The contrary view is that language is just part of the I/O system, not where the hard work gets done. The meaning of "where" in your claim is very slippery. AR

The contrary view is that language is just part of the I/O system, not where the hard work gets done. The meaning of "where" in your claim is very slippery. AR Luria in The Working Brain points out that damage to virtually every part of the brain can result in language dysfunction. To say that a whole lot of things happen apparently without language doesn't demonstrate that language is an extra. The brain generally isn't very modular and my alternative take would view language as accompaniment that sometimes is "just words" and sometimes touches very specific details (edit: plus allow recursive access these other brain-functionalities, as others point out). We can see how GPT-3's output is a stream of plausible things punctuated by some statement that shows "it doesn't anything" (IE, gets the implicit context wildly wrong).