[ExI] A global workspace in language models \ Anthropic

[Giulio Prisco]

Very interesting indeed…

On 2026. Jul 10., Fri at 16:21, Jason Resch via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

>
>
> On Tue, Jul 7, 2026 at 5:01 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.*
>>
>
> You're welcome. That was my reaction too. I said to the person who sent me
> this: "Thanks for sharing this, one of the most fascinating pieces I've
> read in a long time!"
>
>
>> * 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."
>>
>
> Yes, it seems that we have finally now stepped into the realm of doing
> science related to consciousness. None of this introspection of the inner
> workings of neural circuits is technically possible to do in humans while
> they're thinking, but it is possible to do with AI. I think we are learning
> near as much about ourselves as we are learning about AI.
>
>
>>
>> *Every day It's getting more and more difficult to maintain that Claude
>> is not conscious. *
>>
>
> Yes, though none of the AI companies has gone so far as to express that
> doubt, at least Anthropic is honest in their uncertainty.
>
> There were a few parts of their article I disagreed with, and those
> related to their attempts to distance models from the human brain. For
> example, when they stressed the importance of recursion in human thinking,
> I would reply that it's ridiculous to make the argument that LLMs aren't
> recurrent, especially the Decoder model, and where output is looped back in
> as input. Moreover there's a limit to the number of cycles/loops involved
> in the human brain, since a conscious state is generated in less than
> infinite time. Therefore, whatever function the brain performs can be
> accomplished in a fully feed-forward network that has enough depth.
>
> Finally, I would note as regards to their emphasis on the GWT of
> consciousness, that there is any special role access and reportability
> play in consciousness, I look at it as a bit of a red-herring. When we try
> to study what other people are consciously aware of in a scientific
> objective way, we inevitably are limited in our probes to what is
> accessible to the parts of the brain that can respond to the experimenter's
> questions. This fools many into thinking the silent, non-lingual parts of
> the brain, which we can't interview, must not be conscious. But this is a
> mistake. People used to make this mistake regarding the right hemisphere
> after the corpus callosum is severed in split brain patients, until more
> elaborate experiments showed they were conscious.
>
> And most people make this mistake with themselves. Not having direct
> probative access to other modules of the brain, or lower level processing
> functions (from the vantage point of the top-level higher order thoughts)
> is not evidence of a lack of consciousness in those other isolated
> subregions or lower levels, no more than your lack of access to the
> consciousness of other people can be taken as evidence that other people
> are not conscious. So global access/reportability is not the signifier of
> consciousness, it's only the limit of introspection of the consciousness
> you have from your current vantage point from the conscious perspective you
> currently find yourself within. The cerebellum, or right hemisphere's
> visual cortex, may have its own distinct, and unique conscious perspective,
> but because they're not tied in to the part of the brain that talks, we
> can't interview it to see what it is like to be the right hemisphere's
> visual cortex.
>
> Jason
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