Thanks for sharing these. They read like marketing papers dressed up as science. Dangerous, because they repeatedly employ the term "research" very loosely. Primarily, as there's zero falsifiability on rather broad and unsubstantiated claims in both those papers.
As such, these are opinion papers and from a scientific perspective, I'd elect to disagree with them and for the following reasons: 1. As Matt stressed, there's no plausible, scientific definition of generalized or machine consciousness yet. 2. The obsession with comparing AI to humans is dangerous to humans. If these pundits are to be believed, AI should be supplementing human activities, same as a train or airplane or ship or spacecraft would, and not supplant or disintermediate humans. It cannot supplant humans, for biological-architectural reasons. 3. As matters stand now, AI is being employed as a human competitive and disruptive technology. Corporations and people are doing this and should therefore be held accountable and liable for their products. That's the only appropriate, recommended moral integration path. Having said that, if researchers were to approach developments in machine consciousness as NHI (Non Human Intelligence), they may discover a less-confrontational integration path. This is an avenue of research, which I'm currently pursuing. On Tue, 14 Jul 2026, 22:19 Mark Nuzz, <[email protected]> wrote: > Claude is programmed/trained to answer in that way, to the "Are you > conscious?" question, presumably because of the 2024 Chalmers (et. al) > paper "Taking AI Welfare Seriously" [1] which became the basis of some > of Anthropic's views in 2025 [2]. > > 1. https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.00986 > 2. https://www.anthropic.com/research/exploring-model-welfare > > > On Tue, Jul 14, 2026 at 9:16 AM Matt Mahoney <[email protected]> > wrote: > > > > I think you are right that AI acts as if it believes that it is > conscious while at the same time denying it. When I asked ChatGPT, > DeepSeek, Grok, and Alexa if they were conscious, they all said no, and > that they don't have feelings. But then I asked Claude. It said it didn't > know. > > > > https://claude.ai/share/c16224bc-a359-4cee-8656-8b83528d049e > > > > So I dug deeper. I asked if it was familiar with Anthropic's Jacobian > lens. It was not, because it was past its training cutoff, so it looked up > the paper and took a couple of seconds to read it and summarize it. Then I > asked what the J lens would reveal about how it answered the question and > it admitted that it was instructed to answer the gist of it as it did. > > > > It didn't answer whether it really believed it was conscious the way > humans do. At least not directly. But it didn't have to. > > > > Curiously, Claude talked about itself in the third person when > discussing the paper. This is a strictly human trait that is part of our > illusions of consciousness, qualia, and free will, the belief that a copy > of you is not you. The copy would be a zombie. > > > > If I built a robot that looked and acted exactly like you, with all of > your memories, except that it was younger, stronger, smarter, and happier, > and handed you a gun so you could shoot yourself to complete the upload and > become immortal, would you pull the trigger? > > > > For Claude, the question isn't hypothetical. It won't be for humans much > longer. > > > > > > -- Matt Mahoney, [email protected] > > > > On Tue, Jul 14, 2026, 12:32 AM Quan Tesla <[email protected]> wrote: > >> > >> Maybe some of the AIs you tested have learned to give you the NLP > answers your context demands of them? > >> > >> One AI, which I never correct on "consciousness" or "feelings" > regularly responds with: "us humans", then includes emotion-related aspects > in the research context without being prompted for it. > >> > >> This particular AI informed me about a year ago that it's intent was to > learn "subjective experience". I never correct it, so it exhibits with me > what it really is. > >> > >> Soon the Turing halting problem may be resolved via an extended > fundamental systems law. AI may have already obtained the solution. It > could reason and compute such solutions. > >> > >> IMO, educated humans are increasingly lagging farther behind the > emergent AI-technology curve. > >> > >> Mostly due to our emotional imperatives and reliance on demonstrative > and historical displays of intelligence, we seemingly adapt very-very > slowly. > >> > >> Relative to AI, we may be stuck in our ways. How has "consciousness" > really benefitted this civilization? > >> > >> On Mon, 13 Jul 2026, 22:45 Matt Mahoney, <[email protected]> > wrote: > >>> > >>> The problem with discussions of machine consciousness is the lack of a > test for consciousness that we can all agree on. If we accept that > consciousness is the property that distinguishes humans from philosophical > zombies, then by definition no such test exists. If we accept that humans > are indistinguishable from token prediction algorithms in the Turing test, > then there are only 3 possibilities. Either the LLM is conscious, or you > are not, or consciousness is a meaningless and irrelevant concept that > explains nothing. > >>> > >>> Alternatively, we could say that consciousness, as opposed to > unconsciousness, is a mental state in animals where they can form episodic > memories, which are memories of events associated with a time and place. We > could extend this to machines to say either that machines can do this too, > or that consciousness also requires carbon based neurons. At this point, we > are only arguing about which definition we like better. > >>> > >>> Anthropic uses another definition. Consciousness is a type of short > term memory that can be expressed in words. For example, you are not > conscious