When you interact with a large language model (LLM) – one of the systems behind chatbots such as ChatGPT and Claude – it can feel as though you are in contact with another conscious mind. But are you, really?
Some prominent scientists, such as Geoff Hinton and Richard Dawkins, claim you are. But most experts remain sceptical, arguing that the impressive cognitive capacities of LLMs occur in the absence of consciousness.
Last week researchers at Anthropic, the company behind Claude, waded into this debate with an interesting finding. They claim Claude has a normally invisible set of representations of information which guide its internal reasoning and its verbal output.
This is where it gets interesting. The researchers argue this finding can be understood in terms of an influential theory of consciousness called the global workspace theory.
What is the global workspace theory?
