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ANNO·​TRICESIMO·​DIE·​DVCENTESIMO·​OCTAVO·​VITÆ·​POVYA
Quotes & Excerpts

maintaining a global workspace is likely computationally useful: a common representational format allows intermediate results to be written once and read by many neural processes. A language model that must chain reasoning steps, apply general operations in arbitrary contexts, and answer questions about its own processing also stands to benefit from this organization.

Note that access consciousness is a purely functional notion; the relationship that it has with subjective experience (sometimes called phenomenal consciousness) is widely debated.

Modern large language models (LLMs) are known to perform sophisticated, multi-step internal computations in order to select their actions. As part of their internal processing, might LLMs have developed a global workspace of their own, to serve a functional role analogous to conscious access? It is not obvious that they should; in the brain, the workspace is closely associated with recurrent dynamics and brain region interactions that have no direct analog in the transformer architecture on which LLMs are based. On the other hand, maintaining a global workspace is likely computationally useful: a common representational format allows intermediate results to be written once and read by many neural processes. A language model that must chain reasoning steps, apply general operations in arbitrary contexts, and answer questions about its own processing also stands to benefit from this organization. Even if the implementations differ, it is natural to ask whether the functional properties associated with the global workspace have emerged in LLMs.

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