LLMs seem to me to be the "internal streams of thought". I.e. it's not LLMs that are missing an internal process that humans have, but rather it's humans that have an entire process of conscious thinking built on top of something akin to LLM.
- The argument that LLMs are missing introspection / inner voice is based on attempting to compare LLMs directly with human minds.
- Human minds have conscious and unconscious parts; for many people, part of the boundary between unconscious and conscious mind manifests as the "inner voice" - the one that makes verbalized thoughts "appear" in their head (or rather perhaps become consciously observed).
- Based entirely on my own experience in using GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, and my own introspection, I feel that GPT-4 bears a lot of resemblance to my inner voice in terms of functioning.
- Therefore I propose that comparing LLMs directly to human minds is unproductive, and it's much more interesting/useful to compare them to the inner voice in human minds: the part of the boundary between unconscious and conscious that uses natural language for I/O.