Status: Open paper, presented for discussion. This is not a finished theory. The claim is narrower: there may be a useful structure here, precise enough to develop and test.
A system can preserve the sound of a sentence without preserving a statement. It can produce a correct answer without operating on the concepts expressed by that answer. It can distinguish patterns without treating them as symbols. These differences are difficult to describe with a single term such as intelligence or a single score intended to measure it.