Part of Anthropic's J-space research that's niggling at me... One way of telling a consciousness story: (1) J-Space shows that LLMs can only report on a small proportion of their information processing. (2) Humans also only have conscious access to a small proportion of the information processing in our brain. Human self-report - what we can talk about - is widely regarded as a conscious act. (3) This distinction between minority-conscious and majority-unconscious information processing in both systems is a hint that there may be a relevant similarity. (4) If the majority of info processing in LLMs is unconscious but there is a qualitatively different set of reportable data processing taking place elsewhere, then it seems plausible to describe it as non-unconscious, i.e. conscious in some manner (whether phenomenal, access, or both). (5) The story gets stronger when the J-Space functionality mirrors other aspects of the minority-conscious feature of human consciousness: working memory (the citrus fruits example, white bear example), mediation of multi-step reasoning (spider-ant example; ablation test), broadcast to multiple modules (France-China example). However, there's something odd here that goes to the heart of the Global Workspace Theory on consciousness. (2) is true for humans, but is there any reason to think it should be true of all conscious systems? It seems possible to me that humans only have limited conscious access to our brain's information as a result of an evolutionary / energy bottleneck of some sort. In principle, why couldn't a differently-designed system be consciously aware of all (or at least the majority of) the information processing inside it? Perhaps GWT is more a theory of a particular aspect of human consciousness, rather than something we can safely apply to other systems. Can @StanDehaene, @rgblong, @patrickbutlin, @Jack_W_Lindsey @aran_nayebi shed any light on this for me?
New Anthropic research: A global workspace in language models. Of everything happening in your brain right now, only a tiny fraction is consciously accessible—thoughts you can describe, hold in mind, and reason with. We found a strikingly similar divide inside Claude.
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if one buys the whole holographic consciousness thing the. what winds up in our world simulation (which i take as one and the same as that which we have conscious access to, or the "global workspace") is either coherent or noisy as a function of how appropriately calibrated whatever the neural equivalent of the reference beam is anyway, this implies that everything in whatever the neural equivalent of the holographic plate (i.e. decades of memories laid down in superposition) winds up in the world simulation, it's just mostly noise anyway i'm mainly stating that i think access consciousness is a fake idea, there's really only a smooth boundary, or at least a noise floor
