this just seems like some Wittgenstein mistake<p>>"thinking and reasoning require language"<p>we are just going to argue about what thinking and reasoning are because the sentence is meaningless.<p>Clearly animals think and reason and dont have language.<p>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.
Call me crazy, but I think that an internal monologue is a "you" instance running beside your main instance.<p>The "you" is because "you" are a lot of smaller stuff instances of things running along in your brain.<p>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).<p>But some people don't need several instances of themselves, and they just run one "you" thing. Hence, no internal monologue.
I wonder how many "leaders" in AI don't have one, and therefor don't understand reasoning the same way as others do who do have it (FWIW I have Aphantasia, although it doesn't mean I can't imagine - I just can't see it).