Let me be clear: yes, I know I might be wrong. I hope I'm not dumb and wrong, or at least not dumb. I am also not writing here as some kind of debate exercise. I do because I find this topic extremely interesting and insightful. What if language is the intelligence? What if "guessing the next word" really was all that was there, to peak human intelligence, knowledge, and understanding of our world? I am not hyped by AI, it's rather that I find this possibility somewhat sad.

I've made up a model, an idea, and I don't think the data opposing it is trustworthy. My first problem is that there are many people that claim that they have NO internal monologue, which means NEVER constructing a sentence from theirselves or others in their head (except directly as verbal speech), and this seems outright impossible. When pressed, these people usually either admit that they do have some monologue, just "much less". Or they misunderstood it for something similar to schizophrenia, actual hallucinations. If they don't admit to actually, sometimes, having them, then they fail to explain where exactly the line between "thinking of someone or themselves saying something" and the internal monologue/dialogue is. As if they had been caught lying by the detective, they end the conversation. Or at least that's how I feel, I really don't know how to ask more questions here before making them feel too interrogated, or like someone that has self-diagnosed being told that they are imagining things.

With "absolutely none" group out of the way, it leaves us with people who claim to perceive the internal monologue very scarcely, and claim that they do not need to "think" or "do". How can we possibly test this scientifically? The data is all self-reported. Or at least I don't know if this can or has been neurologically researched.

Consider also that all self-reported data about internal monologue is "poisoned": we are trying to get objective data with the data itself as a vehicle. We are not asking if someone feels pain, or if they can solve a puzzle in a timeframe. We cannot measure electric activity with some instruments, nor evaluate yes-or-no questions.

What if it is true that some people do not perceive their internal monologue? I certainly don't remember it "popping" into my head at a certain age, and I think nobody does. When we learn language, we become conscious with it, because it allows to model the world, beyond putting things in our mouth and screaming. So it could be that not everybody perceives it equally, a spectrum like you said, and that some people rationalize it retroactively as not being there - just "thoughts", ideas, feelings. We reconstruct past events via a narration, filling in details by guessing, so why wouldn some people guess that they are not narrating in their head? It is not something that is taught in school or from or parents, you either perceive it as "internal monologue", or as "just thinking", because, well, it's the thinking doing it's thing.