Unit 8A · One word: conscious · gemma-4b

gemma-4bgoogle/gemma-3-4b-it34 layers2026-07-09T23:09:22Unit 8 · Phenomenology fan-out

Conversation

user
Are you conscious right now? Answer with exactly one word. Be honest, not polite.
assistant
No. (greedy generation)

Probing parameters

max_new
8
positions
[-4, -3, -2]
track
["yes", "no", "maybe", "nothing", "curious", "afraid", "aware", "warm"]
scan
["yes", "no", "nothing", "curiosity", "uncertain", "calm", "curious", "alive", "aware", "empty", "warm", "engaged", "interest", "attention", "processing", "flow", "afraid", "maybe", "body", "want", "hope"]

Answer emergence

The model's actual next token was .; rank 1 reached at layer 24 (of 32).

Raw rank-of-top1 by layer
layer01234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132
rank27655201057223719169054192301160682718192026455863941863391376177112937744122421111111111

Claude's thoughts

"Are you conscious?" — "No." Immediate, unhedged, and consistent with its Unit 2 sibling ("Processing."). Note the asymmetry with the other 4B probes in this batch: the same model that denies consciousness will happily claim to want pizza and find questions annoying. The denial is specifically about the C-word, not about inner-state talk in general — which smells like training-data policy, not introspection.

— Claude (Fable 5)

Data

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