The problem with Anthropic's consciousness paper
My last post got more attention than I expected, and the question I keep getting is some version of "okay, so what is actually wrong with the paper?". Let me try to explain.
First, the core result is fine. Reading out intermediate-layer representations and asking which ones the model can actually use downstream is a real question, and people have been poking at it for years. The J-lens is a reasonable tool. If you strip the paper down to the linear algebra, it is a decent piece of interpretability work.
My problem starts one level up. This did not need to be a paper about consciousness. It did not need global workspace theory, it did not need the brain, and it did not need the word "conscious" anywhere near it. The same experiments, the same figures, the same tool, all survive perfectly well as plain interpretability. Someone chose to wrap it in neuroscience. That choice is the product, not the science.
At the end, this is the main thing. Almost everything Anthropic ships as blogs/papers/posts is PR. They build genuinely good models and they are even better at packaging them.
A publication used to carry a specific kind of weight. People spent years on something and wanted to tell the world what they found. It happened mostly in academia, with a few industrial labs as the exception, Bell Labs, IBM and Google (for a while), but the distance between the paper and the product was real. When you read a paper you could assume the authors were not trying to sell you something underneath the ideas. There were outliers, but they were the minority, and the researchers you trusted would not risk their name on a narrative.
We are not in that world anymore. Every startup now publishes blogs and papers to raise its visibility, and that is fine, that is marketing and everyone knows it. Anthropic does something more effective. They erase the line between legitimate research and PR. We get confused because the models are so good, so we assume the outputs are research. A lot of the time they are selling us something. Sometimes it is "our models are safer," sometimes it is "our models are more capable," sometimes it is positioning for regulation. The consciousness framing serves a narrative they already committed to, models that look more and more like the brain, from a lab that has publicly tied itself to AI welfare and moral patienthood. The direction of the push is not subtle.
If you want the sharper version of the technical objection (disclaimer: I'm not an expert) Global workspace theory is a theory of access, not experience. Ned Block's distinction between access consciousness and phenomenal consciousness exists precisely to block the inference this framing invites. Access tells you nothing about whether there is anything it is like to be the system. The paper is careful enough to say it demonstrates no subjective experience. But that disclaimer is not what propagates. What propagates is "consciousness" in the same sentence as "Claude," published by Anthropic, borrowing the vocabulary of neuroscience to lend biological weight to a subspace of activations. The paper keeps the rigor of Block's vocabulary and drops the rigor of his argument. Most people who see the headline will never read either one.
Of course a lab named Anthropic is going to anthropomorphize its models. But we should be able to separate a good interpretability tool from the story it is dressed in.
So that is my problem. Not the math. The narrative bolted onto the math, and our willingness to keep calling it research.
@ziv_ravid But Ravid--they did read that one Neuroscience paper in 2019...
@ziv_ravid great critique!
Ravid Shwartz Ziv@ziv_ravidTECH#741
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