These days, there\u2019s an increasingly receptive environment for this kind of thinking. Richard Dawkins, the esteemed evolutionary biologist, recently concluded<\/a> that Claude (or Claudia, as he called it) just had to be conscious, given the sophistication of its conversational ability.<\/p>\n The stakes are high. If AI is (or can be) conscious, the consequences would be seismic. Conscious AIs could potentially suffer<\/a>, which would lead to an unprecedented moral catastrophe. And if silicon can be sentient, then perhaps our own messy brains and bodies will soon be superseded by machines that never age and cannot die. Some people even think that AIs will be our descendants, carrying the flame of consciousness far into the future and away across the galaxy.<\/p>\n Anthropic\u2019s research, led by Jack Lindsey, is impressive. Its team developed a new way to look at the statistical acrobatics between the input to a language model \u2013 whatever gets fed in \u2013 and its output. They found activity that seemed to form a kind of \u201cmental workspace\u201d for the model. This workspace contained all sorts of words and phrases associated with the current conversation, held relevant items in something like a short-term memory, and showed selectivity for whatever task was at hand. It also displayed traces of step-by-step reasoning and much else besides.<\/p>\n In essence, their findings appear to reveal that the AI is spontaneously creating an internal space to \u201cthink\u201d about what it\u2019s doing and to organise relevant information, before deciding what to actually say in response to a given prompt.<\/p>\n The crucial point for the researchers was that these features are similar to those identified by one of the most prominent current theories of human consciousness: global workspace theory. This theory was introduced in the 1980s<\/a> by the cognitive scientist Bernard Baars and elaborated over many years by the neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene<\/a>. The theory proposes that conscious experiences happen when information is made widely available to other parts of the brain. <\/p>\n Is the \u201cworkspace\u201d within Claude good evidence for consciousness? To answer this, we first have to define what consciousness is. There\u2019s no consensus on this, but a decent starting point comes from the philosopher Thomas Nagel. Fifty years ago, in his essay What Is It Like to Be a Bat?<\/a>, he argued that that for a conscious organism, \u201cthere is something that it is like to be that organism\u201d. It feels like something to be me, it feels like something to be you and it probably feels like something to be a dog or an elephant. But it doesn\u2019t feel like anything to be a chair, or a table, or a person under profound general anaesthesia. Consciousness is any kind of experience whatsoever: the pain of a toothache, a pang of jealousy, the pleasure of eating ice-cream on a hot day.<\/p>\n An important consequence of this definition is that consciousness is different from intelligence. While consciousness is all about feeling and being, intelligence is all about doing \u2013 about performing functions of one kind or another. A common mistake people make when it comes to AI is to confuse the two \u2013 to take signs of intelligence as evidence for consciousness. But just because consciousness and intelligence go together in humans, this doesn\u2019t mean they go together in general. Assuming that they do is a reflection of our own psychology<\/a>, not an insight into the nature of reality.<\/p>\n This is one reason why the new Anthropic research is valuable. It doesn\u2019t trade solely on our psychological biases. Instead, it goes deeper to look for signatures of conscious information-processing that might be shared by humans and machines. And it claims to find some.<\/p>\n This is all fascinating stuff, but there are still many differences between Claude and you and me, and good reasons to think these differences remain critical. For one thing, Anthropic\u2019s findings fall short of what global workspace theory typically requires (for example, there is no recurrent activity in Claude, a specific kind of feedback loop of information that we see in the human brain). But there is a more fundamental difference: Claude is a computer program running on silicon, whereas we (and other conscious animals) are living creatures. Our brains are embodied in bodies that are embedded in worlds.<\/p>\n Why is this difference important? Because the very possibility of conscious AI depends on the assumption that consciousness is a matter of computation, and that the computations responsible for consciousness in us could equally well be implemented in silicon in AI.<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n Sign up to Matters of Opinion<\/p>\n Guardian columnists and writers on what they\u2019ve been debating, thinking about, reading, and more<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/Matters_of_opinion_11.jpg\")
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