>"thinking and reasoning require language"
we are just going to argue about what thinking and reasoning are because the sentence is meaningless.
Clearly animals think and reason and dont have language.
Or clearly thinking and reasoning is a process of symbol manipulation contingent on language itself because nothing else provides the means to ground the symbols nor the rules to encode acceptable manipulations.
I can think in my native tongue or English, but I can also use just abstractions to think - i.e. designing architecture of a software tool or using math. What I am finding frustrating is to have abstract idea in the head and be limited by language in expression of that idea, so much so, that sometimes it is easier to paint a picture of that idea than try to express it in written form. Language is a projection of abstract mind with massive loss of contextual information. But you don't need language to have an abstract mind.
Otherwise why would you be careful not to say the word "walk" around your dog when you didn't intend to go walking.
If you pick up a leash and say, "we are not going on a walk" what will your dog do?
The "you" is because "you" are a lot of smaller stuff instances of things running along in your brain.
Probably it's common to develop this multiple "yous" and kept them happily running (may be with therapy some get to "shutdown" or "suspend" some "evil" "you" they have running and messing everything).
But some people don't need several instances of themselves, and they just run one "you" thing. Hence, no internal monologue.
It's the standard "is the color I call 'yellow' the same yellow color that you call 'yellow'?" question.
We have no frame of reference for what an inner monologue is really like for other people.
How many gradations are there? 0 = none, 1000 = max (I can hear my voice in my head as clearly and cogently as you can hear my voice when I'm explaining something to you?)
0 = none, 3 = max, and almost all humans are either a 0, 1, 2 or 3?
Until we get neuralink's descendent implanted and can share each other's consciousness, we won't know for sure. And probably not even then.
Can I ask why you're "sure" about this? I have an internal monologue and I'm quite skeptical of the LLM hype.
