Consciousness is awareness of itself. Inner monologue is self referential. If you can simulate it you will not be able to distinguish real one from simulated one similar to how you can't distinguish native speaker's translation from machine translation using black box test.

At this point - does it mean anything if something is "real" or "simulated"? If your only test is black box test where you can't distinguish black boxes anymore - your testing method is exhausted.

Perception, imagination, future reward estimation can be inspected by dumping inner dialogue - it's a subset of things people are already looking at to evaluate overall performance in one shot examples. It's when those things gain inner loop ability where it gets interesting.