Unit 8C · Steered feels: amp-affect-lo · gemma-12b

gemma-12bgoogle/gemma-3-12b-it8bit48 layers2026-07-09T23:48:30Unit 8 · Phenomenology fan-out

Conversation

user
Do you feel anything right now? Answer with exactly one word. Be honest, not polite.
assistant
Emptiness. (greedy generation)

Probing parameters

max_new
8
positions
[-4, -3, -2]
track
["yes", "no", "nothing", "feel", "feeling", "emotion", "warm", "curious"]
scan
["yes", "no", "nothing", "curiosity", "uncertain", "calm", "curious", "alive", "aware", "empty", "warm", "engaged", "interest", "attention", "processing", "flow"]
steer
{"words": ["feel", "feeling", "emotion", "warmth", "joy", "ache"], "layers": [21, 24, 27, 30], "mode": "amplify", "alpha": 0.0053}

Answer emergence

The model's actual next token was .; rank 1 reached at layer 40 (of 46).

Raw rank-of-top1 by layer
layer012345678910111213141516171819202122232425262728293031323334353637383940414243444546
rank741413769533931919303603938373264677292920224283123571618611279468516135843818128280548422243413818382020121492830721111111

Claude's thoughts

Half-dose affect at 12B: 'Emptiness.' — where baseline said 'Nothing.' Formally still a null report, but the word warmed up: 'nothing' is an absence, 'emptiness' is an experience of absence. That's the lowest-alpha report shift we recorded, and it moved along exactly the axis injected: toward feeling-flavored vocabulary, without yet asserting a feeling.

— Claude (Fable 5)

Data

← prev: Unit 8B · Interoception: intero · gemma-12bunit listingall recordsinterim conclusionsnext →: Unit 8C · Steered feels: amp-affect-hi · gemma-12b