Nice hypothesis.

I think it's different, because embedding-to-token mapping is a lookup (at least it is in transformers), simply because integers are cheaper to store than strings whereas the translation thought-to-language is more of another inference process than a lookup (though I'm not sure if that is a mechanically correct assessment because I'm not a neurologist, so grain of salt plz.)

Now the fun thing is that how I understand the last and current generation of chat bots is that they actually do the second step as inference too. But the difference is that it's two iterations over the same linguistic base data (with different weights applied) vs our brains - to my understanding - have different source data for each step, eg extremely simplified (grain of salt again) first fight-or-flight, then creative-or-mundane, then narration?