Sounds reasonable. Animals (including humans) construct mental maps of their environment without language, which is an important ability for everything from se

Sounds reasonable. Animals (including humans) construct mental maps of their environment without language, which is an important ability for everything from seasonal migration to location of reliable food sources. For social animals, simple vocal phrases like 'follow me to food' (e.g. in parrots, crows, etc.) would be secondary to the construction of that mental map, but do confer a large survival advantage on their social group (group selection in evolutionary terms). If so, this has some interesting implications for LLMs and AGI. First, LLMs don't seem to be thinking or reasoning if they're only doing next-word-prediction based on a large training set - so a step towards real AGI might be a system that had an internal map of reality that it was constantly updating with new sensory information, with the LLM as a layer above it that allowed it to communicate the relevant details of that internal map to others? Personally, every time I 'think in words' it always begins with 'how can this be explained' and the actual thinking that precedes that is done with images, diagrams, graphs, etc.