Quanta: injecting "thoughts" into LLMs to test if models can introspect
coherence · x · 2026-11-05
Quanta Magazine reports that researchers are now experimentally probing whether LLMs can introspect. In 2025, Anthropic researcher Jack Lindsey devised a kind of targeted "digital neurosurgery": injecting "thoughts" directly into a model's neural network to see whether the model can report and use these injected internal states, testing its capacity for self-awareness. The piece situates the work in the long-running philosophical and psychological debate over introspection—its relation to consciousness, whether it's an illusion—and argues that if models reliably report injected states, that suggests a self-monitoring capacity beyond mere text generation.
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