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Yvain comments on The Blue-Minimizing Robot - Less Wrong
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If you make the old mistake of confusing thoughts in general with analytic, reflective, verbal, serial internal monologue, I'm going to be sad.
I find this rather alien. Some processes are opaque, but that kind definitely isn't. Something (hunger, time, memory of previously made plans, whatever) triggers a reusable pick-a-sandwich-shop process; names and logos of nearby stores come up; associated emotions and concepts come up; weights associated to each shift - an image of those annoying health freaks who diet all the time upvotes "tasty" and downvotes "low calorie"; eventually they stabilize, create an image of myself going to Subway rather than somewhere else, and hand it over to motor control. If something gets stuck at any point, the process stops, a little alarm rings, and internal monologue turns to it to make it come unstuck. If not, there are no verbal thoughts at any point.
Probably time to start being sad; I'm mostly going to use "thoughts" that way. But I think what I'm talking about holds for any definition of "thought" where it's a mental activity accessible to the conscious mind.
I recognize different people use internal monologue to a different degree than others, but whether you decide with a monologue or with vague images of concepts, I think the core idea that these are attempts to turn subjective processes into objects for thought, usually so that you can weave a social narrative around them, remains true.