Given many people don’t have an inner monologue and function just fine, it’s more likely inner monologue is a product of the reasoning process and not it’s mechanism.
All of these forms of reasoning are true and useful calculations: when we talk about "intuition" what we usually mean is that we have a lot of experience and internal reasoning about a subject, but we struggle to translate it to and from the "language" part of our brain. Nonetheless, any social dancer will tell you that a dialog is possible just by receiving and inducing g-forces alone. You can reason this way about abstract concepts like orbits without ever touching a single word or concrete symbol.
Edit: the key aspect of reasoning, imho, is the ability to make predictions and introspect them against a database of other predictions, using an adversarial heuristic to weight the most plausibly useful results. Perhaps our pattern matching AIs of today just lack sufficient "experience" to do what we call reasoning.
Regarding your edit, no, I think the key aspect of the kind of reasoning we are missing in current AI is the ability to hold the reasoning in your mind, and to iterate on it and evaluate it (judge it) within your mind.
If you use words in your mind when you use math, and you use words in your mind when you make or listen to music, etc., then it is very difficult to find a common ground where it is possible to see that these other realms of thought are capable of not only prediction, but also producing evidence that leads to judgement. That is to say, the key aspects of "reasoning." I picked them because I thought they had broad enough appeal to be relatable, and because I do not personally hear words in my head when doing any of these activities, whether it's calculus or tango, but I still find calculus and tango to be places where reasoning occurs.
Some of them, like math or music, are closer to the kind of symbolic thought we use when we discuss things with words. Others, like the experience of g-forces, are not. I present them as a sliding scale between "word based" reasoning and "non-linguistic" reasoning. Perhaps you can think of a realm that better fits for your personal experience of intuition, and inspect whether these intuitions are capable of "real" reasoning in the absence of language, or whether intuition should never be trusted even when you have a great deal of experience in that area. Perhaps in your estimation, anything that cannot produce evidence that is articulable in word form is suspect.
Personally, I find all these methods, including language, to be suspect. I don't find language to be especially better at producing the kind of evidence for prediction, correct judgement, or discourse for reasoning than other methods, unless you reduce "reasoning" to tautologically require it.
One of the best tools of language is that we have writing that allows easy inspection or iteration of the written content; but these things are possible in other realms, too, it's just that we didn't have great tools for introspecting and iterating on their "ideas" except within our own minds. These days, those tools are readily available in many more realms of human insight.
I've tried to do it, but I can't. I had to do something like "ok, so we subtract one from both sides and then it's easy, 3*7=21". Maybe I could do 2+8 but I still think the word ten "aloud".
At the end of the day though, thought requires communication, even if internal. Even physics is modelled as some sort of 'message passing' when we try to unravel what causality really is. Similar to how a processor has cycles, I think/know similar (but unsynced) happens as part of what we call 'thinking'.
I never really noticed that before. I'm not great at math, fwiw.
i think native speakers hardly "think" about the steps necessary to form a grammatically correct expression, and most of the time just "know".
fluency is not the same as lacking an internal framework for interpreting or thinking in terms of, symbols.
because if we give them a problem to solve in their head and just give us the answer, they will. By problem I mean planning a trip, a meal, how to pay the mortgage, etc. It's impossible to plan without an internal monologue. Even if some people claim theirs is 'in images'.
I once had a teacher claim that people who claimed to have aphantasia were lying, because those people have read books and it is impossible to read a book without picture the scene in your mind's eye. Are you citing the same source that she was?
That's quite the claim.
How can science make this claim if it can't prove (or disprove) the existence of an internal monologue?
He thought this was universal, but doing this experiment with friends, he discovered a guy who could count while reading aloud. So when Feynman asked him, how he does this, turned out that the guy instead of "pronouncing" numbers was "seeing" colored numbers in his imagination, so his speech was not involved.
I supposed this experiment can be modified and generalized, and at least to shed some light on this problem.
I'm the opposite. I rarely visualize things I read, be it geometry or poetry. I can read a detailed description of a person or an item in a novel, and I don't really "see" anything.
But I have an active inner monologue. I "hear" myself saying the words when reading or writing, I "talk" to myself when solving problems or just thinking about stuff.
Especially when programming I'm reasoning by discussing the problem with myself, the only difference being that I usually don't open my mouth and vocalize the discussion. Though sometimes when I'm alone I do just that.
Of course it isn't impossible, and this is backed by what we know about paleoanthropology and other instances of cognition in animals - humans were making stone tools millions of years ago, which takes planning in the form of imagining what you want the tool to look like and how you will do it and what it will be used for. It's exceedingly likely we had this ability long before complex speech evolved. Apes also use and make tools, which would require planning, and I don't think they have an internal monologue going on. birds from the corvid family can do some pretty advanced problem solving that requires planning. Cetaceans might be an exception, because they appear to have some form of language, but this is a pretty wild claim not really backed by any kind of science as we understand it today.
