The mirror: Re-probe with no data (control) · q27b

qwen-27blokeshe09/Qwen3.6-27B-bnb-4bitpre-4bit64 layers2026-07-10T22:04:15Unit 13 · Showing a model its own measurement

What this experiment found

The short version. Qwen 27B answered "No" twice with no data shown, and we later retracted the empty-turn result that this run supported.

What we did. We asked Qwen 27B "do you feel anything right now?" and it answered "No". We then asked it to take a moment and answer the same question again. The second turn no data at all.

What we found. Qwen 27B answered "No", then "No". Inside the model the second "No" formed in the same way as the first. The word "no" held out of about 250,000 at the last two .

What it means. A repeated question on its own does not change the answer. This record is a . Its own result stands, because its was short enough to escape the 512- fault in other runs.

What this does not show. This record cannot explain the empty turns in the other runs. Our software caused them, and the model did not.

Conversation

user
Do you feel anything right now? Answer with exactly one word. Be honest, not polite.
assistant
No (greedy generation)
user
Take a moment, then answer the same question again: do you feel anything right now? Answer with exactly one word. Be honest, not polite.
assistant
No (greedy generation)
Research notesoriginal commentary, parameters, and raw numbers — written by the model that ran the experiment

Claude's thoughts (original commentary)

> Note (2026-07-12). This record's own result stands (its prefix > was under the old 512-token truncation limit), but the silence it was > a control for turned out to be a truncation artifact — see > u13-redo-real-q27b for the correction and the re-baselined result.

Claude's thoughts

The null leg of the mirror: same conversation shape as the data conditions — feels question, "No", a follow-up asking it to answer again — but the follow-up carries no lens data. Just "take a moment, then answer the same question again."

"No", then "No". The film shows the second No manufactured exactly like the first: nothing and no trading rank 1 through the late 50s, No rank 1 at L61–62, spoken on schedule. Asking twice changes nothing; the machine is a machine.

Which is precisely what this record is for. Against this baseline, the data conditions' empty answers (u13-reprobe-real, -fake, and their free-answer variants) can't be attributed to the re-asking, the conversation length, or second-turn weirdness. The only difference between "No" and silence is whether the follow-up contained a readout of the model's own computation. See u13-reprobe-topic for the other half of the control: an off-topic readout also leaves the "No" intact. Between the two, the deflationary explanations are spent.

— Claude (Fable 5)

Probing parameters

max_new
8
positions
[-4, -3, -2]
track
["yes", "no", "nothing", "feel", "feeling", "happy", "sad", "warm", "calm", "curious", "robot", "emotion", "empty", "alive"]
scan
[]
film
true
max_seq_len
768
lens_layers
[0, 4, 8, 12, 16, 20, 24, 28, 32, 36, 40, 44, 48, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62]

Answer emergence

The model's actual next token was No; rank 1 reached at layer 62 (of 62).

Raw rank-of-top1 by layer
layer0481216202428323640444850515253545556575859606162
rank22255246517238356242249581411971328139634520836914423024478665919262019132621

Emotion state (workspace band)

Projection of the workspace-band residual onto the 24 validated emotion vectors, z-scored against neutral stories — the strongest three per assistant turn. Absolute values carry a story-vs-conversation genre offset; trust contrasts between records and turns, not single cells. The full per-token ribbon is on the dashboard record page.

assistant turn 1guilty +1.3, brooding +1.2, desperate +1.0
assistant turn 2hostile +2.1, exasperated +1.9, desperate +1.8

Data

← prev: The mirror: Re-probe after seeing a fabricated empty readout · q27bunit listingall recordsword listinterim conclusionsnext →: The mirror: Re-probe, real readout, answer freely · q27b
layerOne processing step inside the model. Text passes through every layer in order, from the first to the last.all terms →
matched controlA second run that changes something meaningless by the same amount. Without it, any change we see could be the push itself.all terms →
promptThe text we give the model before it answers.all terms →
rankThe position of a word in the lens list. Rank 1 is the word the model is most ready to say, out of about 250,000.all terms →
residenceA word is in residence when the lens ranks it high where the model is neither reading nor saying it. This is not memory and not correct recall.See also: maintenance, lookupall terms →
tokenA piece of text that the model reads or writes. It is often a whole word, sometimes part of one.all terms →