[ExI] A global workspace in language models \ Anthropic

[John Clark]

*For anybody who doesn't want to read the entire paper this video
summarizes it pretty well. *

* We just figured out how AI actually works (J-Space)*
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjHuGNo3spk>

*John K Clark*

On Tue, Jul 7, 2026 at 5:00 PM John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Jul 7, 2026 at 4:47 AM Jason Resch via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
> *https://www.anthropic.com/research/global-workspace
>> <https://www.anthropic.com/research/global-workspace> *
>>
>> *> A fascinating article by Anthropic about how LLMs can think access and
>> report certain of their thoughts but not others.*
>>
>
>
> *That article was interesting as hell! Thanks for posting a link to it
> Jason. I was particularly impressed by something in it near the end: *
>
> "We think our results do have something substantial to say about access
> consciousness in language models. The J-space appears to support the
> functions associated with conscious access: it holds the thoughts Claude
> can report on, deliberately bring to mind, and reason with, while the rest
> of its processing runs automatically beneath. Notably, none of this
> structure was designed into Claude—it emerged on its own during training,
> presumably because it was a useful way to organize computation. That
> suggests a *mental workspace supporting conscious access isn’t just a
> peculiarity of how human brains happen to be wired. Instead, it appears to
> be a general solution that intelligent systems arrive at* in order to
> solve certain kinds of problems. [...] We don't know what mechanism
> decides what enters the J-space in the first place. We've seen hints that
> it's tied to Claude's sense of self, something like emotional reactions,
> and traces of metacognition, without exactly having worked out how."
>
> *Every day It's getting more and more difficult to maintain that Claude is
> not conscious. *
>
> *John K Clark*
>
>
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20260708/8386aa0f/attachment.htm>