Honestly a lot of human reasoning is probabilistic and associative too. There’s no axiomatically provable link between the story of No Country for Old Men and the poem the title comes from. Cormack McCarthy just made that association in his head and figured the phrase resonates with his themes

Now as far as the math stuff a quirk of that field is that it can be fully analyzed in token space. Because 2+2 is a matter of definition it doesn’t need empirical testing like biology or subjective social support like a claim about the causes of WWI

So somewhere between the fact that language encodes a lot more ‘concepts’ than we naively may realize, the power of statistical emergence via associations, and what pursuits can be fruitfully done in token space we can get a long way towards ‘intelligence’