> If this qualifies me as "having inner monologue" already then we're done.

It does, but we're not done - we just got the "never" out of the way. I still don't think anybody that literally NEVER has any inner monologue/dialogue could pass as functioning adult in our society today, which I will try to explain here. We did not get that much out of the way though, as there is still vast room between "most of the time" and "once every few months".

I think these are key questions, from my armchair position, if you will excuse that. I don't doubt that some people have much less or more frequent inner monologues. For example, people with ADHD may have, among many other things, a too frequent (or fast, or fast-jumping) inner monologue. I'm not claiming this is the cause or anything, but it could be a factor, or some kind of feedback loop.

> Our language is made of rules and in and of itself has no content. It's literally made out of just rules. Any intelligence has to be brought into it. This was quite clear with GPT-2 era transformers spewing sentences like: "The bear and the snake are wearing stairs". You have to know quite a lot before you can explain why this is nonsense despite it being a valid sentence and it's not clear to me at all that this knowledge itself is purely lingual.

Language is just an extremely efficient encoding of reality. We are having this conversation right now, and the actual information encoded in it is orders of magnitudes higher than just the rules we are using. A word is just a sound or one combination of alphabet letters, yet it is attached to a million pathways of more words, each gaining or losing great amount of weight depending on the surrounding words. The rules are just there to make the pathfinding efficient.

To "know quite a lot" could be either, like I said, some hidden inner "encoding of thoughts" that has not yet been described or discovered, or actual language - perhaps mixed together with primitive "feelings" but impossible to use without language.

We know that the brain can produce this extremely dense and efficient encoding of information to communicate with each other. We know that most people also use this language internally, with a monologue or dialogues, to construct complex and simple scenarios. Now let's assume some people really don't have any inner monologue at all. A person would fall into either of these two categories:

1. Like the author describes, where she did not function like a "normal" person at all AND she was not aware of it, but others were well aware. 2. There is another "hidden" code, capable of the same complexity and efficiency, that has not been discovered or really described by anybody, that can be translated immediately to spoken or written language.

You can see that I find 2. very hard to believe, so either I'm making a strawman, or people that claim to have no inner monologue truly do have at least some degree of it.

> Let's put it this way: do you first cogitate the "class concept" or does the "class syntax" enable the "class"-cogitation?

So I started the bad computer analogy, and now I must own it. While technically possible to spontaneously conjure the class syntax and this making the concept, it's never really the case in general. The "class concept" existed first, described in a poorer way by existing syntax: a collection of functions that take a struct on which they mainly operate. The class-syntax, today, describes the class-concept much better than previous syntax, thus the programming language has evolved. Just like human language does, but human language is much more expressive and dynamic than computer language.

To get back to my doubting the general statement in the comments of "I have no inner monologue", could you answer some more questions?

When was the last time, or with what frequency if any, you imagine another person speaking in your head?

And yourself replying or making a statement or starting a conversation with someone else or even yourself?

I think you have locked on to the LLM-viewpoint quite strongly. I don't think I can agree with a lot of your presuppositions. Like "the rules are just there to make the pathfinding efficient" and "language is just an extremely efficient encoding of reality".

While very interesting I'd have a hell of time debating those issues in this kind of medium. If you take that as your starting point then I do understand why you have a hard time grasping the "lack of monologue"-thing. If language is the source of all raw cogitation then how could anyone possibly lack monologue and still function? Am I getting it? I think I get it and I'd agree if I'd take your framework as true.

> impossible to use without language.

Now I understand those types of statements. I am totally not in a position to say you are wrong, but I'd be careful with this because you seem to be a holding a flashlight and saying there is light everywhere you look.

All I can say is I just don't think language plays that large a role in cognition. Why not? That's an excellent question, but I cannot possibly do justice to that here - besides being a complete amateur. I can leave some clues or things that count to me as clues, perhaps. We are surrounded with enormous quantities of beings that utterly and completely lack language yet show tremendous intellectual sophistication. Our own children are completely non-verbal for a very long time and sure, while they won't be winning Nobel prizes at that stage, you can't possibly claim they are incapable of the very same cognitive maneuvering you showed in the coding example (abstraction, generalization, etc). To me it's just a matter of scale. We gained function, we added something new and fancy to the preexisting Mammalian machinery with language, but I don't think it's fundamental to raw cogitation.

> 2. There is another "hidden" code, capable of the same complexity and efficiency, that has not been discovered or really described by anybody, that can be translated immediately to spoken or written language.

3. All people use the same raw cognitive substrate but some feel the need / are wired to overlay it with running commentary. A running commentary they themselves can inspect, I might add. That's an interesting bit. If it is so foundational, what's inspecting it? Language again? Like an LLM-reasoning type of agent or agents?

I notice the question "What happens before the inner monologue? A deeper level of monologue?" didn't get addressed and I'm quite interested in it. What process produces the monologue you perceive as necessary for cogitation? It surely can't be a monologue again? At some point you have to admit these dialogues just "pop into existence" pre-baked, right? Out of what? What produced that if not some raw, unobservable, non-verbal cogitation? That non-verbal cogitation has to be capable of some kind of computation to make that happen or am I making some kind of error?

Honestly, that last question is rhetorical. I'm making all types of errors, but I hope you see I'm kind of on the fence on the language thing. I'm fully open to the fact that I just might not be perceiving the monologue.

Just FYI it’s pretty rude/insulting and not interesting to dismiss someone’s shared experience based on nothing but your own armchair feelings, and even moreso to concede if the person is telling the truth (how on earth could a person be lying or mistaken about this?) that they couldn’t be a functioning adult.

It’s honestly quite a narcissistic view that someone could not possibly think differently than you, and dismiss it out of hand. The other people in this comment thread sharing similar things make perfect sense to me.