A new research paper from Anthropic hypothesizes that there’s an internal “workspace” within the operations of the Claude LLM. The significance the paper is groping toward is that this so-called “J-Space” inside Claude is sort of like one leading idea about human consciousness—global workspace theory. The J-Space, according to my reading of the paper, is an ostensibly brain-like separation between something more like automatic data-crunching in the background, and more like intentional, logical processing that—if you believe any of this resembles conscious thought—might represent what the model is experiencing. I’m just the Gizmodo nights and weekends blogger, but here goes: global workspace Theory says there’s a sort of roiling sea of unconscious thoughts processing information, and consciousness is a sort of emergent property triggered when thoughts reach the prefrontal cortex.
This related idea of a “J-Space” within Claude (apparently named after the Jacobian lens or J-lens, something used to analyze what LLMs are doing) is meant to be read as mind-like. Anthropic seems to be saying, it’s a little like this theory of consciousness, so it’s a little like consciousness if you think about it.