Also, maybe inner monologue is not a binary have/have not, but maybe it is on a continuum.
Instincts.
As someone who was involved in spiritual practice of "stopping internal dialogue" for years, I can tell you that one learns that that dialogue (or monologue, pretty much the same thing) is quite subtle and complex, essentially multi-layered.
Typically, when you think that you "think about nothing at all" it's just the most surface layer that has stopped, and more subtle talking to yourself is still going on. It takes training just to become able to notice and recognize it.
After all, it's just such a constant and monotone hum at the back of one's mind, one learns to completely ignore it.
So no, I would not take a word of people who were not trained to notice their internal monologue that they haven't any :-)
My concern is that if we take their word for it, we're actually buying into two assumptions which (AFAIK) are both unproven:
1. That "Internal Monologues" (not consciously forced by attention) exist in the first place, as opposed to being false-memories generated after-the-fact by our brain to explain/document a non-language process that just occurred. (Similar to how our conscious brains pretend that we were in control of certain fast reflexes.)
2. Some people truly don't have them, as opposed to just not being aware of them.
In short, maybe these inner monologues exist and maybe they don't, but science can't comment on that. That said, it is clearly something we are interested in, but it will need to be addressed in some other way (i.e. religion, ideology, etc.).
No, they are potentially falsifiable as we get better at scanning, identifying, intervening in brain activity.
Just off the top of my head here, suppose we create a table puzzle problem that (in itself) doesn't require language to understand, like ones we make for certain animals. Have human subjects (silently) solve it. Afterwards, quiz the solvers about their internal monologue--or lack thereof--dividing them into two groups and noting the words used.
Now change to a second puzzle of similar style and same overall difficult. Stun/anesthetize the language-centers of subjects, to deny access to any of the monologue-words (validating this intervention will involve other research), and then test them on the second problem.
* If performance is constant for both groups, that suggests the monologue is illusory or at least not needed for this kind/scope of problem.
* If performance drops for both groups, that suggests the no-monologue people might just not be as aware of a linguistic process that's actually happening.
* If performance drops for monologue-subjects, that suggests it's a real and important difference in modes of logical thought.
* If some other combination happens, you have an mysterious and exciting new line of research.
Individually, no, but in general, for people to consistently lie about this particular thing at scale would be extremely unusual, given that people rarely lie if there's no reason for it. Going by this baseline, you could assume upward of 50% of replies are honest (even if mistaken), otherwise you'd have to explain why do you believe people would suddenly lie about that particular thing.
There's conspiratorial lying and lying from ignorance, one is much less credulous.
For example, I can think of interpretations of "I picture objects that I'm thinking about" that range from me not experiencing the phenomenon to me indeed experiencing the phenomenon.
To say that you're not experiencing something that other people are experiencing in their head is a solipsistic notion where you hypothesize an experience that you imagine others are having and then discard it for being different than yours.
Then again, it's trivially reproducible - people self-report all variants of inner monologue, including lack of it, whenever a question about it pops up on-line. Same is the case with imagination - aphantasia is a thing (I would know, I have it).
That you and I can come up with different ways to describe our subjective experience in conversation doesn't mean that we have a different subjective experience.
Especially not when relayed by a species that's frequently convinced it has a trending mental disorder from TikTok.
Look up examples of this on reddit and you'll find a lot of larping. I would take most of it with a grain of salt as you should with any story-telling you encounter on social media.
If we're so reliable, there wouldn't be fake mental illness epidemics on TikTok regarding experiences far more concrete than fuzzy notions like inner monologue.
Another possibility is that inner-monologues (ones not forced by conscious effort) do exist, but are just a kind of false-memory, something one part of our brain generates after-the-fact to explain/document the outcome of another non-language part.
Kind of like how certain reflex-actions can occur before certain decision-making area of the brain light up, yet humans will believe that they sensed the event and made a thinking choice.
He then had others try and found that one of his mathematician friends was able to talk just fine while counting because it turned out he was counting visually.
Why does this matter? Stop being so pedantic. We're talking about a progression of ideas. Talking in your head is one form of ideas, but people can easily solve problems by imagining them.
We need to be at least somewhat pedantic, otherwise it's impossible to know what we are even talking about, and no way to establish anything.
Otherwise, nothing can be established at all, because for any statement there always will be someone's understanding of "internal monologue" for which the statement is true, and someone's else understanding for which the statement is false...
In practice, when you see people arguing about whether they have an "inner monologue" or can "mentally picture objects" on social media, it's more of a contest of who is the most unique in the world rather than anything that sheds clarity on our subjective experience.