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.

I'd like to say that I'm not "locked on to the LLM-viewpoint", because I have been interested in the inner monologue / consciousness questions since I was a teenager and by pure chance read a somewhat crazy (and now outdated / partly debunked / never really a peer reviewed science theory) book: [The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976, Julian Jaynes)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Consciousness_in...). It's at the very least a very entertaining read IMO, but must be taken with a grain of salt. On the other hand, the recent advances in LLM output might have been biasing me. I consider myself also an amateur of course, my knowledge is superficial.

So yes, my framework is that the language articulation is the thought itself, and that is why we (most people) consistently have/hear an inner monologue, or dialogues with others.

> 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).

I don't think a child that cannot yet speak, so typically around 2 years old, can do much cognitive maneuvering, or at least not significantly more than an a great ape. Of course it could be pure correlation, and as we age we learn and simply also learn to use language efficiently. But we also cannot rule it out. Hellen Keller is a somewhat interesting case of someone missing the language learning stage and then also essentially not developing a "consciousness" as we understand it.

> the question "What happens before the inner monologue? A deeper level of monologue?"

I do not have an answer. I'm afraid that there isn't one, just like there is an answer to "How do LLMs work?", beyond some technicalities about the core operations, matrices, weightings and whatnot. I think there is no indication that this is recursive in any sense. I cannot find the words to describe it, ironically, but it might be like other systems in nature which seem chaotic in detail and only seem ordered when you look at the whole.

If you allow me to indulge: maybe we are too deep and lost in the simulation now, there are no more curtains to peel back. A mask cannot look at who is behind itself. Is there really another hidden "code" inside our brain that could express the last two sentences more efficiently? Perhaps there is, and our mostly "outer" language simply cannot express it, because the inner hidden language is just much better. Or perhaps it's the other way 'round.

Edit: BTW you also didn't answer "when was the last time you imagined yourself or someone else talking in your head", and I am genuinely interested in the answer - for armchair science!