Tim Bayne in Singularity Hub:
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 skeptical, arguing that the impressive cognitive capacities of LLMs occur in the absence of consciousness.
Recently, 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 that 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.
More here.
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