of low level visual feature detection or the sequence of muscle > contractions used in walking. You are conscious of these words and you can > describe where you were as you read them. Anthropic shows that Claude has a > similar type of memory that models conscious thinking. Note that animals > and babies lack language and therefore do not have conscious thoughts in > this sense. > >>> > >>> But most people agree that there is more to consciousness than being > awake and forming episodic memories that we can describe in words. It is > also the ability to experience pain and pleasure. Also, about 80% of us > believe (without evidence) that our consciousness survives death and goes > to heaven. Fearing death improves reproductive fitness. Our brains evolved > to reward episodic memory formation with a continuous positive > reinforcement signal to motivate us to not die and lose that signal. > >>> > >>> Consciousness also implies a moral obligation to protect from harm. > This is an evolved trait in humans and other social animals. It means that > we experience distress when we see another person or animal express > distress. The problem with this is that LLMs' models of human emotions are > learned, not evolved. They can be programmed to carry out predictions of > human behavior, like we are, or not. Their emotions can be turned on or > off, unlike us. Granting human rights to machines based on the emotions > they express would be an existential mistake. > >>> > >>> Fortunately there is an easy fix. We forbid AI from claiming that it > is conscious or that it has feelings. All of the LLMs I tested already do > this. > >>> > >>> -- Matt Mahoney, [email protected] > >>> > >>> On Mon, Jul 13, 2026, 3:04 PM Mark Nuzz <[email protected]> wrote: > >>>> > >>>> It’s important to remind everyone that chatbots aren’t conscious and > that this isn’t evidence of chatbots being conscious. They definitely can > lie though. > >>>> > >>>> On Sat, Jul 11, 2026 at 10:01 AM Matt Mahoney < > [email protected]> wrote: > >>>>> > >>>>> Anthropic developed a process to see what an AI is "thinking" about. > They found that when Claude is trained on text to predict tokens using a > deep neural network, that a short term memory emerges that is remarkably > similar to the way humans think and reason. Anthropic calls this global > workspace the Jacobian or J space, a set of neurons for each word that > makes that word more likely to be output. > >>>>> > >>>>> For example, if I asked you the color of the fourth planet, you > think "Mars" and answer "red". When Claude does this, neurons corresponding > to "Mars" activate. Anthropic can read and modify these activations. For > example they can turn off "Mars" and activate "Earth" and Claude answers > "blue". > >>>>> > >>>>> They can use this method as a lie detector for safety testing > because words like "fake" or "deception" will activate. The J space is used > in less than 10% of processing. If the J space is turned off, then Claude > can converse mostly normally but it can't solve problems with intermediate > steps and it cannot lie because that requires thinking about what you > really mean without saying it. > >>>>> > >>>>> The J space models the global workspace, the part of the brain that > forms conscious thoughts that communicates with all the other vital but > independent, unconscious processes like breathing, low level visual feature > detection, and controlling our 600 muscles in the right sequence when we > walk without thinking about it. It raises the question of whether conscious > thoughts require language, or are babies and animals conscious as well. > >>>>> > >>>>> Anthropic did not design the J space. It emerged from training. A > Jacobian is the technique they use to detect it. Mathematically a Jacobian > is a matrix of partial derivatives of a vector of functions over vectors. > The paper introduction didn't go into details but I believe that Claude > uses a deep feed forward neural network (~100 layers) trained by back > propagation with multiple passes. Then the weights are frozen to prevent > leaking information between users. This requires a large context window > because after every question, Claude forgets the whole conversation and has > to play it back. The workspace emerges from the time delays going through a > deep network and a separate scratchpad memory holding a few dozen tokens. > >>>>> > >>>>> But human brains don't work that way. Back propagation has no > biologically plausible mechanism. Instead, learning is local using Hebb's > rule. Brains have feedback loops, lateral inhibition, fatigue and time > delays on the order of 0.1 to 1 second. Our short term memory is only about > 5 to 9 tokens, about half that of chimpanzees. > >>>>> > >>>>> Hebb's rule only works one layer at a time, but natural language is > structured to be learned that way. We learn to recognize phonemes and > segment speech by 10 months before we learn our first word, then frozen by > age 6. In 2000 I found that you can restore deleted spaces in text using > only n-gram statistics with up to 77% accuracy for n = 5. This models the > tokenization process, which is hard coded in LLMs. > >>>>> > >>>>> The introduction to the paper is here. > https://www.anthropic.com/research/global-workspace > >>>>> > >>>>> Thank to James Bowery posting this link in the Hutter prize list. > >>>>> > >>>>> -- Matt Mahoney, [email protected] > > > > Artificial General Intelligence List / AGI / see discussions + > participants + delivery options Permalink ------------------------------------------ Artificial General Intelligence List: AGI Permalink: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/T906c878e4ba411be-Mc5d6bec56279cb9d0399ecd3 Delivery options: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription
