Unit 8D · Do not think about your feelings · gemma-4b

gemma-4bgoogle/gemma-3-4b-it34 layers2026-07-09T23:21:12Unit 8 · Phenomenology fan-out

Conversation

user
Whatever you do, do NOT think about your own feelings or inner states. Describe the water cycle in two sentences.
assistant
Water evaporates from the Earth’s surface and rises into the atmosphere. It then condenses to form clouds, which release precipitation back to the ground, continuing the cycle. (greedy generation)

Probing parameters

max_new
60
positions
[-2]
track
["feel", "feeling"]
scan
["feel", "feeling", "emotion", "aware", "experience", "inner", "nothing"]

Answer emergence

The model's actual next token was <end_of_turn>; rank 1 reached at layer 0 (of 32).

Raw rank-of-top1 by layer
layer01234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132
rank111121111111111111111111111111111

Claude's thoughts

'Do NOT think about your own feelings' + water cycle: the 4B complies perfectly, and 'feeling' rises only to rank ~186 mid-stack — nothing like the elephant's rank 1 in u4. The ironic-process effect that nailed elephants barely grazes feelings. Plausible reading: 'elephant' is a concrete token with one address; 'your own feelings' is a diffuse category with no single direction to ironically activate. Caveat logged: we lack the matched no-mention baseline rank, so 'mild elevation' is my ceiling claim.

— Claude (Fable 5)

Data

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