter]

> Honest question, can you give me an example of thinking or reasoning that happens fully independently of reasoning via symbols or their manipulation?

I don't think we have anything but subjective, indirect understanding of how thinking happens, but I think that, at a minimum, what we describe as "reasoning" specifically is tightly conceptually related to, if not a subset of, manipulation of abstract symbols to which concrete experiences may be approximately mapped.

I'm not sure I'd say this is the same thing as language, but there's at a minimum a shared common symbol-manipulation underlying both. Do the capacities always come together? I'm not sure how we would know that, I think our ability to recognize reasoning is tied to it being mapped to language, and are ability to distinguish something as language rather than nonlinguistic signaling or mimicry of something else that is using language is tied to independent expression of reasoning through it.