Anthropic just reported that LLMs have hidden thoughts they hold without saying. An internal ”J-Space”

In [Anthropic’s new paper](https://www.anthropic.com/research/global-workspace) they found that a small set of internal activations in language models, they call it the J-space, behaves like a global workspace: the model can report what’s in it, deliberately hold things in it, and uses it for multi-step reasoning. what’s crazy is most of the model’s fluent output completely bypasses it. grammar, facts, and tone. the workspace only lights up for actual thinking. reading the paper I wanted to watch it for myself so I built [subtext](https://github.com/ninjahawk/Subtext) so the internal words are revealed as the model thinks. each floating word is the model’s internal state disposed toward that word, before it’s said, sometimes never said. i spent some time and reproduced this information from the paper: **•** the verdict forms while it’s still reading. ask “is this correct? 12 + 5 = 1” and incorrect saturates before a single token of reply exists **•** two-hop reasoning is visible: “currency of the country shaped like a boot” → Italy appears at layer 20, euros at layer 26, before generation starts **•** it holds planned words at high strength while saying unrelated ones to be clear about limits (the paper is careful here and I should be too): this shows information being functionally available for report and reasoning. it doesn’t show subjective experience. do any of you think that an internal “experience” exists based on what anthropic’s new research shows? they specifically say they aren’t sure if there is or isn’t internal experience in claude.