Sure I agree what I am talking about is different in some important ways; I am “yes and”ing here. It’s an interesting space for sure.

Internal vs external in this case is a subjective decision. Where there is a boundary, within it is the model. If you draw the boundary outside the texts then the complete system of model, inference, text documents form the agent.

I liken this to a “text wave” by metaphor. If you keep feeding in the same text into the model and have the model emit updates to the same text, then there is continuity. The text wave propagates forward and can react and learn and adapt.

The introspection within the neural net is similar except over an internal representation. Our human system is similar I believe as a layer observing another layer.

I think that is really interesting as well.

The “yes and” part is you can have more fun playing with the models ability to analyze their own thinking by using the “text wave” idea.