It is what it is thinking consciously / its internal narrative. For example a supervillain's internal narrative with their plans would go into their COT notepad. If we want to really lean into the analogy between human psychology and LLMs. The "internal reasoning" that people keep referencing in this thread.. referring to the transformer weights and inscrutable inner working of a GPT.. isn't reasoning, but more like instinct, or the subconscious.
It’s more like if the supervillain had to write one word of his chain of thought, then go away and forget what he was thinking, then come back and write one more word based on what he had written so far, repeating the process until the whole chain of thought is written out. Each token is generated conditional only on the previous tokens.